Lucasfilm declares war; Episode II: in which our rebel heroes fly in the face of an all-powerful-yet-moribund, oligarchy - while creating the world's first all-digital blockbuster - Cover Story - Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones - Column

Post, June, 2002 by Ken McGorry

MARIN COUNTY CA -- It's shot on tape. Very nice tape, but tape nonetheless. Its prototype Sony cameras were untested in battle conditions. Yet all its hero shots proclaim seamless compositing mastery. And nearly every other shot has some form of digital manipulation -- there are even dramatic, eye-to-eye two-shots in which one character's performance has been replaced with a different, preferable line reading. As a true digital cinema creation, it was color corrected twice -- for digital display and for traditional film out.

Its storied, veteran filmmakers speak confidently of the demise of film, both as an acquisition and as a delivery format. And director George Lucas and producer Rick McCallum even go one better. The creators of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones boldly predict the fall of the greatest entertainment empire of all -- Hollywood itself -- if the movie industry does not quickly react to the winds of digital change.

Three years ago, we heard producer Rick McCallum say in these pages that the making of Star Wars Episode / represented a clarion call to all filmmakers. Follow your dream; adopt and exploit new, democratizing technologies: only work with the Hollywood establishment when you must. But at the time such notions could seem counterintuitive in light of the gargantuan production and effects effort that Episode I represented.

Last month, with the release of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, McCallum's challenge to both the Hollywood elite and the vast numbers of struggling filmmakers began to ring true. If you can produce a sprawling, effects-driven space opera, shot in five exotic locations (if you count England), using no film, and if you also can avoid the film processing chain until the very last step, well, you should be able to produce just about any film this new, digital way. And distribute and display it digitally, too.

Now McCallum also wants to enlist fans and the general moviegoing public in a grass roots Internet effort to sway both the Hollywood hierarchy and theater owners nationwide to adopt digital film distribution and projection. He says fans will quickly get hip to the fact that digital projection allows films like SW II to look and sound noticeably better, and doesn't deteriorate after a few weeks, as film stands accused of. New digital cinema techniques, he says, can easily save the movie studios $1.2 billion a year in film processing, film prints, shipping, re-shipping and the ultimate, environmentally unfriendly fate of old prints. He goes as far as to say that, if Hollywood bigs don't change their ways and embrace the higher quality display that digital film can provide, savvy users of the Internet -- and many valuable sets of young eyes -- will eventually work their way around corporate Hollywood, downloading their digital entertainment direct to their hard drives. McCallum sees a possible future in which an antiquated, oblivious Hollywood studio system is nibbled to death in the same way Napster aficionados have been having their way with the music industry. Meanwhile, McCallum was counting on a hoped-for total of 80 digital cinemas showing Episode II domestically and another 20 internationally to sound the battle cry signaling the eventual end of film.

Episode II has quickly gone on to prove that large audiences of pop culture consumers and hard core fans alike can embrace digital movie making, whether it's a digital or a film projection. Attack of the Clones grossed a blockbusting $116 million in the US on its opening weekend, a four-day affair that began on May 16 when Episode II debuted in an unheard-of 72 countries, dubbed into 19 languages.

Besides the drama and "biggest weekend on Earth" marketing potential that a global opening could generate, McCallum stresses that Lucasfilm particularly wanted to avoid the rampant piracy and fan frustration that the trickle-down of traditional, staggered international release dates can engender.

THE PROCESS

Behind the prodigious numbers of the production's opening weekend was, of course, a major, ground-breaking post production effort. Yet McCallum speaks of the film's budget and personnel as modest "We had only one visual effects editor," he says. "And our editor, Ben Burtt, is also our sound designer" who used Pro Tools to sketch the movies sound design, ultimately going for big sound on the Skywalker stage.

Starting with editing the film's animatics -- and making SW II about making animatics -- McCallum praises the performance of Final Cut Pro and the support Apple provided (including" downloads at 3 am.!")

As with "SWI, Mike Blanchard was again Lucasfilm's head of post production, working to keep the ball rolling between Lucas, McCallum, DP David Tattersall, Avid editor Ben Burtt, principal engineer Fred Meyers and the large crew at ILM, the animators, the color correction effort, virtually everybody.

The challenges began with acquisition. "It was challenging because we were pushing a digital acquisition system that could work on a major feature," Blanchard says.