Latest Star Wars brings digital video to mainstream

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

With "Star Wars: Episode II," digital video makes the leap to hyperspace — from the low-budget world of independent film to the big-budget stratosphere of mainstream Hollywood.

When it opens on Thursday, George Lucas' "Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones" will become the first major studio film to be shot completely on digital video. Lucas didn't expose a single frame of film, relying instead on specially designed high-definition digital video cameras created by Sony and Panavision.

While it's the first major studio film, it won't be the last. Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams," due out later this summer, is a digital feature — and James Cameron is putting the finishing touches on a digitally shot IMAX feature filmed at the underwater grave of the Titanic.

But the question remains: Will "Attack of the Clones" look as good as film? If it does, what does it bode for motion pictures in general?

"There's a lot of controversy about this," Lucas said. "Everybody knows this is a big leap. Everybody's been discussing the 24-frame (per-second) high-def camera. But when you see this on film, it looks like any other film out there — not better or worse."

Lucas originally wanted to shoot "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" on digital video but the technology had not been sufficiently developed. The advantage to shooting digitally, Lucas says, is the compatibility and cost-effectiveness of combining his footage with the computer-generated effects in a movie where every shot features more than one computerized element — from the environments in which the actors stand to the actors themselves.

"Ultimately, it all exists in the computer," said Lucas, whose various film offshoots — including Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound — have pioneered the use of computers since Lucas shot the first "Star Wars" film (now known as "Episode IV: A New Hope"), released in 1977.

"To shoot on film and then transfer the film to the computer is cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. So it's a practical issue. We had worked with Sony and Panavision to develop the high-def for `Phantom Menace,' but we had to wait for the lenses."

Having shot the film digitally, Lucas is also trying to expand the number of theaters with the capability to exhibit them the same way. But he is running into resistance, for a couple of reasons. Digital projectors are three times as expensive as film projectors, a figure that jumps drastically when the computer server in which the film is stored is added in.

Industry opposition

Digital projection also would mean drastic changes to the billion-dollar film distribution system, which creates and ships thousands of celluloid prints of individual films to multiplexes around the country. By contrast, digital films can be beamed to theaters by satellite, where they are downloaded to a server — or they are delivered in DVD-sized discs. The digitally stored information never decays or erodes, unlike celluloid, which is vulnerable to all kinds of physical damage, from scratches to breakage.

"The industry is locked down against this — they're dragging their feet and the theater owners have locked hands against it," Lucas said. "They're struggling to control it. But they're not losing anything with this; we would all win. Right now there's a lot of fear of the unknown; as it becomes more understandable, people will relax and go with it."

The number of theaters with digital equipment is expanding slowly. There were only four theaters in the United States equipped with digital projectors for "The Phantom Menace" in 1999. By Thursday's release of "Attack of the Clones," there will be 80: "I was hoping it would be 300 or 400," Lucas said.

Until "Attack of the Clones," digital video had been the realm of the independent-film world. Cheap, mobile and unintrusive, digital video equipment provided a means for filmmakers to shoot their scripts without the expense of film stock and developing.

At this year's Sundance Film Festival, the award for best drama — and best cinematography in a drama — went to "Personal Velocity," a movie shot on digital video by Rebecca Miller. The directing award in feature films went to "Tadpole," a digital video feature by Gary Winick. Both were funded by a production company called InDigEnt, created by Winick, which offered 10 filmmakers $100,000 each to shoot an entire feature on digital video.

Digital detractors

Ethan Hawke, whose directorial debut, "Chelsea Walls," was also an InDigEnt production, said, "It makes it easier to tell a story in an experimental way. And digital takes the financial pressure off. When you're filming every day, it's a race to get the shots. With digital, you have all the time in the world and can be more deliberate."

Still, director Michael Apted has his reservations about the digital revolution: "It doesn't begin to approach what you can do on film," he said. "I haven't seen a movie yet that was shot on DV that made me think, `Boy that was the way to do that.' I'll have to see `Star Wars' before I make up my mind about it. But they've got a lot to prove yet."

Director Peter Bogdanovich has similar feelings, yet also sees the medium's potential. The visual quality of most digital features — films such as "Lisa Picard is Famous" or Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" or Mike Figgis' "Time Code" — has yet to equal film, he says, but the technology continues to develop.

"The quality of the prints is so poor and everything is way overlit," Bogdanovich said. "There's not the depth or the richness of film. And yet it's getting better every week. And the economy, the mobility — it's very exciting. And the cameras are smaller, so they're less intrusive. Actors love to work with it."

Filmmaker Rebecca Miller said there is a distinct video look to most of the InDigEnt features.

"My director of photography had to do a lot to make it look less greasy and hard-edged, less video-like," Miller said. "Video eats light and blows out subtlety. Filmmakers are in love with the beauty of film; film is a fuzzier image. But video is very appropriate for certain stories. It's not a question of replacing film: It's oil paints versus watercolors."

Hold the chutzpah

Years ago, Francis Ford Coppola predicted that, one day, technology would become accessible enough that anyone could make a film. That moment seems to have arrived. The cost of low-end digital video equipment is such that students in a number of film schools now routinely make their first films on video rather than film.

"It's more democratic, more like literature," Hawke said. "Now it's not about having a rich uncle or Coppola's chutzpah to raise money to make a movie."

Miller agreed: "If somebody has an idiosyncratic voice, they would have to wait a long time to raise $1 million to shoot it on film. Video can be great in that respect."

Said Lucas, "Anybody with the will and the talent now has a chance. There are a lot of gatekeepers to making a movie at the studios because it's so expensive. And film is a lot of the expense."

Apted isn't so sure that giving the masses access to the tools of his trade is necessarily a good thing.

"My first thought was that I was delighted, that this would democratize film," Apted said. "But the trouble is you don't want to watch most of these films once they're finished. So you've got a stockpile of dreadful movies."

Said Hawke: "If the average moviegoer hears it was shot on DV, he thinks it's not a real movie. But I've worked on independent films shot on film with limited finances and time — and those don't look as good, either."

Writer-director Henry Bean said, "DV has its own inherent subject matter. Video is present tense and film is like past tense, or past perfect — the novelistic tense. If you want your image carefully controlled, then video doesn't work. But it's great for things that feel like they're happening right now."

Even Apted said, "With documentaries, digital video looks immediate and has a visceral power."

Using their 10 minutes

Because the cost of digital videotape is about 1/10th that of film, directors can also let scenes play out, or shoot them with more than one camera at a time. Director Rick Linklater, whose "Tape" was an InDigEnt project, says, "With film, so much of it is about the image and getting it before the magazine of film — which is only 10 minutes long — runs out. It's always about worrying that your 10 minutes are up. With `Tape,' we could keep the cameras rolling nine or 10 hours a day. That's why we were able to shoot it in six days."

Digital video will never replace film, Lucas believes: "I mean, we still use pencil and paper," he said. "But we also know that not putting computers in our offices would be naive."

But the next generation of filmmakers, he adds, will be as comfortable with digital video as with film. When the cost of the high-definition cameras comes down, the issue will become moot.

"Most young people don't even know what film is," he said. "They shoot their first movie on digital 8mm video. They don't really think about the actual medium. ... They know how to edit in their computers, how to manipulate images — at some point, to not use this technology will seem odd to them."

Meanwhile, to further his campaign to expand the number of theaters with digital projection, Lucas will advertise and promote those theaters that show "Attack of the Clones" on digital projectors.

"Anybody who is lucky enough to see it projected digitally will realize the difference," he said. "I'm hoping that those theaters do better than the ones with film prints. If they do significantly better, theater owners might realize there's a market for this."