A camerman stands inside a soundproof camera booth with a Vitaphone camera, circa 1926. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The dawn of a new "virtual filmmaking" age is upon us. Sparked by the pioneering work of Bob Zemeckis on The Polar Express and Beowulf and amped to the extreme to create a realtime director-centric workflow by James Cameron, Rob Legato and team for the upcoming Avatar, this new evolution of the filmmaking process is energizing the Hollywood industry. Having worked on a couple of these bleeding-edge film projects (Avatar, Tintin) with many of the industry's' leading filmmakers, artists and technicians has allowed me to witness and contribute to the development of this new virtual filmmaking system that will likely lead the moviemaking process over the coming decades. The virtual filmmaking process is an amalgamation of traditional filmmaking, CGI, visual effects pipelines, previs workflows and realtime computer gaming technology. Virtual filmmaking combines the best parts of all of these previous traditions in a unique way to create something immensely useful and creatively liberating for the director and other artistic team members. Although I can't elaborate on the specifics of any one system, I'd like to briefly touch on the technological progression toward the virtual filmmaking revolution in general and point out some of the innovations of this new system.

Technical limitations imposed on filmmaking are nothing new. The art form endured an earlier "dark-ages" period when it struggled with the coming of sound and the introduction of the first color film stocks. These technological advancements actually changed the way that films were made for short while due to the often overwhelming limitations they imposed. The fluid moving cameras of the silent film era had reached an almost poetic height only to be temporarily restricted when cameras suddenly required bulky soundproof enclosures to eliminate the noise from their mechanisms. Actors that previously had freedom of motion now found themselves speaking into potted plants or telephones, which concealed a hidden microphone, as in the infamous Warner Bros. film The Lights of New York produced in 1928. In addition, there were three different, non-compatible sound systems competing to become the sound standard. These were the Vitaphone, Movietone and Photophone systems and much like the current format wars of today they were all backed and supported by different studios and groups. Sound familiar? Later, in the 1950s, the heavy lighting requirements of early color film stocks imposed limitations on the cinematographers and production designers and also influenced and changed the final imagery of the films themselves. Given time and ingenuity, these limitations were overcome and the art form once again was able to flourish.

Similarly, our current visual effects and CG filmmaking evolution has been technologically shackled throughout its first several decades of development. Filmmaking has gone through a tremendous change in the last 30 years with more and more films involving elaborate visual effects sequences with complete digital environments and characters becoming commonplace. Often the films are so heavy with vfx that the effects themselves almost become the "star of the show." Filmmakers and actors comfortable working on a live-action set in the traditional way have increasingly found themselves alienated from the living, breathing, realtime discovery process that was previously inherent in the moviemaking workflow. Many wonderful "happy accidents" and creative discoveries were born from the director, cinematographer and actor's interaction within the "real" environments on the live-action set and this allowed these creative individuals to be fully "in the moment." These types of creative inspirations cannot easily be planned or anticipated and attempting to do so often produces results that are hollow or false.

For the filmmaker, virtual filmmaking could easily be seen as a long overdue correction to a system often hampered by the inherent limitations of traditional visual effects pipelines and CG technology. As the fully CG films have evolved, they have inherited the benefits and limitations of a traditional visual effects pipeline. With all of the fantastical imagery that these pipelines have allowed, they have also often stifled much of the immediate, organic discovery and replaced it with a slow and laborious process that required the director to wait weeks or months before seeing how a sequence would actually look in the final film. As a result, this slow turn-around time for the visual effects often limited or altered some of the decisions and discoveries that would have occurred had the shots been created in the traditional live-action way.

A "fix it in post" attitude often prevails with the larger visual effects houses who know that if given the time and money their large teams of animators and technicians will eventually turn over visually impressive shots for the film. This works great for the visual effects houses with their regimented technical pipelines, but it isn't the most ideal situation for the director, actors or cinematographer, who often make many profound artistic discoveries "in the moment" and are inspired by having direct interaction with the lighting, sets, props and other characters. Give these creative individuals something tangible that they can see, touch and interact with and they will flourish: Thus, the emergence of the virtual filmmaking process.

One of the biggest challenges faced by CG filmmaking and visual effects has been to duplicate all of the subtle accidents and unpredictable events that happen in the real world and make a shot look alive and believable. The barely perceptible twitch in a character's eye or the way the characters move through lighting on a set can be taken for granted on a live action movie, but often these things require weeks of painstaking work by numerous individuals when replicated in CG. As a result, many of the subtleties of the real world are often lost, leaving the audience with a feeling that something is missing or wrong with the shots.