Mosaiko

The Digital Revolution

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Behind the Scenes

In the history of motion pictures there have been decisive moments when a new technology changed everything. In 1927 The Jazz Singer—the first “talkie”—marked the beginning of the sound era. Suddenly, silent film stars were out and a new type of star and a new type of story were in, changing how movies were written, filmed, and shown.

Today digital technology is driving a revolution that’s even more earthshaking. Young people who have grown up in the Internet era don’t realize how seismic the changes have been. Movies—all kinds of media, really—will never be the same.

What digital means technically is that pictures and sounds are converted to digital data (ones and zeros) that can be stored, manipulated, and transmitted by computers. Once in digital form, a world of possibilities opens up.

A New Reality

The digital era in movies began in the 1980s but picked up momentum around 1990. From the beginning, digital technology was used to create new kinds of images. Filmmaker George Lucas’s company, Industrial Light and Magic, pioneered astonishing visual effects that made the most fantastic space stories look stunningly realistic. With programs like Photoshop we could now digitally alter pictures—say, to remove a person or add a building— which changed our basic understanding of photographed reality. In the digital era, statements like “pictures don’t lie” and “seeing is believing” are clearly untrue. Digital editing systems helped shape new filmmaking styles and techniques, such as the use of very short shots, graphics that fly around the screen, and objects that seamlessly transform (morph) into other objects. The look of most television commercials today would not be possible without digital tools.

The 1990s brought an explosion in digital video (DV) and the now-familiar miniDV camcorders that give amateurs the ability to shoot and edit inexpensive, very good-quality video. Independent filmmakers seized DV cameras and used them to make movies that were suddenly being shown on television and at prestigious film festivals. In the traditional Hollywood production model, films are shot with big 35mm film cameras and big crews to handle them. While DV is not up to 35mm quality, it’s good enough and cheap enough that a wide range of fiction and documentary projects that would have been impossible, or impossibly expensive, before can be made in DV.

As digital video took off, so did the World Wide Web. At first, Hollywood didn’t know what to do with it. The Blair Witch Project, a 1999 low-budget thriller shot with small-format video cameras, is credited as the first movie to exploit the Internet’s marketing power. By posting hints on the Web that the horror in the film was real, the producers sparked intense debate, helping propel the film to a $248 million worldwide gross. Today, Web sites, blogs, online reviews, and discussions on sites like MySpace.com are essential elements in building “buzz” for a new film.

The Web opens the door to a new model of filmmaking and distribution. The majority of movies are created and distributed by large corporations—such as film studios, television broadcasters, or big distribution companies. However, the Web makes it possible to produce a movie for a specialized audience and sell DVDs (digital video discs) directly to that audience, bypassing the gatekeepers who would have likely rejected the project for lack of broad appeal. Distribution expert Peter Broderick notes that Reversal, a drama about high school wrestling, has never been shown in theaters or on TV or even offered in video stores, but it has generated more than a million dollars in sales of DVDs and merchandising over the Web. In The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, author Chris Anderson describes how the Web enables producers and distributors to target niche audiences with products that don’t sell in high enough volume for traditional retail outlets. The ability to make a profit while producing smaller and more unusual types of productions increases as we move away from selling or renting physical objects like DVDs and toward downloading electronic files.

Digital Delivery

Meanwhile, recent advances in high-definition television (HDTV) have brought a quantum leap forward in picture and sound quality. If you’ve been to an electronics store lately, you know how incredibly clear, vivid, and downright huge the new flat-panel screens are. Every frame of digital video is made up of tiny dots of light called pixels; the more pixels, the sharper and better the image, especially when shown on a big screen. Traditional, standard-definition video uses about 345,000 pixels for each frame; the best high-definition systems use about 2 million. Once you’ve seen a beautifully shot, widescreen movie in high definition, you never want to go back to watching old-fashioned standard def again.

High definition is transforming Hollywood movies and TV shows (using camera technology pioneered by, once again, George Lucas). Many types of projects that used to be shot on film are now shot in high definition to save time and money; the quality is now high enough that audiences usually can’t tell the difference. Almost every movie today goes through a digital stage at some point in its production.

The Digital Cinema Initiative was put forth by a group of studios to bring digital technology all the way to theaters. Currently, when you go to your local movie theater, chances are you’re watching a movie being shown with a film projector. New “4K” digital projectors use almost 9 million pixels and create a gorgeous picture that never gets scratched or dirty. Theaters have resisted investing in the expensive machines, but because studios can save millions by not having to manufacture and ship heavy film prints, they may eventually subsidize the equipment. However, Hollywood is terrified of the potential for piracy when their new releases come out in digital form. Piracy is an enormous problem. When the latest James Bond film opened recently in foreign theaters, the pirated DVD was already available on the street.

But just as theaters are poised to move into the digital era, consumers have an exploding number of options for viewing movies on giant flat-panel screens in their living rooms, on smaller computer screens at their desks, and on tiny iPod or cellphone screens on the street. Digital television—already available with new high-definition and standard-definition channels—will completely replace traditional analog TV in the United States on February 17, 2009. Between video-on-demand, downloads, TiVO, and Webcasts, we’ll soon be able to see almost anything, anywhere, anytime. Will this mean the death of one of the great worldwide traditions—going to a theater to watch a movie surrounded by an audience that’s laughing and crying along with you?

Yet again, we look to George Lucas as a bellwether. Because releasing a movie theatrically is incredibly risky and expensive, studios are driven to a blockbuster mentality, creating product for the widest possible appeal (or, depending on how you see it, the lowest common denominator). Even so, most films lose money in the theaters. Lucas, the man behind more blockbusters than almost anyone, told Daily Variety, “We don’t want to make movies. We’re about to get into television.” Instead of spending $100 million to make a single film and another $100 million to distribute it to theaters, he said, he could make 50 to 60 films for television and Internet distribution. As for future audiences going to theaters, Lucas said, “I don’t think that’s going to be a habit anymore.”

When you consider that digital technology is at its heart simply a way to convert movies to a string of ones and zeros, it’s both shocking and amazing to see how it has changed the way movies are made, the stories they tell, where they’re shown, how much they cost, and who’s watching. Stand by for further developments.