creative cow magazine

More specifically, a review of the rapidly emerging news about the slice of nerd-vana that may or may not be named Tron 2.

Those of us who became devoted some classics of science fiction filmmaking between, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 1977 and 1983, have reasons to cast the stink eye in the direction of latter-day sequels, prequels and such. One of those classics is 1982’s “Tron,” and you don’t need me to explain why.





Yet even in this post-stink-eye era, the word on its sequel is nothing but good so far – including the news that it’s being shot in stereoscopic 3D. As soon as you hear that, your reaction is probably the same as mine – how could it NOT be?

Details have been coming fast of late, so it seems a good time to review where we are so far. Let’s start with a wonderful a bootleg clip of the trailer from 2008’s Comic Con. The quality is pretty nasty, because it’s, well, a bootleg. The clip itself drags a bit (less a well-paced trailer than a look at the “look” of the movie so far, I think), but you can definitely see where they were at the time.





The art and science of the final release will of course be light years (har har) ahead of this, but so far, so good!

A few things to note:

• This is still online! Disney is notoriously protective of its properties, yet here this clip remains. I think they get that this barely embryonic footage is worth something, and was, after all shown publicly. I doubt any mercy will be shown for leaks…or to leakers…from here on.
  
  
• I got chills hearing the roars of approval when the light cars, and especially Jeff Bridges, appear on screen. Even without the pictures, I’d have gotten chills just hearing it.
  
  
  
  
  
  (Here’s an interview in The Guardian that includes some of Jeff’s very endearing enthusiasm for the project.)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• No Bruce Boxleitner in the trailer? No worries. He didn’t sign on until later in 2008, although he’s still listed as “rumored” on IMDb.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• It was at the time of the trailer called “TR2N.” Cool-looking, yes, but virtually unpronounceable.
  
  
  
  
  
  The name has changed a few other times, but IMDB suggests that we may have landed on Tron 2.0 for now. I'm not convinced. Disney released a videogame called “Tron 2.0” in 2003.
  
  
  
  
  
  It was generally well-received -- both the hardcore game nerds and the gen pop give it roughly a B -- but Disney seems like a creative-enough bunch to come up with a unique name. Indeed, reports as recent as a few weeks ago have said that the title is in fact NOT set. Read on for details.
  
  
• Did I mention the roars of approval? That for me is the big takeaway from the trailer.

One of the first questions to come up is, who’s involved? One sign of the project’s legitimacy is the presence of Steve Lisberger, who directed and wrote the story for the original, now here as a writer and consultant. Here’s a wonderful intervie... with Lisberger, as well as the best discussion I've seen of the showing of the trailer at Comic Con.

Something to be truly excited about is that two of the screenwriters, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis have done quite a bit of heavy lifting as both writers and producers for television’s “Lost,” my vote for richest storytelling in the history of the medium, by a pretty long shot.

The key name is of course the director, Joseph Kosinski. A speedy look at his IMDb profile shows…nothing, except a pre-production credit for Logan’s Run. To be released in 2010, sez IMDb?! I don’t think so! (Although it turns out that Kosinski did in fact sign to do “Logan’s Run” first.) And no mention of Kosinski at Wikipedia!

I'd actually heard of him a couple of years before he signed on for Tron, when me and millions of other folks were bowled over by his commercial for Gears of War. Hit the HQ button. Watch full screen. Turn it up.




I was actually a little skeptical about the Tron sequel before I found out that the guy who did THAT was directing the movie! And while you may be skeptical about a commercial director taking on Tron for his first feature, I've put together some of his spots and other shorts that relate to what he might be up to with Tron, and some of the striking things he has to say about it. You'll love it. Even if you'd never heard of Tron, Kosinski is one of the most creative people you'll have come across in a long, long time.

In the meantime, here are some more of stories that have put the Tron sequel back in the news of late. First comes this article at /film the week before last, featuring the first picture of a costumed actor. Later that day, a picture from the set in Vancouver, standing in for New York City.





(I’m only including a few photos from the articles I link to at /film. It’s a great resource for folks tracking stories like this for the entire “reel world” that you should check out.)

The fella who sent in the picture is breathless with wonder:

“I was in total awe of how much equipment and gadgets they had. Everything I’ve seen them doing in the last five days is easily some of the most expensive stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s probably is $300 million, even if it’s canadian dollars.”

(Presumably written by an American who hasn’t noticed that the US dollar is getting its ass handed to it by the Canadian dollar…although because they’re Canadian, they’re doing it very, very politely.)

