ANGELES, Feb. 28 -- Robert Zemeckis made his way through the labyrinth of scaffolding and packing crates, steering clear of the "Wet Paint" signs and excusing himself as he passed through throngs of workers making the final touches on the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at the University of Southern California. Outside, a tent was rising over the parking lot for the opening gala on Thursday evening.
When I was at U.S.C. in the 1970's, I remember a couple of students talking about "audio," and a professor heard them and said, "Men" --and it was all men back then '' "you are in film school, and in film we talk about picture and track. There is no video, and there is no audio,"Mr. Zemeckis said.
Mr. Zemeckis, director of films like "Cast Away" and "Forrest Gump," laughed and pushed through the door into a classroom for beginning film students filled with 30 Avid film- editing machines. A few young faces peered up tentatively from their work.
"Now, I've noticed the new word you hear students use is capture," he said. "You don't shoot a scene, you capture it. It's not principal photography, it's the initial capture. That's because with digital technology there is so much that you can do with the image after you shoot it. The whole notion that what was photographed in the camera is the final image is gone forever."
Hollywood is not famous for its agility in adapting to change, though when cornered by innovations like sound and color it has always eventually, if reluctantly, embraced them. One of the main forces pushing digital technology is that it is much cheaper to use. The equipment is less costly and requires less elaborate lighting, and there are no costs of developing film or striking prints. Most everyone in the entertainment industry now is well aware that developing digital technologies will profoundly affect and permanently alter not only the way movies are made, but also the kinds of movies that get made.
That is why the grand opening of the new Zemeckis Center, in a former warehouse just north of the U.S.C. campus in South-Central Los Angeles, is as good an occasion as any to ask how the rapidly evolving digital world will influence new filmmakers, many of whom grew up with home video cameras and have never worked with film in their lives.
"I really like that this is not some brick-and-ivy building," Mr. Zemeckis said of the 35,000-square-foot center, for which he acts as head cheerleader and chief benefactor, having gotten the ball rolling in 1998 with a $5 million contribution. "It looks like the kind of places that these students will actually work at when they graduate."
Digital filmmaking has been for the past five years or so largely the domain of shoestring rebels like Lars von Trier and Mike Figgis, or of high-end computer effects houses like Digital Domain and Industrial Light and Magic, while mainstream studios have generally gone along making films as they have for decades.
What is most immediately noticeable about the Zemeckis Center is the list of those who have chosen to be associated with it, beginning with Mr. Zemeckis, one of the most successful mainstream directors in Hollywood, and continuing through filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (who contributed money to build adjoining digital stages; Mr. Spielberg named his for the late Stanley Kubrick, Mr. Lucas for Akira Kurosawa) and television figures like NBCís Scott Sassa and the writer-producer John Wells.
Four major studios ó Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures ó have donated money or equipment and have portions of the center named for them. Two major talent agencies, the Creative Artists Agency and the William Morris Agency, are also in evidence.
This is the Hollywood establishment planting its stake right in the middle of the emerging digital world.
ìWhat we are going through, with this shift to digital, is on the same level and just as significant as the change from silent to sound films, or the shift from black-and-white to color,î Mr. Lucas said this week.
He, more than most directors, has embraced the new technology. Indeed, his ìStar Wars: Episode 2î will be the first major studio film shot entirely with new generation digital cameras. In many theaters, when it is released in the summer of 2002, a digital projection system will be used so that at no point in the movieís cycle of production and exhibition will film ó that shiny strip of celluloid clacking along sprockets in a flickering projector ó have played any role.
"Each one of these changes, whether it's from silent to sound or from film to digital, has really changed the vocabulary that the filmmaker has to work with,î Mr. Lucas said. ìWhat happens with digital is that it makes the medium much more malleable. You can do things that you just could not do before."
