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Steven Spielberg to Produce Web Films 40

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wouldn't-that-be-sweet dept.
starlady writes "DreamWorks SKG and Imagine Entertainment apparently are trying their hand at Web movies. The article says that the first will be shorts - but might we be seeing full-length movies soon if this first venture is successful? "
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Steven Spielberg to Produce Web Films More

Steven Spielberg to Produce Web Films

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  • Re:Jeffery Katzenberg (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Imagine that, you heard nasty things about the "little midget" while working at Pixar? I never would have guessed. Look, I think it's obvious to everyone that Katzenberg and Disney have had a dysfunctional relationship, there's no need to rehash this situation...
  • I don't need to be babied (I'm sure the AC trolls will disagree on this one, but then, ``Coward'' is the key part of that equation, mmm?)

    On the other hand, utter boredom is the key part of the equation that shallow, one-note, anti-MS commenters insist upon solving again and again (for, presumably, their own amusement) -- in tremendous numbers.

    No, I don't particularly like Mickeysoft, but how many tiresomely hyperbolic declarations of the instability of Win95 do we need?

  • I'd actually submit this to Ask Slashdot but I'm not sure would get posted since this is more just me feeling around a bit.

    Right now consumer digital cameras are probably good enough to do a pretty admirable job of creating a movie, or at least a short movie. I'm not at all sure of what is available for manipulating the data under Linux.

    Question 1: What is the status of FireWire under Linux? Could I download data from say a Sony Digital Camcorder to my Linux box?

    Question 2: Are there any tools available under Linux, either free or low cost, for manipulating digital movie data?

    Question 3: What choices do I have for storing the data in a format available to consumers? I'd be interested in streaming formats as well as data file type formats. Is MPEG all we have, do we even have MPEG video encoders? How slow is the encoding process without accelerator boards? Do we have any low cost ones?

    Question 4: What low cost options are available for creating animation?

    Question 5: How can real life video and animation be combined?

    Ideally the end product would be pervasively platform agnostic. It should be playable under Linux on any flavour of processor. It should be playable under Windows, the MacOS and any other machine that is at least presently sold.
  • When I was a kid my parents had HBO (illicitly, since HBO didn't feel that the Canadian market was worth the bother, not even the Canadian market that was all of 5 minutes from Detroit freely receiving their signals) and for the most part I didn't see the point. You could watch 'first run' movies that were over a year old and had already been out in the newish videocassete rental market for quite a while.

    What I did occasionaly find entertaining were the shorts between movies. These were short films, most of them only a few minutes long, made by independant film makers. There was animation, claymation, puppetry, live action and probably others that I don't remember or didn't recognize. A lot of it didn't entertain me at all, but some of them were very entertaining. I've seen a couple of them rebroadcast on the Cartoon Network, unfortunately I don't remember titles, though one may have been called "The Cat is Back".

    The reason that they were entertaining was that they took advantage of the short and relatively cheap format to experiment with things that you could never get financial backing for in any other media. I would hope that rather than trying to make mini-Star Wars that SKG would try and do something unique, something that they could never do in a larger format.

    I don't know that the time is quite right for this venture. To keep the publics interest you're going to need a decent frame rate and resolution and I'm not sure that the bandwidth available to the average internet-connected public is available.

    If it were, and if cheap content creation tools were available I'd love to see what the more artistic element of the general public could do. There would be a lot of crap and a lot of stuff done just for the shock value but my bet is that this is where the next ground breaking work would come from.

    Who knows, maybe one of us could be the next Stanley Kubrick.
  • From the press release on www.pop.com
    "In order to make the entire content of the site accessible to the largest possible internet audience, computer users with 28.8k modems will be able to enjoy much of the programming, although those with faster modems and faster internet connections will obviously have improved video quality. As broadband penetration continues to grow, POP.com's programming will evolve to keep it on the cutting edge of technology."

    The Press Release [pop.com]

  • Jeffery Katzenberg (Score:3)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @02:13AM (#1584740) Homepage Journal
    I can't say anything nice about Jeffery Katzenberg. Not very long after he left Disney where he'd apparently seen early plans for A Bug's Life, he started production on a very similar movie. Now, some people say this was all coincidence, and some say that he did this as a means of threatening Disney and wreaking some sort of revenge on them for not making him president of their company.

    Now, from my perspective it looks as if Mr. Katzenberg had more money than anyone would ever need before he'd left Disney. But he's certainly run a vendetta against them since he's left, with zero regard for the little people who get hurt in a clash of titans. Not just the little people working with Disney, but collaborators of SKG who got caught in the cross fire.

    There's even been talk about evil characters in Prince of Egypt that were drawn to resemble Disney executives. I can't say if any of this is true, but I hear so much of it and it seems consistent.