It took Disney only 3 days to tell us that the budget of Tron 2.0 is NOT approaching $300 million, a figure that had also been mentioned in the Vancouver Sun.

In reporting that debunking, /film includes a picture of a camera, and some tantalizing tech details:

“[‘Benjamin Button’ cinematographer Claudio] Miranda has challenged his crew with the task of having all the flexibility of standard 2D cameras including ambitious use of shots as well as Steadicam in 3D.” … “Amongst other setups, we will be rigging an F-35 to a GF-8 crane and Mini-Scorpio head to get a bird’s eye view out over the night streets of Vancouver.”





Remember the stereoscopic part? I recently had a chance to speak to John Daro at FotoKem, where a number of recent stereo smashes have been posted. He was speaking generally about stereo 3D DI…most definitely NOT about Tron, I promise…but he gave me insights into how the Sony F35 CineAlta camera works for stereo features.





Quite a bit of footage from the F35 crosses his desk, most of it shot at 1920x1080, 4:2:2, recorded at 880 mbps to the Sony SRW-1 HDCAM tape recorder that you can see prominently docked to the back of the F35.

Yes, tape. There’s a ton of it out there, even for high-end digital cinema. And yes, 1920x1080. As Russell Lasson noted in 21st Century Cinema for Creative COW Magazine, virtually all digital cinema is 2K, and as Panavision’s John Galt noted for us in The Truth About 2K, 4K, and The Future of Pixels, the majority of 2K is shot at 1920x1080. Even the Academy aperture for a 2K scan is only 1728 pixels.

So don’t get your panties in a wad about the Tron sequel or anything else being shot at 1980 for the big screen. You’ve already seen a ton of movies shot this way.)

At 4:2:2 for a stereo 3D shoot, the SRW-1 takes two HD-SDI feeds, and records them to a single tape: left-eye/right-eye for frame one, left-eye/right-eye for frame two, etc. John digitizes via the Sony SRW 5800 into the Quantum Pablo, which splits out two separate streams in real time as it digitizes.

The SRW-1 records only – only! – a single stream of 4:4:4. Shooting that way would of course call for a dedicated deck for each eye.

So if the report about shooting Tron 2.0 is accurate, that’s almost certainly how it’s being recorded. In any case, John will be going into much, more detail on the 3D DI post process for the upcoming Stereoscopic Issue of Creative COW Magazine.

Another recent report about Tron 2.0 is that it will be scored by the masked electronica dance duo known as Daft Punk.





With the original scored by the iconic Wendy Carlos, they have as much to live up to as anybody involved in the production of Tron 2.0. They can be cheesy – not necessarily a bad thing in this context – but I think they’re a great choice.

The most-viewed Daft Punk clip I found is this bit of genius by a youngster named Austin Hall, set to their song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” also known in this permutation as “Daft Hands.”





The uber-geeks at Ain’t It Cool News got an updated report on the plot in the last few weeks, which you can take a couple of ways. One is that, far from being mere fanboys, the team at AICN have established themselves as a genuine force to be reckoned with. For example, site founder Harry Knowles emailed James Cameron about some of the “Avatar” rumors he’d been hearing, and Cameron replied.

So this wouldn’t be the first time that AICN has had info leaked to them...sometimes from official sources, intending to whip up a storm. It also wouldn’t be the first time that a studio has leaked something substantially true, but with important details obscured. And as the author points out, anything can change over the next two years. But his one rings true.

You can find plenty of other good stuff at AICN (as well as some adult language – step gingerly). I've been following it since early web adopter Roger Ebert – whose site remains one of the web’s great film resources -- pointed us to AICN back in 1996, when it was just Harry Knowles and his father. (Harry also co-hosted “At the Movies” with Roger a few times.)

One of AICN's Tron sequel tidbits is this impromptu conversation with Kosinski in 2008.

And this story includes the news that the name of the movie is not Tron 2, but “something with a colon."

This week they've also posted another exterior shot from Vancouver this week. Below is greatly reduced from the original.





As with the other photos we’ve seen so far, admittedly not much to see, but trainspotters will note that this is in fact another train, and that it has indeed been spotted.

This little summary is far from complete, but it’s enough to catch you up on where we are so far. For more perspective on this news, especially on director Joseph Kosinski, see here.



PS. In an article for Creative COW Magazine, CGI pioneer Steve Wright tells how the effects in Tron actually set the industry back!





This is the sidebar in an article in on how commercials were actually the driving force in widespread adoption of CGI. Pretty slick stuff, and well worth a look.

