The Stars Shine At Chevrolet Film Night

What is the latest technology set to be implemented in the film industry?
Who better to tell us than Jon Landau, Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning producer of Avatar and Titanic, the man who truly brought 3D to the masses?
This is the question I posed to the producer during Chevrolet Film Night at the legendary Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
"What we’re looking at that is the next step is high frame rates. Films have been projected for almost a century now at 24 frames a second. 24 frames a second came out of the sound evolution. Where it was the slowest frame rate that studios had to pay for stock where the sound wouldn’t distort by playing it back to slowly and we see more than that, " he said.
"That’s why when we watch a film we see strobing. That’s why if you never see a projector running without film in it. You see actually the shutter up and down. Our eyes see too much by going to a higher frame rate and we can do that now with the digital projectionist.
"We can go to 48, we can go to 60 frames per second. And we don’t need to choose, we don’t need to mandate this is what a filmmaker has to use. Its a software decision.
"One filmmaker can say I want to do 48, one can say I want to do 60 and that’s what I think is going to be transportative and really it goes back to the old show scam days and Doug Trumbull when he was pushing vista vision at 60 FPS and created almost the allusion of 3D without needing the glasses.
"So the higher frame rate will affect the 2D movies as well as 3D movies because one of the artifacts you have with 3D is the strobing. We don’t see that in our life, it removes that and more light ends up on the screen so you’re going to have a brighter image.
"In addition most of our home entertainment sets I believe in the future are going to go to 60 FPS and you’re going to see that as the standard, you’re going to see sporting events broadcast that way. Its only natural and even now when you think about it television is at 30 FPS. That’s at a better quality than we are projecting our films. By filming at a higher frame rate 60 frames it’s easy to convert to 30 so we are trying to push that technology."
The Chevrolet Film Night gathered top names in film making and a select group of international students for an evening of insight into the film industry and the brands unique place within it. The festivities featured a thought-provoking panel discussion, the Young Creative Chevrolet awards ceremony and a themed reception.
"The iconic Chevrolet brand has played a major role in the U.S. film and television industry for many decades and is as important to popular culture as it is to everyday life. What better place could there be than Hollywood to bring together award-winning film makers and young talents, inspiring the creative leaders of tomorrow," said Susan Docherty, President of Chevrolet Europe.
At the high-caliber panel discussion, aimed at giving the audience an authentic view of film making today, Jon Landau was joined by:
Ian Bryce -Producer of the three Transformer movies, Spider-Man, Hancock, Almost Famous, Saving Private Ryan and Michael Bay's The Island.
Rob Cohen - Writer, Director, and producer known for The Fast and the Furious, xXx, DragonHeart, and upcoming feature, Alex Cross.
F. Gary Gray – Award-winning filmmaker known for directing The Italian Job and Law Abiding Citizen, as well as music videos for artists like Dr. Dre, TLC and Ice Cube.
The discussion was chaired by Ari Karpel, a Los Angeles-based journalist who writes about creativity, branding and Hollywood for Fast Company, The New York Times and AwardsLine. He is a regular contributor to KCRW's "The Business" and teaches classes in film and journalism at UCLA Extension.
Panel Discussion Highlights
Ari Karpel: Let's talk about the impact of the original Avatar. I think, it really brought 3D and so many visual effects technologies to a new level and I'm curious if you feel like, cause to me, the thing that made Avatar so special was of course the technology, but really was what the technology allowed for sort of this, there is this kind of humanity that came through in the film that was aided by the 3D that was so unusual, that I think is what made it such a special film. So I'm curious if you feel like Hollywood has learned from that and is working in that way or if Hollywood is simply, perhaps this is a leading question 'slapping 3D on things, because that's the craze'. How do you see it?
Jon Landau: Well first of all, I think you have to separate when you are talking about Avatar and technology into two different areas, 3D being one. But that’s the afterthought, that’s the presentation portion. I think the breakthrough of the first Avatar was to be able to do synthetic characters, CGI characters, that were engaging and emotive and that was the key. That was the transformation that I don’t think had really been done successfully before. And it was a commitment that we made to our actors that they would see themselves in these computer generated Avatars and the novees in the film and that the audience would make a connection with them. We’re storytellers, all of us, and if you can’t engaged the audience in your characters.
Movies are about closeups, movies are not about worlds. That’s secondary so that was our commitment. I think as filmmakers who are looking to come into the business, anything you do, keep that in mind, technology is there to service the story and not the other way around. The 3D, was a presentation difference. Just like black and white to color changed things. It didn’t change what made a good movie.
Casablanca is still a great movie but what we were able to do with the 3D, and thanks to technology not in the capture side or the creation side, the theatres had to embrace it and be able to go out and present it. And if you think about it, we had not had a change in cinema presentation since the 1950’s. We had widescreen technicolor back then. We need to offer people more, to engage them more. For us 3D is about creating a window into a world and not a world coming out of a window. To immerse you the audience, more into our narrative story.
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