VFX Pioneer Moves Into Digital World: An Interview with Doug Trumbull
DT: Well, you still have to deal with your people and you have to have foreground sets and you have all the lighting issues. One of the problems yet to be solved is the automation of lighting. So that you have a meta-data format so that the lighting parameters in the virtual space are identical to the lighting parameters in the full-scale space. One of the guys doing some of the most advanced work in that area is Paul Debevec at ICT [Institute for Creative Technologies]. You ought to talk to him. He’s down in Marina Del Rey and he’s tied in with USC Film School…he’s been doing some advanced work on replication conditions that are exactly a reconstruction of natural light. I think he calls it rendering with natural light. So I’ve got the whole motion-tracking thing down. We used it extensively on The Book of Pooh, we used it for some live-action casts…it works fine. We’re going to next generation now and miniaturizing a lot of the equipment and lightening it up because the new digital cameras are really very tiny. That’s one of the aspects that make this whole thing even more feasible because you don’t have to have a battery or a film magazine or a viewfinder or a motor or anything on there. You just got a prism block with some electronics that’s not very heavy so it gives you tremendous reduction on the physical size and weight of the camera package, and so all of the supporting equipment, whether you’re using a steady cam or a boom or a crane or a head or whatever, or just hand-holding, you know is a fraction of the mass for the entire system. So I think this is a big advantage for both live-action and motion control type of photography. I’m just working on the problem from the standpoint of developing movies that can benefit from a dramatic move in this direction, which would make what looks like a hundred million dollar movie for a fraction of that cost, and I think that’s one of the next big steps. There are some people that I’ve been talking to: Volker Engel, who did the visual effects supervising on Independence Day and Godzilla, and his partner Marc Weigert have just finished a movie called Coronado.
BD:Tell me more…
DT: Well, they just did what looks like Romancing the Stone shot down in Mexico with really amazing production values and about 600 effects shots, and they did the whole thing for an amazingly low amount of money, which I won’t even quote. They’re about to do it again on some other productions they’re developing… [they’re] proving the concept that electronics and photography, if you couple it with virtual sets and electronic compositing, and you really story board out your film, you can save multi millions of dollars. The flip side of it is that a cinematographer who’s going to shoot a regular feature film if he’s choosing between electronic cinematography and film is probably going to choose film because he wouldn’t immediately see any benefit to electronic cinematography. But when you’re compositing it’s a whole other thing.
BD: Tell me what kinds of movies you’d like to make?
DT: I want to get back to my own roots as a filmmaker and have experiences again like I had on Silent Running. I did that whole movie in 32 days for a little over a million dollars and you could do it again today…I think that one of the things that is going to continue to happen is that we’re seeing a very, very rapid almost exponential change in the capacity of digital imaging to increase resolution and bandwidth and depth so we have 10-bit this year we may have 12-bit next year. Who knows how many lines of resolution we’ll have two or three years from now, which is not very far. When you jump from 2k to 4k, it’s a massive leap in screen resolution.
BD: Do you think they’ll settle on the 4k standard or somewhere in between?
DT: I don’t think anybody’s going to settle on anything. I think its going to be kind of a mix and match whatever’s appropriate for the content choice just like some people shoot wide screen, some people shoot 1:85, some people shoot high speed film, some people shoot slow. I think all the choices are going to continue to be there.
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But this is all being used to make crappy films. All the films mentioned or discussed in this interview: all summer blockbusters, all rigid plots, all shallow stories, all ultimately forgettable after 5 minutes.
Same for the blockbusters made in the six years since this interview was conducted.
Its cheap and quick in the sense that you don't have to worry about sets and locations - not much money needed to film in an empty stage draped in green or blue.
But then doing everything that goes into the digital effects?
I can't help but wonder if this has more to do with labor relations more than anything else.
And really, his puppet show couldn't have been done by The Jim Henson Studio or somebody equivalent?
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