Popularity: 1
Vote:   | A background like a cityscape-we digitally recorded that into the computer and then brought Spider-Man as a digital character into that environment, that plate. We combined the two and then outputted them electronically onto film, which then went into the movie, which then got scanned again to go back into the DVD. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A DVD is a hugely oversampled thing. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A DVD is yet another generation away from the film, and there are no free lunches. The images that were taken from the film, recorded into a hi-def medium and then color-corrected for their final use, have gone through several steps already. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | A lot of the gearheads want to talk about what they do and how cooltheir ideas are. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film image, based on contrast, bit depth, and refresh rate. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Digital imaging has untied our hands with regards to technical limitations. We no longer have to be arbiters of technology; we get to participate in the interpretation of technology into creative content. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Digital video doesn't have apochromatic aberration; on film, red, green, and blue do not focus at the same plane, so when you shoot film, green and red are very close together but blue is fairly far out. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Film is not an accurate representation of the real world any more than digital is; in both cases you are dealing with a surrogate, and it's a matter of preference which you like. And preferences varies from society to society-in Japan, the bent is to have everything in crisp, inaccurate sharpness. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Film, as far as I'm concerned, is my area of artistic endeavor, so I never think of a movie that gets released as being all done-it's just when they took it away from you. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I feel a certain sense of loss for a lot of the people who have grown up in the computer age for their lack of first-hand real-world experience. I got into this business because I wanted to do a lot of traveling and see a lot of places and be paid to do it, and now with the advent of computer, we're making everything in a box. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I like engineering, but I love the creative input. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I obviously wanted to design cars-everybody who does industrial design wants to design cars. I also knew how they worked. My father was a mechanical engineer, so I had an understanding of engineering processes and materials. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I started out as a kid liking to disassemble and assemble things-I took apart a lot more things than I put together. And I like pyrotechnics-I liked to blow things up. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think a much greater segment of the movie-going public is interested in the technology behind the making of films than ever before. Frankly it's starting to be understandable to the layman because we're using the common medium of the computer. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I try to stick with a lot of the same people because you develop a common shorthand. Because you are working in this virtual world, it really comes down to verbal descriptions of what you're seeing on the screen. You have to be able to describe to the artist what you want to achieve-and he has to understand you. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was heavily involved in photography; it was an avocation from the time I was a little kid-I like taking pictures. And all of that stuff kind of came together. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I was involved in the color correction and the digital color correction. In an odd way, you end up making a film many times-the DVD, the archival record of a high-definition master, and so on. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was working as a plumber-actually made a ton of money as a plumber, very good job-and I went and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I liked it very much, really enjoyed it. I really liked the whole business of visuals as a component of the story. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I went to work... on a movie called Andromeda Strain, and then later on Silent Running. So that was where I started. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If you bet on horses, it was like betting that you're going to get the Quinella - you're going to pick all of the winners of all the races in one day. Lucas was willing to take that risk. I'm not sure that I even realized what a great risk it was, but as fortune would have it, we were successful. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If you can imagine it, we can make it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In the first Spider-Man, at the end of the movie, Peter Parker had to deny himself a relationship with a girl that he's in love with. The very next thing that happens is that he's swinging through the city. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It's an embarrassment of riches because you have directors who don't better. You end up with so much stuff going on the screen that you don't know where to look, and that's what I consider self-indulgent. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It's very much like filmmaking always is-you're always asked to do something that you're not sure you know how to do. So you make an educated guess as to what you think will work and you hope between that and plan B, that you can end up with a product that's really good. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Miniatures are going to be around for a while because they are very competitive cost-wise. It's all cost-driven. But the particle systems and the dynamic simulations in computers are good enough now that it's really like comparing apples and apples. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Now, you're focused on content, product rather than process. And that's a huge change that's occurred in the last 10 years. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We stayed there 24 hours a day. We lived and ate and slept that movie. We were enthusiastic, not just because of the movie, but because we had such a great collaborative team. We had a really good time. It was very much a family. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We still get to blow some stuff up. One of the most enjoyable things about doing special effects was going out and blowing up miniatures. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We were fortunate-we got to harvest all of these great ideas that were out there that nobody in the motion picture industry had considered using because they were sort of hidebound. So all of a sudden we brought this stuff in and we look like heroes. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When you see somebody in a blue costume standing beside someone else in a blue costume, a white line appears between them. That's a real-world effect; your own eyes do the same thing when they mix colors. In digital, these anomalies have to be created, because the computer doesn't know about them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When you used to have to put subjects in front of a camera-a miniature, an actor, or an environment-you actually had to photograph it and then put those together in an optical printer, you were always trying to figure out how to mechanically achieve an end result. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering. |