Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 2, 2005. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
As always, the Siggraph keynote serves to introduce the conference as well as the organiser and conveys general information about the 3D and special effects market. This year, however, it was able to come up with an especially prominent guest: George Lucas, who in 1977 with “Star Wars” ensured that the field of Visual Effects exists. In a one-hour interview, he answered the moderator’s questions on stage and talked out of the sewing box.
Since the first “Star Wars” film, and thus also the founding of ILM, much has happened in the computer animation market. At the time, Lucas had developed the first nonlinear editing system at ILM (EditDroid), which was then later sold to a company named Avid and developed further there into what is regarded today as the de facto standard in video editing. Meanwhile, anyone interested has the possibility to edit their own films on a home computer.
Such and other pioneering achievements were necessary to advance the industry, Lucas observed. He himself had only wanted to tell stories and had not much idea of technology. However, he had thousands of ideas for projects for which he was repeatedly able to enthuse people, who were then inspired to peak technical performance in the course of these projects. While 90 percent of the designers still worked analogously – that is, with pen and brush – on Episode I, it was only 10 percent on Episode III. For Lucas, this was further evidence that the digital revolution can no longer be stopped. He explicitly thanked the CGI community for its work, and that it thereby enables him to make his visions a reality.
Digital cinema is also among these visions: For Lucas, there is no way around D-Cinema – celluloid will one day disappear from the picture. Together with several distributors and industrial companies, he is driving the digital revolution forward. The great technical leap had long since been made, Lucas stated; all that was still missing was broad acceptance of the new medium.
He had already been able to convince a few of his fellow directors to shoot digital films or make a 3D previsualisation for their film. The great vision is digital cinema in all theatres and more interactive technology, that is, software and hardware that creatives can handle without problems and that is so intuitive that even he himself could work with it, Lucas looked ahead. Siggraph is naturally the ideal place for this: This conference is about precisely such new technologies and refined processes for generating digital images.