The folks at Reuters were among the world press who covered the Game Developer Conference earlier this month. It truly is a massive event, this year held March 23-27 in San Francisco. Among the tidbits from their coverage on April 1:

Some say the iPhone's unique features -- GPS capability, connectivity, a touch screen -- and sheer variety of content gives it an edge over its more established handheld console competition

Yo, Reuters: kind of late to the game, boys. You could have read THIS three weeks earlier in Creative COW Magazine's Games Issue:

Our notion was that if Nintendo had announced this device as a games machine, and said, "It's got a camera, it's got a GPS, it's got all your contacts, it's always connected, it's multi-touch, it's got accelerometers, and oh by the way, there's 75 million users with credit card accounts already active," you'd say, "Are you kidding me?" But Apple DID it.

That's from Bob Stevenson, Chief Creative Officer (GREAT title) at ngmoco, a "Next Generation MObile COmpany" made up of some truly sharp games developers from companies including EA.



While far from the biggest company in the market -- only 6 of 'em when we spoke to Bob -- but I think absolutely the one to watch. After you read our conversation with him, I know you'll agree.



Back to Reuters:

The DS franchise has shipped more than 100 million units and the PSP more than 50 million since both came to market in late 2004.

They threw that away in one sentence, but three weeks earlier, I had put it in a much wider context in the COW Magazine. I posted an expanded version what I wrote in the mag here at my blog on March 23, before GDC opened, and a week before Reuters picked up the story. I have to tell you, I write a lot of stuff, and I really like this piece. Games really are a big deal for our business, and game developers are among the folks who are quickly pouring into The COW.


(Turns out that there's a lot of VIDEO in VIDEO GAMES. Who knew?)

Of course, lots of other people are pouring into The COW too.



So anyway, you can hang around and wait for the world's leading news agencies to get in the game and tell you what's happening out there...or you can read it weeks earlier here at The COW.

Jeffry Katzenberg has been a major advocate of stereoscopic 3D for a while. The first place I saw him talk about it was ShoEast in 2007, a gathering of eastern US movie theater owners and operators. The talk was called "The Future of 3D in the Digital Age," and it was among the places that he said that all of Dreamworks' animated features would be released as stereoscopic.

On one count, he underestimated how quickly this would come to pass: he said that there would be "5, 6 or 7 'Super-A' titles" in 2009, 12 to 18 by 2010. So far this year, we've already seen My Bloody Valentine, the Jonas Brothers concert movie, Henry Selick's "Coraline," and just this weekend, "Aliens vs. Monsters," with 10 more slated for release this summer.

Here's the first trailer for Aliens vs. Monsters, which first ran in 3D during the Super Bowl:




Here's the second trailer:





Here's the third. Not sure why YouTube won't let me embed the high-quality version, but it's worth following the link to take a gander.


The next biggie is going to be Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.






(You can see Entertainment Weekly's preview of the year's 3D releases here, but it's worth trying to track down the print issue, which includes anagplypic stills from most of those features, along with 3D glasses to view 'em. Pretty slick. It also doesn't have much to say about James Cameron's Avatar, opening in December...but I sure will later.)

So for the pace of "Super 'A'" releases, we're well ahead of schedule.

As theater owners pushed back on Katzenberg in 2007, they said that upgrading screens was going to be way, way too expensive. His reply was that they'd make more money on 3D showings, and this week's premiere of "Monsters vs. Aliens" certainly bore that out. Here's how the numbers broke down:

• $58.2 million for the weekend, on 4104 screens
• 28% of those screens were 3D, and accounted for 58% of the gross!
• .03% --that's three-tenths of 1 percent -- of those 4104 screens were IMAX (143 to be exact)...and they accounted for nearly TEN PERCENT of the gross! (Again to be exact, $5.2 million, a record.)

To put it another way, 28.3% of the screens accounted for nearly 70% of the money that Av.M pulled in! That is, as the kids say, off the hizz-OOOK! (Actually, I doubt any kids say that anymore.) There's absolutely no question that Katzenberg is being proved right on feature after feature.

However, here's one area he was a little optimistic on: he predicted 6000 3D-equipped screens by March 2009. The number is more like 2000 in the US, with a smattering more overseas. Let's be generous and call it halfway there.

The good news is that there are a total of 8000 screens "committed" (see previous link)...but as far as I can tell, no particular timetable.