A digital camera uses no film, capturing its images on digital tape or some form of computer disk. Since film editing and special effects have pretty much been digital for the last decade, it is possible to feed the camera's digital images directly into the editing machine, blending them with computer-generated digital effects and creating a final, digital version of the movie.
This is important ó and frightening, to some -- because the digital data is much more elastic than film images, frozen on celluloid. A director can shift the perspective of a scene, add a fresh camera movement, alter an actor's performance, transfer the location from Red Square to Times Square, speed up time, slow it down and generally do whatever schedule and budget allow to get the desired images up there on the screen.
"What's happening is, digital technology is creating the potential for a lot more flexibility," said the director Ron Howard, who donated money for a fully digital 50-seat screening room at the Zemeckis Center. "Basically, it's a chance for filmmakers to more readily realize the images that exist in their heads. So often, making a movie is a case of managing your compromises. Suddenly, whatever a filmmaker imagines is possible to achieve. It's pretty liberating."
The shift to digital has been opposed by some directors and many cinematographers who contend that digital images feel colder than the more lush images on films. This, said Mr. Lucas, is an outdated complaint as a new generation of lenses is closing the gap between the two forms.
The Zemeckis Center is part of U.S.C.'s School of Cinema-Television, and its offerings include classrooms, five stages for digital (or film) productions, studios for the campus television station, two large editing rooms with 30 digital editing machines in each, several individual editing suites for advanced projects, a computer animation laboratory, a room that will someday be home to a renderfarm (the mega-computer necessary to process computer-generated images efficiently), a motion- capture stage and a brand new patio that one donor paid to have built when he noticed students sitting on a concrete bench outside. There are hopes of transforming one space into a four-camera, high-definition studio.
"You used to need to bring your own 8-millimeter camera," Mr. Zemeckis said. "It was expensive to be a student here."
Now, there are 110 Sony digital cameras for students to check out for their school projects.
U.S.C. is not alone in moving into the digital world, though school officials believe there is nothing quite as extensive as the Zemeckis Center anywhere else.
"The idea, we hope," said Elizabeth Daley, dean of the U.S.C. film and television program, "is that you're not training students in yesterday's way of doing things, you're training them in tomorrow's way. The kids coming out of here will, for the first time, know more than the people who are actually working in the industry."
New York University's film school has been edging into digital for seven years, and though it has no fully digital stages, its students also have access to high-end Avid editing machines. "We don't do anything outside what you'd do on an Avid system," said Scott Bankert, N.Y.U.'s production center coordinator. ìIt's pretty basic. We're talking about very expensive stuff here."
Others worry that an emphasis on expensive state-of-the-art equipment might distract students from the prime task, which is learning how to tell a story with a camera.
"It's all nice to be able to learn the craft of digital effects and digital production, but the content is really the heart and soul of any project," said Myrl Schreibman, academic administrator at U.C.L.A.'s film school. "I think creativity flourishes with limitations and restrictions, and if you give schools all the bells and whistles, they stop focusing on content and instead focus on what the bells and whistles can do."
Mr. Zemeckis agreed. "Ultimately, you've got to learn how to throw all this stuff away," he said. "That's the hardest part to learn, not to use all of this technical stuff to save yourself all the time."
Mr. Zemeckis said he hoped that the new U.S.C. center, and future efforts at other important film schools, would help close the creativity gap he perceives between what writers and directors are imagining and what the new technology is actually able to do. Now, he said, for perhaps the first time in movie history, the technology is changing so rapidly that the reality of what can be created on the screen is running ahead of what the creative artists are imagining.
The result, he believes, will be that as digital effects become cheaper and more polished and it becomes possible to create almost anything on screen convincingly, the impact of blockbuster action moments will be lessened. If you can do anything, his thinking goes, then what's the big deal about crashing a car into a building or crashing a rocket on Mars? That, Mr. Zemeckis said, will drive filmmakers away from big effects and back toward storytelling.
"I really think that's what's going to happen," he said. "It's all going to come back to substance. That's the really good news."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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