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LucasFilm Combines Video Games and Movies To Eliminate Post-Production 79

Posted by Soulskill from the until-they-want-to-add-in-more-jabba-scenes dept.
llebeel writes "Lucasfilm is currently prototyping the combining of video game engines with film-making to eliminate the post-production process in movies. 'Speaking at the Technology Strategy Board event at BAFTA in London this week, the company's chief technology strategy officer, Kim Libreri, announced that the developments in computer graphics have meant Lucasfilm has been able to transfer its techniques to film-making, shifting video game assets into movie production. Real-time motion capture and the graphics of video game engines, Libreri claimed, will increasingly be used in movie creation, allowing post-production effects to be overlayed in real time. "We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic in real time computer graphics that, over the next decade, we'll start to be able to take the post out of post-production; where you'll leave a movie set and the shot is pretty much complete," Libreri said.'"

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LucasFilm Combines Video Games and Movies To Eliminate Post-Production More

LucasFilm Combines Video Games and Movies To Eliminate Post-Production

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  • So Machinima with motion capture instead of controllers.

    • I was about to say

      Apparently they found Source Filmmaker

      I expect to see Stormtroopers rocket jumping around a heavily distorted Han Solo spouting some memetic phrase to warbled stock music

      • Get to the end of the movie, the big climax, and Toad says "sorry, Mario, the princess is not in this castle."
        That or we get a Gozilla flick where the monster looks remarkably like Bowzer.

        • Get to the end of the movie, the big climax, and Toad says "sorry, Mario, the princess is not in this castle."

          So we've seen Mario's origin story (a recap of the events of Yoshi's Island and some of the sports games featuring Baby Mario) through the first world of the main quest, and Mario ended up rescuing one of the Toad Brigade from one of Bowser's adopted kids.

          -- Thank you, Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
          -- That's-a fine. We're gonna need a lot-a more manpower to tackle Bowser.
          -- But who?
          -- You head to Giant Land and rescue Toadette, Luigi'll be by the beach fetching Yvan, and I'm off to the

      • And then the nude mods start showing up....

  • Well, yea? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Friday September 20, 2013 @05:31PM (#44907669) Homepage

    Games are typically designed with ultra-high res textures and ultra-high poly or NURBS models which get transformed into something which will run on PCs. For textures this is a relatively simple resize (I say relatively because many of them actually get it wrong!), and for models this means generating bump/tessellation maps, etc.

    It doesn't make any sense for them to make multiple sets of these high-quality assets because whichever has lesser quality (games) can be generated from the one with higher-quality.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fatphil ( 181876 )
      I presume from your comment that you were capable of extracting some meaning from his comment. Personally, when I come across a sentence containing "developments in computer graphics have meant Lucasfilm has been able to transfer its techniques to film-making" I'm inclined to say "but LucasFilm has always traditionally revolved around film-making, and in particular the use of computer graphics", and then dismiss the whole thing as being devoid of much sense at all.

      In particular, films will always be the hig
    • I could not agree more.

  • Pick any two (except this is Lucasfilm, "better" isn't part of the vocabulary.

    • Not so. At Lucasfilm, the company (more specifically ILM, the special effects branch), "better" is default. "Faster" and "cheaper": pick two is the saying.

      However, when it comes to movies by George Lucas... not so much.

  • Then where will we fix everything?!?!?!!! (Score:3)

    by Y-Crate ( 540566 ) on Friday September 20, 2013 @05:34PM (#44907701)

    This will never work. ;)

    • This will never work. ;)

      Why didn't you say so before? ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drkim ( 1559875 )

      This will never work. ;)

      It's kind of inane title, " ...Eliminate Post-Production " because it's been "working" for centuries.

      First:
      Filmmaker Georges Méliès started shooting VFX 'in-camera' back in 1896, and it worked out fine.

      It didn't "eliminate post-production" back then, because post-production includes editing, enhancing the effects (like when he hand-colored frames) changing things in the darkroom, etc. and later music, ADR, mixing, etc.

      Second:
      It just moves CG tasks like texture painting, model building, rigging, li

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by mattyj ( 18900 )

        I can say from firsthand experience that Kim Libreri speaks in nothing by hyperbole and is a world class d-bag.

        That being said, there is some merit to this concept, at least as it applies to the type of movies Disney will be churning out under the Lucasfilm moniker for the next decade or so. It won't eliminate post-production, but as others have said it will move some of it to actual production time, and streamline some of the repetitiveness in vfx production, namely animating the same stormtrooper dying in

  • Cause I'm sure someone out there said that at some point, we would not longer be spending days, weeks, months, or even years in the studio to get a final product, and yet it still takes typically months for most projects*. Just because it's possible that that will happen, doesn't mean it will work for everyone.

    *I emphasize most projects. Hiphop/rap/what have you are notorious for making sure that they get their next record out the moment sales dip from their previous one...perhaps that's why their songs a

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hiphop/rap/what have you are notorious for making sure that they get their next record out the moment sales dip from their previous one...perhaps that's why their songs are almost never memorable.

      You sure it hasn't got anything to do with not having a melody, just a beat and some incomprehensible muttering.

  • Angry Birds Star Wars II was released yesterday (Score:5, Funny)

    by jd2112 ( 1535857 ) on Friday September 20, 2013 @05:48PM (#44907797)
    In the next Star Wars movie the rebels will fling themselves at the stormtrooper pigs with a giant slingshot.