When I say 8000 screens, the vast majority are those offered by RealD. Dolby is late to the party, but has a few hundred screens committed, mostly in Europe. The draw is that they don't require a new screen, and sell their gear outright. RealD requires new screens and collects royalties....but c'mon, seriously now, RealD has it locked up. Although as far as overall revenues, all signs point to Katzenberg being exactly right: the real money is in 3D exhibition.

It's true now. It's going to get truer. Expect more details.

In the meantime, our stereoscopic 3D coverage is going to be a wild ride that you're not going to want to miss. If you don't already subscribe, now's a good time to start.

(On the off chance that you're looking for it, the expanded edition of my print column from the Games Issue is here.)

Playing for keeps, and other lessons from games

As much as games represent the cutting edge of technology, they've also been around for a while. For example, the game of marbles dates back to ancient Egypt. Thanks to a German inventor's new glassblowing tools for creating little glass balls, the game began spreading wide in the 19th century, then mass-produced by (you guessed it) Americans in the early 20th century.

This is the small version of a photo found here, but it's enough to give you an idea how beautiful the marbles themselves can be: tiny works of art. (These are from West Africa.)




(I'll be honest - I was only of middling skill at the game. I collected marbles because I thought they were pretty.)

One version of the game marbles involves rolling a small glass ball, flicked by thumb from a curled forefinger, at other balls in a circle on the ground. Knock another player's ball outside the circle, and you get to keep it.

Normally, the winner returns the marbles to their original owners afterward, but in a high-stakes variation, playing "for all the marbles," the "winner takes all." No wonder that "lost your marbles" is synonymous with insanity. Imagine a neighbor coming over to play Madden Football or Guitar Hero, and if they win, getting to go home with your console and all your games. If I lost all that simply because I lost a single game, I'd go insane too.

Fast forward, so to speak, to computer-based games in the 70s. Computer graphics were still rare, so games were text-based. Many of them were quest-themed. Using only words, you had to talk, fight, or bribe your way out of trouble as you moved from one level to the next, toward the ultimate prize.

(While there's no way to be certain, I truly believe that the phrase "the next level" comes from games. What happens when you overcome each obstacle? You get to...where? That's right. The next level.)

Since nobody could possibly know all the hazards of the game the first time through, it was impossible to succeed in these games without trying again and again, (hopefully) learning from your mistakes along the way.

You might eventually learn that it was worth buying a pencil rather than a sword on level 1, because the giant on level 2 was deaf. You could never defeat him with a sword, but if you used the pencil to write a note asking for help, the giant would fight the battle on level 3 on your behalf, bringing you safely to level four.

Here are the morals of the stories as applied to our business: every undertaking is for keeps, and you'll make many mistakes before you figure out what's really important. Sound fun? Let's play!

Just as with mainstream film and video production, there's every scale of game development, from indies with a handful of people, to casts and crews that rival the grandest Hollywood epics. Projects begin with storyboards and pitches, make their way through long stretches of creativity tempered by client interference (and, often, cluelessness). Adding to the degree of creative difficulty, there might be hundreds or thousands of potential stories to manage, each unfolding in a series of fast twitches, often among multiple players.

Even if yours is much smaller scale production, down to single stories told in 30 seconds or less, you'll see that, like you, the people in this issue are definitely playing for all the marbles, and that, even on the deepest-cutting edge, many of their experiences apply directly to yours.

And to keep from losing all of YOUR marbles, we encourage you to do what these folks do: use your keyboard to ask the giant COW for help getting to the next level.

Bigger than The Beatles. Big opportunity.

(This is an expanded version of my column at the beginning of The Games Issue.)

Normally, Creative COW Magazine is heavily production-oriented. We typically talk about high-end cameras and other cutting-edge hardware. So why a games issue, and why now?

Because while other parts of our business may be cooling down, games are hot. If you've ever tried to pry your kid (or your boss) away from video games long enough to eat supper (or sign your paycheck), then you know how compelling video games are.

Re: hot, here are some numbers. Best opening day for a movie: "The Dark Knight," $67 million. For a console game? "Grand Theft Auto IV," $310 million. This shattered the previous record for first-day sales, Halo 3 and $131 million ??" which was still nearly DOUBLE the all-time best movie opening day! Holy console, Batman!

This year alone, the "World of Warcraft" franchise is expected to pull in well north of $1 billion. Last year, the number was actually $1.1 billion. "World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King" sold 2.8 million new copies in its first 24 hours. Then there were the upgrades. And then the subscriptions for this MMO ??" "massively multiplayer online" game: topping 11.5 million by the end of 2008. That's somewhere around double the population of Ireland, or half the population of Australia.

