There is a global change happening in the world of movies right now. Only blockbusters will remain in cinemas, which will let people get more adrenaline. By the way, ticket prices will go up. But all genre movies will go to cable TV and internet channels like Netflix. There is another player that is crowding out all the others – the gaming industry. It has started to take over user time that used to be spent on movies and books. Games have started to take over a lot of things from movies. It’s now common to hire serious musicians to write soundtracks, directors to direct game scenes, and actors to recreate episodes.
Accessibility of technology
Tools have become easier and creativity has been able to be done by ordinary people. There are great cameras that produce a great picture on default settings, you don’t need to hire mathematicians or programmers to write additional tools, algorithms, everything is already written and perfected. There are already a lot of push-button solutions in the industry that allow you not to think about how to technologically realize the idea, they give more room for creativity. This has led to a lot of nuggets of creativity emerging. As before there were “garage” programmers, and now such homegrown geniuses create short films and animated masterpieces and are already approaching the full meter. There are a lot of such examples.
If we talk about specific technologies that have changed cinema, there are several. Motion capture (creating animated characters using computer technology that reads actors’ movements and facial expressions) has become affordable for mid-level companies. By adding a virtual camera (a device that allows the director to see the filming location) and a virtual set, we can create a digital previsualization – an animated version of the film. This allows us to speed up the shooting process several times, because we can plan and adjust everything at the stage of preparation for shooting – scenery, movements, emotions of the actors. The director can create a movie without leaving the pavilion. Now we are developing technologies for transferring lighting from reality to virtual space. This is a very interesting topic for us – in the future it will help us to move away from filming and collect photorealistic images in 3D. There are technologies that work on the basis of artificial intelligence – with their help, you can create the same armies using only five actors. The system controls the characters on its own. So, huge masses are no longer needed either.
What global changes have new technologies provoked? We have access to new worlds. In the famous TV series “Game of Thrones” an ordinary viewer can consider only 20% of the changes that modern technology has brought to it. In the series, landscapes were changed, land was built up, virtual fortresses were built.
What can modern technology do? Change the environment, interior and exterior of buildings, create battle scenes and disaster scenes that are impossible to shoot “live” and reproduce natural phenomena and their consequences. In fact, the entire movie can be shot in a “green room”. But live actors are still needed. For now.
New technologies have provoked the emergence of new professions in the film industry: 3D modelers, compositors (those who put a shot together from disparate images), VFX-artists (visual effects specialists – those who blow up, break, create complex effects like track marks from a tank), visual effects supervisors (those, who know how to interpret the director’s idea in the category of visual effects and bring it to the specialists), motion capture and motion control engineers (robotic crane that moves over the set on a given trajectory). And then there are the generalists – the “jack of all trades” who put everything together.