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[Tuesday at NAB]
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HP, DreamWorks Lead Hollywood Out of Vinyl Era
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by David E. Williams,
~ April 15, 2008
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DV MAGAZINE
Traditional 2-D motion pictures are stuck “in the vinyl era,” and need a jumpstart in Hollywood’s visual storytelling approach, one industry leader said Monday during the “Digital Innovation” Spotlight Series summit.
DreamWorks Animation SKG Chairman Roger A. Enrico used the evolution of music delivery media as a metaphor for the stagnant state of today’s motion pictures.
Billed with the subhead “What You Dream Is What You Get,” the South Hall event showcased a variety of technological breakthroughs made through the close collaboration between the animation studio and Hewlett-Packard.
Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP’s Personal Systems Group, opened the presentation, explaining that the expanding digital economy is not being led by technology companies such as his own but by content creators at every level — from major Hollywood studios to individual artists: “They are the driving force,” he said.
USING CREATIVITY AND TECHNOLOGY
“Technology is the artistic tool,” Enrico added, giving credit to HP for helping his studio overcome a series of creative hurdles. “And effective tools plus great stories has been the formula for success for DreamWorks.”
Enrico and Bradley — with a brief assist from DreamWorks co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, appearing via tape, then launched into a series of diverse examples of how they have combined creativity and technology to result in better communication, improved presentation and an enhanced experience for audiences.
Given that DreamWorks is divided across distinct geographic locations, long-distance communication has been a dilemma for the company. “Animation is a very collaborative art form, and being apart has been an issue during production,” Katzenberg explained. Unhappy with the look and feel of off-the-shelf teleconferencing systems, he approached HP to help solve the dilemma, resulting in the company’s Halo virtual-meeting system, of which there are now 100 installed around the world.
Using the green star of the “Shrek” film series as an example, Enrico described how DreamWorks animators were having issues with screen-to-screen color fidelity during the production of the franchise’s latest entry, as the hundreds of animators individually working on the picture were literally looking at hundreds of different shades of green.
HP’s solution to the issue was their DreamColor display technology, which manages color accuracy to ensure that each and every screen in use at DreamWorks conforms to a given image standard. “DreamColor sets a standard for displays much in the way THX set a standard for sound reproduction,” Enrico said, unveiling a widescreen DreamColor monitor. “It’s a new bar for managing color within our industry.”
Noting that DreamColor offers “accurate and predictable” hues with a range of “a billion colors,” Bradley announced that HP would begin delivering the displays in June at a price “that’s 25 percent of the cost of similarly professional models.”
Acknowledging the growing interest in 3-D motion picture production and exhibition — citing projects in the works from such top filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson — Enrico reiterated the announcement that future DreamWorks animation projects will be “100 percent 3-D.” However, he emphasized, “this will not be your father’s 3-D. We can finally use this process without the gimmicks and blurry visuals.”
To drive this point home, he invited the audience to don RealD glasses that had been distributed earlier to view a scene of the studio’s upcoming 2-D animated feature “Kung Fu Panda.”
The crowd’s enthusiastic reaction to the action-packed clip seemed to confirm Enrico’s claim that digital 3-D is “the biggest advance [to the motion picture business] since the advent of color more than 70 years ago.”
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