    I sure don't mind being out of the movie business.

    Bruce

  • You do realize that a phone call doesn't take any more than 64Kbps in bandwidth and in many cases only takes 56Kbps (Robbed-bit T1 configuration) So what difference is a phone call than a FTP download utilizing the full bandwidth 56K modem? Is your rationale that those with Cable modems and ISDN connections shouldn't FTP files because they are using more than 56Kbps of bandwidth? I think not.. Not to mention it's the provider who is hit with huge streaming costs (via high local bandwidth costs) not the user. Are you more concerned that this "causes" the Internet to die of a thousand cuts? This smells of the phone company bitching about there being a difference between data and voice traffic. We all know the answer to that one..
  • Being an Internet video producer, I have a feeling that POP.com will be a flop. We've already seen DEN's [den.com] attempt to try to figure out what people on the Net want to watch (and "Frat Ratz" isn't it!). Pseudo [pseudo.com] does a bit better job, but their long-form live shows do not translate well into view-on-demand.

    You can't just put anything up and expect an Internet audience to watch it. Net video content has to be relavent to the viewers. We're talking about shows with fierce independence, intellectual and emotional openess, free expression of often strong views, investigatory shows, and it can't be too corporate.

    That's why we approached Slashdot to do Geeks in Space [thesync.com], even though we can't afford to make it a video show today, it is something that people want to listen to. People listen to GIS because it is relavent to them, the nerdy/geeky/hacker/open source population.

    If you can watch it on TV today, you don't need it on the Net. It looks a hell of a lot better on TV. However there are plenty of opportunities to do cool video shows on the Net, you just have to have some clue about what Net viewers want to watch.

    What scares me is that if POP and DEN don't work out, the entire Internet video industry could look really bad. I'm hoping that before that happens some money flows into the people who are making cool Internet video.
  • Hey, yes! Let's turn the Web into TV! That would be a great idea! Not.
  • Paul Allen also finances Transmeta.
  • Now I can watch Spielbergian cinema-quality video in a 2-inch square, in brilliant mono 22Khz audio! I can marvel as little specks shoot from one side of the square to the other, and shoot monopixel lines at each other! A centimeter tall Jar-Jar Binks will bumble around hilariously at a blazing 3 frames per second! Truly this is a marvelous age we live in.

    -lx
  • Don't get me wrong I like Sonys product lines and I'm already salivating at the mere thought of the Playstation 2, but competition is good. The following is an excerpt from an email with an film industry related friend:

    Sony owns Paramount Pictures which is perhaps the most powerful (in terms of box office receipts) distributor in the motion picture industry. Second only to Columbia, Fox, and SKG. Now, digital photography is taking off since George Lucas is one of it's biggest advocates. The Blair Witch Project also helped the digital cause. What's happening is that the internet has the potential of changing how films will be distributed worldwide. The problem is that Hollywood types are afraid because Sony is the #1 producer of digital equipment. I think you can see that if Sony is allowed to become the standard of digital photography in the industry, they will control the entire industry. That's where Panasonic comes in. They're trying, with the help of SKG, Microsoft, and others, to battle Sony in this fight. As a result, they are building the ground work for a digital distribution now before Sony eats everyone up.

  • The web... where the bandwidth isn't. (Score:4)

    by ddt ( 14627 ) <ddt@davetaylor.name> on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @02:20AM (#1584747) Homepage
    Takes about 1Mbyte/sec for DVD-quality mpg2 playback. That's a titch high for even DSL and cable modem users, and at 1Mbit/sec, more in line with what those users can swallow (on a good day, phase of the moon just right, servers aren't too badly loaded), you're going to need to play that back on one darn small window.

    If SKG wants to explore production on the web, I recommend taking a shot at fully modelled 3D animation, a la Pixar but way less geometric, lighting, and animation complexity, and instead make it real-time by requiring cheap but fast 3D accelerators. This hasn't been done professionally before, and as anyone who has watched a grainy, barfy little 320x200x256color Quake movie can attest, even "amateurs" have created dramatic, funny, awe-inspiring content. Imagine what the pros could learn to do, and with a budget, and with today's technology!

    But it takes lots of talent to do it right and a lot of modifications to directing techniques to understand its strengths and limitations as a medium. So if they want to be there for the next big thing on the web, I think this is where they should be sinking the bucks and time. Unlike so many other web ventures, you could actually turn a profit selling good flicks for your PC, and there are some nice bennies:

    1. You can re-use your character models,
    textures, and basic animations.
    2. You can re-use your world textures, possibly
    parts of the geometery ("sets").
    3. Colored lighting techniques are very cheap.
    4. Those hyper-expensive spin-shots usually
    done with a battery of cameras are now free.
    5. You can re-use sound effects.
    6. No expensive shoot. License actor skins in
    several costumes for the movie, get their
    lines in a foley studio. Then use
    variations on stock animations for the
    cast's movement instead of dragging big-name
    and big-budget actors through the tedium of
    mocap.

