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The Empire's Real Legacy
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Silicon Valley Bureau Chief
Star Wars celebrates 30 years; A Hollywood/Silicon Valley collaboration.
Get ready for the Star Wars steamroller this week as the blockbuster sci-fi thriller celebrates its 30-year anniversary this Friday. The celebration will be captured in a week-long series of special reports here on CNBC and other networks of the NBC family. And our coverage will involve our own unique collaboration of coverage from both our Silicon Valley and Los Angeles bureaus.
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(photo credit: Mark Neuling) Jedi Master Yoda oversees all who enter the Letterman Digital Arts Center at Industrial Light and Magic located on the Presidio in San Francisco, California. The 850,000 square foot state of the art studio was opened in June of 2005 and is within walking distance of the Golden Gate Bridge. |
We'll have all the angles covered, posting extended clips of key interviews as well as stills of our own, behind-the-scenes shots shots as we set out to produce these stories. We'll top off our special series from the massive Star Wars Celebration fest at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Friday, May 25.
In this first installment, I want to focus on the successful partnership between so many Silicon Valley companies and Hollywood studios, born out of George Lucas' vision to embrace all kinds of technology to better tell his stories. It's kind of like how car makers work with Indy 500 teams: trying out fantastic new, yet extremely expensive technology, that ultimately trickles down to consumers like you and me.
Nowadays in Hollywood, there's really nothing "special" about special effects. Bits, bytes, memory and microprocessors have become just as important in filmmaking as the traditional lights, camera and action! In fact, effects are now the second biggest budget item in a film production behind the actors themselves.
"Technology is now waiting for you to come up with ideas," says digital filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, the pioneering producer behind hits like Sin City, and the guy Wired Magazine calls a "one-man digital army." "We're here, now what are you gonna do with us?"
Sin City, and Rodriguez himself, are really children of the Star Wars era, breaking new ground on the deepening relationship between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
"How can I use technology creatively to give people something they haven't seen before," he asks. "Pretty much anything you can imagine, you can do now."
Sin City, indeed all his films, really aren't "films" at all. He uses Sony's high-def cameras, Avid editing systems (a technology born at ILM), laptops, desktops and servers all running on microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices.
"The movie set is really your mind, and you really should be able to work at the speed of thought," says AMD's Charlie Boswell, the executive in charge of fostering Hollywood relationships with his company. And those relationships are becoming the key for movie-makers who are looking for better, and sometimes cheaper ways to tell their stories.
AMD isn't alone. Intel's chips were inside the computers that powered the effects in "Superman," "Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon" and "Lord of the Rings." Those films, and their effects, really show what technology is capable of today, and what it could do for consumers months or years from now.
"We try to stir their imaginations," says Intel's John Davies. "What (moviemakers) can do now, someone will be able to do in their home five years from now."
In fact, George Lucas himself has been beating the tech drum since before Star Wars was produced. And since then, he's been beating the drum even harder because it's no longer merely about his movies alone. ILM has now done effects in more than 250 movies, everything from "Howard the Duck," to "Twister," "War of the Worlds," "Terminator 2," and "Jurassic Park."
"We're in a giant transition," Lucas tells me. "As digital technology takes over, it's gonna change the whole way they do business, and they haven't accepted that yet."
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Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP Katherine Williams from the popular entertainment department of Christie's auction rooms, holds an Imperial Stormtroopers helmet, London, Friday Dec. 9, 2005. The helmet from the first Star Wars film 'A New Hope' 1977 is expected to raise 8,000-10,000 pounds (euro 11,871; US$ 14,000 to euro 14,800; US$ 17,5000) when sold at auction on Wednesday Dec. 14. |
"The goal here is not being technology for technology's sake," computer special effects legend Dennis Muren, an 8-time Oscar winner, the most of any living filmmaker, tells me. "It is always when there is a project that (we ask) is there a better way of doing it?"
And that's how ILM pulled off the effects in Disney's latest, $300-million blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
"Digital actors like Davy Jones, are not a human straight-up, but in parts inspired by, driven by, acted by a human," says ILM's R&D Director Scott Sullivan, himself a two-time Oscar winner for technical achievement. "It is like a digital make-up. It is a character that they couldn't play in a suit.
And for him, and hundreds of other ILM engineers, the job is all about innovation, with Hollywood and moviegoers the big beneficiaries.
"So whatever you can imagine, you can create," I asked him? "That's what we do. That's what we're paid to do," Sullivan tells me.
Some effects are invisible to the viewer, and clearly the trend in moviemaking today. ILM perfected that approach early on in movies like "Forrest Gump," when Lt. Dan's legs were digitally erased to transform him into a double-amputee. And then on a higher level in Paramount's "Mission Impossible: 3."
High tech and lower costs had always been a kind of "mission impossible" for Hollywood. But thanks to this robust partnership with Silicon Valley, it's a challenge no longer.
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