Keynote EDA Tech forum – Jon Landau
September 16, 2010, EDA Tech Forum Santa Clara, CA, Academy Award winning producer Jon Landau talked about “Creating a New World: The Innovations Behind 3-D in the Making of Avatar and What Lies Ahead”. People have been saying for a long time that there is nothing new in movies. And yet, the basic principle of innovation is to meet or exceed consumer expectations.
courtesy Twentieths Century Fox
Early in the 50s, a new medium, television, changed the viewing habits in the US. As long form plays migrated to television they changed the whole process of storytelling. This started an ongoing challenge to find what technology makes possible in the creative process. Innovators create new realities, as film continued pushing the boundaries of new technologies.
Innovation requires a range of people, talents, and disciplines, a large budget doesn’t hurt either, as all of this leads to very high complexity. Movies are now created in software, meaning that movie production is a technology project. The increasing levels of technology that is needed, requires that the technology itself cannot interfere with the creativity nor have an adverse impact on schedules and budgets.
Therefore, the job of the producer becomes much more complex. This complexity is not tasked only to a producer, by the quality control and concept control person, but the product must also understand the creative team and their associated strengths and weaknesses. The producer must establish an environment that enables storytelling, while being responsible for managing the budget.
Landau started after college as a production assistant, then moved into being a post-production supervisor. Always learning new skills and also having found that he was being paid for results, he therefore found ways to make it happen. Innovation is the key. As directors bump up against limits and problems they are finding more and more solutions that are enabled by technology. Innovation is a driver that helps them tell a more compelling story.
For example, in “Honey, I shrunk the kids” they used an optical shrink and stop motion for many of their optical effects. This was innovation at the set and prop level and cost less than $20 million. Therefore, visual effects became increasingly important as directors used sets, props, and effects to set moods and scenes.
In “Abyss”, James Cameron used computer-generated images to enhance visual effects. This is the first film with long computer-generated sequences and became the driving force for the creation of Photoshop. The final set of CGI effects amounted to about 900 MB of data. In comparison, “Avatar” used more than 1 petabyte.
“Titanic” required building a custom studio on 42 acres in Mexico. In order to populate a scale model with moving people, they used a motion capture technique and texture mapping to generate the computer-generated images. For this movie, they mixed CGI and close-ups to give the impression that the camera was zooming in rather than the usual mode of mixing CGI and live images.
Because innovation abounds, the film industry is not going away. The first use of digital technologies was in sound back in the 70s. This has evolved into today’s nonlinear editing flow, everything is now edited digitally to unlock the digital effects. The use of digital effects in “Terminator 2” increased the effects count to 36. George Lucas created the first movie in a fully digital capture mode in the “Phantom Menace”. He wanted it to be the first to also use digital projection, but the theaters weren’t ready yet.
Now, many directors are moving towards a virtual production and a visualization environment. They capture the performance of the actors and convert those motions to CGI. Audiences appreciate close-up views of the actors so the CGI effects must capture as much of the actors face and emotions as possible.
Movie screens have seen no change in 50 years. The audio is changed but the visual environment has been static. Now, 3-D provides a window into the world and in the future all screens will be 3-D capable. The issue of passive polarized lenses to view stereoscopic images presents another opportunity for innovation and imagination. Technology provides a means to an end, to entertain an audience.
Some of the challenges in this new environment are asset management, backup, and archiving of all the data. The goal is to get all data in off-site servers and storage. In addition, access and search are becoming increasingly difficult problems, so a good flow and process in software will help to reduce silos between operational environments. Eventually, we would like to see much more automation in the workflow.
Dreams are the embodiment of innovation and vice versa, but dreams without the courage to fail are illusions.