    In other words, you get not only re-use within a production, but between productions, and in distribution, too. You just can't say that about platters of film or even DVD's. That could be a big, big deal.

    Here's hoping SKG (or someone else wielding Mbucks of st00pid money) gives it a shot. :)

    There is a gotcha. Unless they do some neat stuff, they will prolly still have to hock up a healthy 64kbits/sec stream for the soundtrack, and downloading those first textures and models is gonna smart a little. On the bright side, the user could always start watching without textures and watch them "res in" as the textures come down the pipe. (teehee)

    Still, these are neat problems to have, unlike the one of how to make RealVideo look and sound better than pigs making bacon in what looks more like an icon than a window.

  • I guess cable/tel companies better start putting loads more fibre optic cable in the ground ;-)
    I'd really hate to see my q3test performance go down cause of ppl watching movies on the net in stead of television.
  • I've been less than impressed with Speilberg of late, what with those two awful dinosaur movies. I was intrigued, if not ecstatic, to hear that he'll be doing AI. As for this... it was inevitable, really. SKG already do theme rides, so it's not like they're mired in film.
    I have my doubts about these; how will they charge, for example? I doubt they'll be free (after the first one or two, anyway).
  • This sounds like an idea that Robert X. Cringely talked about in his January 1999 column [pbs.org]. He later admitted [pbs.org] that the idea was inspired by the awesome rendering power of the Sony Playstation 2, which he got a sneak preview of.
  • As long as it's better than that Pixelon garbage..

  • Microsoft.. fear not. (Score:3)

    by Plasmic ( 26063 ) on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @01:49AM (#1584752)
    I quote directly:

    It's being financed by Vulcan Ventures Inc., the investment arm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

    It must be bad!

    This company must be the embodiment of Satan in the form of animated entertainment!

    Chill, those of you who have to say "Microslop" and "Micro$oft". It's okay. Really.

    I hope I caught this before the anti-Microsoft crew kicks in.. surely we can give 'em a break on this one, eh?

    Notice how they DID NOT mention that the title of their first film is "Bill Gates: Man or God"? That's because it isn't. Take note, ye of little faith.
  • Well, hell, these days most movies are digital at some point in the process anyway, people have demonstrated their willingness to brave long download times for entertaiment, and the capitalists are fast coming up with ways to charge for it. It had to happen sooner or later, and The Great Speilberg decided on sooner. Long live the Animaniac.

    fh

  • There is MPEG1. A 320*200 16 fps (I believe, its something like that anyways, video quality when encoded well) stream requires 1 Mbit/s for streaming. If you want less bandwitdth, you are going to have to compromise quality.

    The people who claim you can get any quality out of compression are just lying to you.

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

  • For realplayer? (Score:3)

    by Hobbex ( 41473 ) on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @02:03AM (#1584755)

    Maybe they should take a hint from the failure of that NetAid nonsense. Not the part about generation Y not giving less about charity, but that any high profile webcast is doomed to fail.

    I mean, Real player? Who wants to watch something made by Spielberg on a 100*100 dot updated at about 5 fps. And while you and I know that this is because our Internet connections suck and might try to have patience, 99% of the viewers just get pissed off.

    Until enough people have serious broadband capability and ip multicasting takes off, the Web is a lousy medium for film. Which is ok. It doesn't have to be everything. So if only Spielberg would let the hype be and go do what he is good at for a medium that deserves it instead...


    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
  • Personally I think it's all a load of corporate PR hype. Some people a while back tried to get away with calling The Blair Witch Project the first "web film".

    But then again, I guess with "tv movies", "web films" aren't that dumb... unless you're on a phone modem.

    Personally I would rather not sit in front of my PC screen for two hours to watch a movie.

    (not fully concious yet, not capable of good argument)

  • What about streaming quicktime4?
    It automagically scales to your availible bandwidth (56K gets postage stamp, T1 gets a decent sized window).

    All we need is to convice Apple to do a linux version....
  • There is one potential advantage to the "Web film," as I see it. Since there will probably be advertisements in banner form, or interspersed elsewhere around the site, we might finally see a decrease in invasive and distracting product placements in the films themselves. Personally, I'm getting tired of seeing the advertisements upstage the actors in most modern Hollywood productions. As it stands, I've already got a terminal case of "banner blindness," so the web ads wouldn't be nearly as distracting as the ubiquitous product placement shots.

