HD For Indies

CinemaTech: Videogame / Movie Convergence

Another great link - this time to an article about how LucasArts (George Lucas' game division) and ILM (the visual effects folks) are sharing resources and techniques in their new common space in San Francisco.

Chief among them - using the realtime engine from gaming stuff to hand directors a previs (short for previsualization) tool - move the camera around the scene in real time, record camera lense choices, settings, and moves, and be able to hand off that data, rather than pre-rendered scenes, to the VFX crew. So instead of "here's a little movie that looks like what I want, reverse engineer it to make your finals", it is "Here's some scene and camera data with an animated camera path. Plug that in as a starter kit for the shot."

Very very cool.

Read Scott's thing, then go read the article. All good.

ILM is at the forefront of digital moviemaking technology in a lot of ways, I'd expect for someone to have some kind of indie viable software available over the counter in 3-8 years based on this kind of stuff.

It all trickles down.

-mike