    • In the next Star Wars movie the rebels will fling themselves at the stormtrooper pigs with a giant slingshot.

      Star Wars: Angry Bespin
      As Cloud City is antigrav-supported, this will wreak havoc on the drone-slings, but our heroes will overcome the convoluted physics model to fling themselves at the stormtrooper pigs in first-person 3D!*

      *note, for copyright reasons, they'll fling themselves using a fedora and bull whip instead of a slingshot.

  • Since a lot of videogames are now being done for cellphones, this means vertical games and vertical movies [youtube.com].

  • Alright then! (Score:3)

    by ArcadeMan ( 2766669 ) on Friday September 20, 2013 @05:50PM (#44907813)

    Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 )

      Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!

      ... all with the face and voice of Jar Jar Binks ...

      You must recall the franchise is pwned by Dizfiz.

  • ...which just continues to flush the toilet until everything is completely gone.

  • Post will just be replaced with Pre Production (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pebbert ( 624675 ) on Friday September 20, 2013 @06:21PM (#44908057)
    Someone has to do all the effects. It'll just have to be done before the film is shot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )
      That will make the news more interesting. Now not only can they make up the quotes ahead of time, but the video footage as well.

  • This doesn't change the effort needed. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nadaka ( 224565 ) on Friday September 20, 2013 @06:22PM (#44908061)

    It just transforms post production into preproduction, even if the composition of effects can be done concurrently with filming actors, you still have to actually produce the effects. And in this case, you have to rely more on the actors syncing correctly with the effects instead of adjusting the affects to match the actions of the actors.

    • "[...] adjusting the affects [...]"
      so. it has come to this.

    • What you said, definitely. DVD extras (the best part of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) show preproduction steadily evolving. Nearly all movies are story-boarded [wikipedia.org] before production, and animation houses have always made animatics [wikipedia.org] showing the key frames and shifts of the camera. Nowadays effects-heavy movie scenes are pre-visualized on a computer: someone builds a 3-D world for the scene, puts some 3-D character models in it, animates the models, and then moves a virtual camera around to create a

  • Gravity and inertia models? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic"
    LOL.
    Only if they plan on finally implementing CORRECT and realistic gravity and inertia models. Look at Gollum in Lord of the Rings, or the hundreds of apes in Planet of the Apes, etc.etc. Not one of them move realistically, not one of them has a realistic gravity or inertia model, so they are obviously CGI. Why is this? Why do the movie studios go to the huge effort of making them look incredibly realistic in still frames, but deliberately make

    • To be honest, realistic gravity and inertia are severely lacking in movies as well. You know how sometimes a person gets shot, and the bullet throws him away? Conservation of momentum would require that the same thing happens to the shooter, but it never does.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Only if they plan on finally implementing CORRECT and realistic gravity and inertia models. Look at Gollum in Lord of the Rings, or the hundreds of apes in Planet of the Apes, etc.etc. Not one of them move realistically, not one of them has a realistic gravity or inertia model, so they are obviously CGI. Why is this? Why do the movie studios go to the huge effort of making them look incredibly realistic in still frames, but deliberately make the gravity and inertia models incorrect?

      Actually, gravity and ine

  • Given George Lucas's history, Zork's going to involve ring-shaped explosion wavefronts.

    Oh, and the Grue will have turned out the lights first.

  • More pre, less post, or "just add actors". (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday September 20, 2013 @06:36PM (#44908139) Homepage

    Post-production work can be cut with this approach, but it means more pre-production work. The background art and animation produced in pre-production has to be good enough for final output.

    Take a look at Before VFX [tumblr.com], which shows how little of what appears on screen today exists in the real world. The latest Star Trek was almost all green-screen, of course. But movies which don't seem to be "effects movies", like The Great Gatsby, were done that way. If no actor touches it, it's probably CG.

    Now to get rid of the actors...

  • Looker (1981) is getting closer and closer.

    Cant wait for the first movie made and acted entirely by one person (or an AI).

  • I hope not. (Score:3)

    by Hsien-Ko ( 1090623 ) on Saturday September 21, 2013 @06:59AM (#44910811)
    I've seen so much Z flicker in modern video hardware (especially AMD) it's almost like playing stuck in 16bpp with Voodoo-based hardware again. Same goes for the 24-bit precision regarding the depth for shadow map accuracy. Do you really want to see flicker and shadow jagginess along angles in feature films?

    • Sigh... they are not going to render movies using the same GPU's you have in your own gaming rig. They are just going to use the same techniques used by video game production with movies.

  • That could prove interesting - create a game that's actually the post processing of the movie.

  • Luke will put a Hamptser in the microwave in star wars seven. Censors to go crazy!

  • Others have commented how this will lead to dumbed-down movies with videogame features and Mario/Angry Birds franchise tie-ins, such as

    Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!

    ... all with the face and voice of Jar Jar Binks ...

    But this would actually be fantastic if if the movie watcher got to control the remix. There are cut-scenes in Red Dead Redemption that are rival anything in a movie (Marston's last encounter with Bonnie, so polite, so suffused with longing!) and then you can enter the world as one of the characters. Why limit your favorite characters to one setting, legal threats from Georg

  • Great. Now we can look forward to even more fakerer bluescreen acting and even MORE packed and MORE dense scenes to cover up the complete lack of quality dialogue or plot that George Lucas is so good at creating.

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