    This, of course, assumes that the new medium will ever attract the kind of budget that would require product placement in the first place, which is an iffy prospect at best, at least for the next few years.
  • Exactly my point. He will either want to broadcast his productions in high quality and nobody will be able to see it because the bandwidth just doesn't allow, or he'll try to adapt to the capacities and distribute a stamp-sized grainy window with the sound quality of an old FM radio that has fallen down from the Empire State building. ;)

    Seriously though, is there anything that might be better than RealMedia? I've seen Vivo (even worse) and I've seen MS's ASF (looks just the same) but maybe I've missed something. Or is the Internet just way too slow and overloaded with spam, p0rn banners and XXX sites? It might be interesting to see the outcome of this: Maybe if we hyped it enough people would finally realise the need for more bandwidth?

    Just my 2.- LUF
  • > Who knows, maybe one of us could be the next Stanley Kubrick.

    Perhaps, but look at how often Kubrick uses massively long segments of almost-still-image.... I doubt that the poor, struggling 28.8 modem user would want to download massive DVD-quality movies just to find out that about half of the footage was a long, dragged-out establishing shot.

    To be more successful, you'd have to make certain that no single image lingers on the screen for too long. In fact, to be absolutely certain that the audience will stay tuned and glued to their seats for every precious kilobyte, one would have to keep a fast pace of eye-grabbing imagery, never giving the viewer a single moment to think their bandwidth is poorly-spent or wasted.... Bright colors! Loud music! Fast action!

    Oh, wait, that's how film is going today anyhow. Looks like this is indeed the perfect time to introduce web-movies.
  • *sniff* It was so sad when that brown blur got into that bright blur and went back to his blurry home planet. I bet that little girl would be cute if she wasn't a blur.

    Web: Film medium designed for the far-sighted.

  • one to six minute films?
    wow, I could watch mtv for that.

    but seriously, what would be the fun in that, seeing a one minute clip of what? a frustrated cubicle employee kicking his pc aroud and hitting it with his keyboard? I would be interested in things starting at around 15 minutes or more but then I'd probably be downloading an additional 30 minutes of commercials and "comming up next" announcements.
  • Hey, web films aren't all that bad... you just have to really love film, not only Hollywood(tm). Check out www.ifilm.net [ifilm.net] or any of the other web film "theaters." You won't find features; it's mostly all short form. There is a big difference between shorts and features (compare a short story to a novel), but that doesn't make the shorts any less enjoyable. They're just different. You'd be surprised what a skilled filmmaker could do with six minutes.

  • If this project really takes off, the bandwidth will indeed suffer from the download of those big movies and commercials. However, in the mid-term, I'm sure we will all benefit from it as the network adapts itself (read Cisco sales increase) to compensate this new constraint.

    K.


  • ..to preempt any/all idiotic/inflammatory comments with idiotic/inflammatory comments which insist upon the discontinuance of other idiotic/inflammatory comments, ``if only for a little while'' or ``just this once''.

    I don't need to be babied (I'm sure the AC trolls will disagree on this one, but then, ``Coward'' is the key part of that equation, mmm?), and I happen to say ``M$'' from time to time, but does that make me some sort of ``anti-MS or anything that's associated with it'' bigot? I suppose not since I don't particularly dislike Transmeta, even though Paul Allen helped invest in it. I'm not a conspiracy theorist who thinks M$ is really governed by space aliens or the Borg and they plan on turning the entire world in cyber slaves (well, maybe if you take out the ``space aliens'' part..).

    Lay off it, already. Saying stuff like, ``You anti-MS trolls should just shut up already!'' or other talking condescendingly to a theoretical crowd that hasn't even spoken up yet during the course of the conversation is damn childish. Just let them get moderated down, as they should. You don't want to read their comments? Fine. Set hard thresholds. ``Get over it''. Don't read Slashdot.

    But becoming a lamer yourself isn't going to stem the tide of other lamers: it's going to add to it (above and beyond the fact that you added yourself to it, of course).

  • It would be interesting if something like this could take off - disregarding the bandwidth issues, of course.

    First of all, how much does it cost to produce a web-film, as opposed to a feature film? We can probably assume that most of the production costs will remain the same (you still have to pay actors, technicians, etc) but the distribution costs may be cheaper - I imagine some good servers cost quite a bit less than printing up enough film to stretch to to moon and back 8 times and then shipping it off to theatres would.

    This could end up something akin to mp3.com - a lot of independent artists get featured there, as the cost of entry is so much less. I, for one, would like to see what someone with little more than a digital camcorder and a PC could put together. After all, they budgeted Blair Witch on $35.26 and a piece of string. Sure, it could be crap, but 90% of everything is crap.

    Looking forward to lots of movies about people who are trying to get the lenscap off their camcorders,
  • First I thouhght Internet phone calls steal bandwidth from more important 'conversations'. Now come the big movies... how many times will they interrupt that six-minute-show with commercials? For whose benefit?

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