Company Town : New On-Line Service Targets Tinseltown : Technology: Post-production firms could transmit video on the computer network.
Sprint and Silicon Graphics Inc. plan to announce today the launch of a private telephone and computer network aimed at the entertainment industry that will allow subscribers to transmit video or graphics to another site in a matter of minutes.
Several post-production firms that do visual effects work for film, television and advertising that require dozens of time consuming back-and-forth approval and editing sessions have already signed up for the network, dubbed “Drums”--a reference to one of the first forms of mass communication. And two of the major film studios are considering joining up.
Coming a day after Pacific Bell’s announcement Monday of a planned test to deliver movies to theaters over telephone lines, the prospect of a Sprint-SGI “post-production internet” that could speed decision-making and ultimately save costs reflects how dramatically advancing telecommunications are starting to reshape the way the entertainment industry does business.
While the production process itself has become ever-more digital--witness the “Jurassic Park” computer-generated dinosaurs and the growing trend of digitally inserting actors into their sets--communication between the numerous people and businesses that contribute to a film has remained largely in the age of the Pony Express.
“It blows me away that people have this tremendous power on the desktop, do a bunch of work, and then download it to commercial tape and mail the tape through the U.S. mail,” says Jim Flaging, regional director for Sprint’s business services group.
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Not everybody is eager to embrace as-yet-unproven new technologies.
The reaction Monday of theater owners, studio executives and Hollywood’s creative community to PacBell’s “cinema of the future” announcement was decidedly mixed.
“Film distributors would be delighted to see an electronic method of distribution that would eliminate the need for physical distribution,” said one studio executive. “But one of our concerns is quality, and another is who pays for it, the theater owner or a distributor?”
Larry Jacobson of the AMC theater chain was more bullish on the subject: “Change is change, and people are afraid of it. You can close your eyes and put your head in the sand if you want, but it’s the future of the business.”
Sean Daniel, a producer at Universal Studios, said he’d be interested in it if the technology was good enough. But he took some offense at the suggestion that the digital format could lead to producing different endings for different audiences, or re-editing a film after it’s already been released.
“Anything that makes the business more profitable would be good for movies. But I think it is a misunderstanding about what a motion picture is there to do. Theater 12 might have a choose-your-own-alien attack. But that’s not a movie. A movie is someone else’s vision that you want to give yourself over to see.”
