Tinseltown for the taking (cont.)
Good question. One answer: A year ago, people were shelling out $3,500 for a slower machine that would not run iDVD. A better answer: Those DVDs will be much more useful for what Hollywood considers piracy. Grandma will have to wait her turn as college-dorm entrepreneurs digitise new movies, burn them into DVDs, and send them out into the world.
Of course, pirated digital copies of new movies have been moving stealthily around the Web for years. The late Scour Exchange was a trading post for users with movie files, legal or not; it was shut down in November 2000 after a movie-industry lawsuit. But even if Scour succeeds in its current plans for a legal rebirth, it will not become a Napster-like Hollywood nightmare. Recent Hollywood movies circulating on the Web will invariably be illegal, and unlikely to be found on a convenient Web site.
More likely: a clandestine movable feast in cyberspace that changes its location daily or weekly, with the URL circulating underground. Since the enormous size of feature-film files makes them impractical for anyone without a T-1 line and a lot of storage, wide-scale piracy is impracticalâ€"-or was, until iDVD. It's one thing to watch a movie on a US$3,500 (or US$1,000) machine. It's another to slip a disc into a US$199 DVD player. Burning a DVD is obviously an easier way for pirates to distribute their booty; if Hollywood is Napsterised, it may be by burners rather than looters.
At the same time Hollywood's war against piracy heats up, it will be facing another battle with the emerging indie animation breakthroughs. I was present at the Sundance world premiere of Waking Life, saw the standing ovation, and heard the buzz afterward from would-be filmmakers who talked about obtaining Rotoshop or its kin and making their own animated features. Sabiston told me he hesitated to sell Rotoshop but decided he might as well, since similar programs will no doubt appear.
Why is indie animation such a breakthrough? Because it's easier to make a low-budget animated film look professional than to do the same thing with live-action digital video. Your roommate running down the street looks depressingly like your roommate running down the street. Rotoshop him, stylise him, exaggerate his movements and speed, costume him, and suddenly he looks like a superhero.
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.