When people my age say, "Big," we mean The Beatles: 132 million albums in the US. Compare this to Nintendo's Mario franchise at 160 million units! "The Sims" and "Madden Football" are strong too, with 100 million and 75 million respectively.

And don't forget, The Beatles never got to sell you the record player that would only play Beatle albums: Nintendo has sold 100 million DS handhelds! The "other" handheld, the Sony Playstation Portable, is doing fine, thanks, with sales of over 50 million units.

On the console front, Wii is of course stampeding, with 74% growth (can that be right?), and is likely to achieve 50% market share by the end of the year. The most striking thing about console sales is that they're still growing faster than sales of games themselves ??" for now. This says to me that we're still a long way from finished laying the foundation for the growth of the games business as a whole.


A side note on The Beatles: they sold records in other places besides the US, of course, and, especially early in their careers, singles were a critical component in the world-changing impact that these 4 youngsters had. (Youngsters? It's easy to forget that the group was done by the time they reached 30!) It's impossible to overstate the effect of singles including "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You," and my favorite, the double A-side single of "Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane." Add them all to the mix, and The Beatles sold well north of 1 billion records worldwide. Nobody else is close.

(While the "nobody is close" observation is clear through every lens, it was harder than I thought to quantify Beatle album sales. There were many different versions, including some US-only releases like "Yesterday and Today." There are also a number of sales certifications vying for ultimate authority, but I feel very, very comfortable with the number 132 million US sales. If you want to dig deeper into the world of album sales ??" and why wouldn't you? ??" you need to go here.

All of that said, The Beatles agree that games are Beatle-sized big. Starting 09/09/09, they'll offer digital downloads of their music exclusively through "Rock Band," a video game where many artists are finding far more sales, and far more money, than anywhere else. Yep, games are becoming bigger than iTunes for music, too.

(Of course, this issue of The COW Magazine also includes a fantastic article on cutting-edge game development for the iTunes App Store.)

The Beatles Rock Band story is well worth a closer look for any fan of music, games, Rock Band, The Beatles and any combination of the above. Rolling Stone has a wonderful overview of the variety of packages that will be available, including a limited edition that will include both game software and a combination of instruments for actually doing the Rock Band thing.

So what does the growth of games mean for you? Jobs. Here at COW East in Boston, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick made the rounds of west-coast game developers like EA and Microsoft, , pitching the same tax breaks offered to filmmakers who create jobs here. He also noted the 60+ game development companies already in the state, including our pals at Harmonix, the developers of Rock Band. After its success with "Lord of the Rings Online," $40 million in venture capital has helped once-tiny Turbine expand to 250 employees. MIT is even partnering with the government of Singapore to develop new games technologies and new jobs.

As you'll see in this issue, not all game jobs are going to fast-twitch 3D animators. Many of them look like traditional post jobs - video is integrated into games, promos are cut - along with quite a few traditional production jobs, like greenscreen shooting and motion capture. Add the stampede of interactive developers- Flash, online gaming, iTunes games and more - into the COW, here for the same reasons that film and video producers have been coming to our communities for 14 years, and watch convergence explode before your eyes.

No story this big can be told in a single issue. We'll keep digging in deeper at magazine.creativecow.net: more jobs information, interviews with industry leaders, and more of the games-related hardcore production (not just post) stories that you've come to expect from The COW Magazine.

From there, we'll also be exploring the ways that games are changing the landscape of technology. The demands of gamers for beefier processors, higher resolution monitors with faster redraws, surround sound, social networking, and, increasingly, stereoscopic 3D immersive experience, are all making their way into a world even bigger than the world of gaming itself. That's BIG.

In the meantime, there are indeed some production stories for this issue: Oscar-winner James Moll's new documentary "Running the Sahara," is about three guys who, well, yeah - and James has great stories about the shoot. And Bob Zelin will once again blow your mind, this time with Blackmagic's Broadcast Videohub, a distribution revolution. An upcoming expanded edition of Dustin Lau's article on advanced media management with FCP, using workflows he developed for a games review TV show in Singapore, will also include more production angles than our decidedly post-oriented print version. (Links to follow.)

Our detour into Games is an opportunity to remember that, whatever your field of endeavor, we're all playing for keeps, every day. Thanks, too, for helping us play to win at CreativeCOW.net, as over 1.3 million monthly visitors help each other get to the next level of the game! In the meantime, have fun with this issue. We sure did.