Next week when Lionsgate’s Ender’s Game opens in theaters, the visual effects community will be watching to see if the nontraditional model of a VFX house coming on board in a co-producer role—which lead VFX house Digital Domain did with Ender’s—is a model that can work for the struggling effects industry.
Chris Meledandri felt terrible after losing $100 million making 2000's underperforming sci-fi animated title Titan A.E.
"That failure was the price of admission for the rest of my career," admits the founder and CEO of Illumination Entertainment, the studio behind one of the year’s biggest successes, Despicable Me 2, which is poised to clear $900 million worldwide.
This column in THR’s Behind the Screen blog runs on Fridays.
News:
Three-time Academy Award-winning re-recording mixer Mike Minkler has extended his relationship with Todd-AO through 2018. He has received 11 Academy Award nominations, winning Oscars for Black Hawk Down, Chicago, and Dreamgirls. Recent credits include The Fifth Estate.
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers capped its conference Thursday night with an annual awards ceremony, which was followed by a jam session featuring the musical talents of the organization's membership and staff.
This close-knit group of technology leaders honored its own, including respected image scientist Bill Feightner, CTO at Colorfront and a co-founder of Efilm, who was awarded the Technicolor/Herbert T. Kalmus Medal for commitment to the highest standards of quality and innovation.
Re-recording mixer Frank Morrone, who has won Emmys for Lost and The Kennedys, is joining Technicolor. His first project at the company will be Justin Bieber's Believe.
Morrone bring an extensive list of TV credits, including Sex and the City and the recent pilot of The Blacklist, and features such as Ransom, Sleepy Hollow and the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings.
Wendy Aylsworth, who is senior vp of technology at Warner Bros. Technical Operations, admitted that the awards committee that she chairs went behind committee member Chris Cookson’s back to vote to give him the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented Wednesday night at the Television Academy’s 65th Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards at Loews Hollywood Hotel.
The search is on for an unbiased chair to lead a new committee that is being formed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, aimed at bringing some standards to object-based (also referred to as immersive) sound in cinema.
Thomas Gewecke, chief digital officer and executive vp for strategy and business development at Warner Bros. Entertainment, asserted that now is the time for Hollywood to “redesign” entertainment by creating new products and services.
“This is no longer science fiction,” he said in a keynote Tuesday at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers annual technical conference and exhibition in Hollywood. “The technology is there; the product is not.”
Howard Lukk, Disney’s vp production technology, revealed Tuesday at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers conference that the studio recently completed a three-day shoot in Berlin that tested a new approach to 3D production that he called “hybrid 3D.”
“Disney is continuing to explore better ways to capture, create and distribute quality 3D,” Lukk confirmed.
Dolby has officially confirmed that upcoming Atmos titles will include Fox’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Rio 2, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and X-Men: Days of Future Past; and Warner Bros. releases 300: Rise of an Empire and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey received an Atmos mix a year ago).
Matt Cowan and Garrett J. Smith have joined Entertainment Technology Consultants.
Cowan, one of the original co-founders of ETC, rejoins the company as chief innovation engineer. Smith will assume the newly created role of senior creative liaison.
Most recently, Cowan held the position of chief scientific officer at RealD. He chairs SMPTE’s onscreen light measurement study group and teaches color science and digital cinema courses for universities and industry forums.
Underscoring the hesitance that many professionals are feeling about Ultra HD TV, Fox Sports vp of field operations Jerry Steinberg asserted that he doesn’t see 4K broadcasting in Fox’s near future.
Execs from Sony, Samsung, HDMI Licensing and NPD DisplaySearch said that this is an “exciting” time for “immersive” Ultra HD TV, while discussing issues such as a lack of available content and clear consumer messaging to grow the young market.
Speaking at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers’ annual conference, the proponents asserted that there would ultimately be consumer demand for a transition to Ultra HD, or 4K, TV—though the wider industry is very much divided on this topic.
Addressing complaints that theater screens, especially when showing a 3D movie, are too dark, the digital cinema industry has been exploring laser-illuminated projection technology. And some of these new developments will be highlighted at theater owners confab ShowEast, which starts Monday at the Westin Diplomat & Spa in Hollywood, Fla.
