The Big Picture

Style Points

Submitted by Nick Dager on Tue, 01/31/2012 - 12:59.

The wholesale rethinking of every detail of a modern movie theatre including its size, shape and the services and content it offers, is a growing trend in exhibition driven largely by digital cinema technology. While this trend is happening around the world some of it is market specific: what will work beautifully in one theatre won’t necessarily succeed elsewhere. Veteran exhibitors have always had an intuitive understanding of the communities they serve and now, as the very idea of exhibition is undergoing a major transition, the look and feel of the venue is an even more important element than ever. Gone forever are the days when the goal was to funnel patrons through a tunnel-like configuration geared to get them in, sell them popcorn and soda, get them seated and get them out. Leading theatres today are created from the ground up as destinations for social events of all kinds. The best examples, such as Hollywood Theaters showplace in metropolitan Denver – which was designed by Russell Architects – are doing it in style.

On Stranger Tides

Submitted by Nick Dager on Fri, 01/13/2012 - 11:47.

Stranger tides, indeed. Of course the movie industry has seen down years domestically and a few successful movies in 2012 could change everything but, as has been widely reported, domestic tickets sales dropped by about three percent in 2010 – despite a rise in ticket prices – and, more troubling, attendance was the lowest it has been in sixteen years. And yet, international sales set records. To take just one example, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides tallied $802.6 million in offshore box office, more than three times its domestic gross. Many factors are contributing to this developing trend, not the least of which are digital cinema technology, the rise of alternative content and Hollywood’s unending dependence on sequels and lowest common denominator films. The transition in the motion picture exhibition business that started a decade ago with the implementation of digital technology is gaining momentum. More wholesale change is inevitable.

The Artist, Hugo and Transition Eras

Submitted by Nick Dager on Wed, 12/14/2011 - 13:31.

lead_image:

If you love movies and, in particular, if you love the moviemaking process I highly recommend you see two current films: Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. More than one critic has written about the rather obvious differences between the two highly regarded movies. After all, one is a big-budget effects laden 3D adventure with Oscar-winning stars and seemingly half the character actors from the Harry Potter movies and the other is a relatively modest French black and white silent film. And yet I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to think of one of them again without automatically recalling the other, because for me they are inextricably linked. Both are very much about what one of the central characters in one of those movies says is the ability of movies to capture dreams. Both movies also focus on the early days of cinema and offer different views of artists coming to terms with transition eras. Both gave me a lot of bittersweet joy. I’m fascinated by just how many similarities they have; it’s a surprisingly long list. And not the least of those similarities is how the two films show that moviemaking tools in the hands of talented and inspired artists can create magic.

Easing Workflow Worries

Submitted by Nick Dager on Wed, 11/30/2011 - 12:37.

When Alin Bijan decided to make a feature film based on the ghost that reportedly haunts his Texas production studio he knew he wanted to shoot it digitally and he wanted to keep his costs in check. He ended up buying one of the first Sony PMW-F3 cameras and, in turn, making what turns out to have been the first feature film – The Ghost Of Goodnight Lane – to be shot with the camera. In Bijan’s mind, the combination of Cinedeck EX with F3 cameras enabled the production to solve budget, performance and space constraints during the shoot, by delivering a fast uncompressed, file-based camera-to-post workflow for the editorial and VFX teams.

Canon Arrives

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 11/14/2011 - 14:48.

Canon hosted a major event at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles earlier this month. The invitations read “The Story Begins” and as has been widely reported (our own coverage is elsewhere in this Report) the stated purpose was to unveil a new digital cinema camera and a range of new lenses to support it. But Fujio Mitarai, who is chairman and CEO of all Canon and flew from Tokyo for the event made it clear that the true purpose was, as he put it, to demonstrate that Canon hopes to be welcomed by the Hollywood filmmaking community and to work together to “greatly expand the boundaries of digital cinema.” If the initial question is whether Canon can deliver on that, the initial evidence suggests they can and will. In any case, as of now, Canon has arrived.