Lucasfilm Predicts the Future

There have always been three stages to the filmmaking process: pre-production, production, and post-production. These three components rely on each other to create a polished final product. Regardless of being a documentary, a promotional video, or feature film, all film productions require these three steps. 

"Over the next decade video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process."

This is the ambitious claim made by Lucasfilm, the production company behind the Star Wars franchise. 

Speaking at the Technology Strategy Board event at BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), the company’s chief technology strategy officer, Kim Libreri, introduced a new style of filming: 

As you can see, the company has figured out a way to implement special effects in real-time, moving a large amount of post-production work into the pre-production and production phase. Although Lucasfilm is able to show off this technology now, it is still more of a future concept and calling it a complete replacement to post-production is laughable. As you can see from the video, the graphics are not exactly feature-film quality. But this is, more then anything, is a sign of things to come. It could also be considered an advanced style of storyboarding, enabling special effects artists to see their work before actually implementing it.  

All of the effects in the video have been possible in the past, except before you had to process, tweak, and render the footage. Now they are able to do it incredibly faster to the point where it's instantaneous. In movie making time is money, so what this means is that films will be able to implement special effects on a much smaller budget. I know some people favor practical effects so this may not be an entirely good thing... but I'm very interested to see what happens when high-end graphics become assessable to a very wide audience.

Oh... and speaking of the future. Check out this cool film I found that interviews Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. They ask them about the future of movies... but in year 1990. Quite the interesting perspective.