Tinseltown for the taking
Item: The Industry Standard reports, "While no one will say it out loud, privately [movie executives] admit they're terrified Hollywood will be Napsterised: that some college kid will post a movie-swapping program that will explode in popularity, swiftly creating a ravenous audience of millions of users who will expect free access to Hollywood blockbusters."
Item: In January 2001, Apple introduces a new G4 desktop computer that includes iDVD software and DVD-R/CD-RW drives that enable users to digitise movies and burn them into DVDs. Compaq has a similar desktop on the way. The US$3,500 computer incorporates a Pioneer drive that itself was priced at US$5,000 weeks earlier.
Item: Two weeks after the Apple announcement, writer-director Richard Linklater premieres Waking Life at the Sundance Film Festival. His animated feature was produced by Austin, Texas, computer-animation wizards Tommy Pallotta and Bob Sabiston. They made it on their Macs, using Sabiston's Rotoshop software to digitise live-action video and serve it up for animators to play with.
Item: A Wired magazine article on Pallotta, Sabiston, and their Flat Black Films reports that Sabiston may package Rotoshop software, "since it runs on relatively cheap G4s." By comparison, Wired says, Pixar, the Toy Story shop, "this year bought 250 Silicon Graphics workstations, which typically run up to US$30,000 a pop."
Both of these technologiesâ€"-iDVD and Rotoshopâ€"-will spread quickly. Rotoshop holds the promise of extending the digital indie revolution from live action to animation. And iDVD is a way to quickly copy and distribute films that can play on any DVD machine. When this all comes to pass, the movie industry's fear of Napsterisation will reach the loathing stage. When the Standard article appeared in January, the threat seemed to come from online file-swapping programs, but the new iDVD hardware and software are more ominous developments that threaten Hollywood's domination of both production and distribution.
Apple has a demo of iDVD on the Web, showing how easy it will be to take QuickTime movies of an innocuous day at the beach, for instance, and burn them into a DVDâ€"-for sending to grandma, perhaps. That hypothetical grandma got a lot of attention after Steve Jobs, the CEO of both Apple and Pixar, rolled out his iDVD announcement. A ZDNet story reported that one analyst wondered if average computer users would "be able to shell out $3,500" for a machine capable of running iDVD.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
