By Jonathan Arkin
Student Writer

Heralding a new age in moving picture entertainment, a panel of Hollywood innovators on Feb. 19 at USC Annenberg predicted a three-dimensional makeover of movies and television, led by advances and improvements in stereoscopic technology.

“Do you really want to be banging out horseshoes while Model Ts are rolling off the line?” Evan Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab Media said, quoting his brother and paying homage to the “hungry producers” of early television who introduced innovation to a world of skeptics, much like today’s innovators create groundbreaking online content. “That really did it for me. It was people having no interest in film or who were locked out of the system…Today, for me, the biggest opportunity is on the Web – telling stories on the Web.”

Moderated by author Scott Kirsner, who also signed copies of his new book Inventing the Movies, the group included David Wertheimer, former president of Paramount Digital Entertainment and current CEO of the Entertainment Technology Center @ USC; Brian J. Terwilliger, CEO, Terwilliger Productions and Producer/Director of "One Six Right"; Steve Schklair, CEO, 3ality Digital Systems; Evan and Gregg Spiridellis, co-founders, JibJab Media; and Cliff Plumer (pictured, above left), CEO, Digital Domain. The event was part of Dean Ernest J. Wilson III's (pictured, bottom right) Initiative on Sustainable Innovation, produced in collaboration with Krisztina “Z” Holly and the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation and the Entertainment Technology Center @ USC.

Schklair, a USC film school alumnus, pointed to 3-D technology as the next big thing, adding that he saw 3-D glasses not as an impediment – as one in the audience coined them – but as an enhancement to a new experience.

“[3-D] was the only place I could see digital video moving as an immersive media,” Schklair said. “Pictures are going to go from flat to depth. It’s not just optics, and it’s not just mechanics.”

Plumer, who showed clips from Digital Domain’s Oscar-nominated effect efforts on the Brad Pitt vehicle “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” revealed the expertise that has endeared him to directors such as Michael Bay, George Lucas and David Fincher.

“There’s always something that some director wants,” Plumer said. “If you tell [them] that you can’t do something, you won’t work for them again. So a lot of what we do in technology is enabling and solving a creative problem.”

The panel said much of this enabling and solving involves bringing the designs of a visionary to fruition, even if that idea encounters initial resistance. The 3-D phenomenon was cited as an example.

“3-D works,” said Wertheimer, who added the caveat that the most impressive technology could not take the place of good storytelling even as the technology surpasses the art. “It works great. I’m excited about it. But in terms of what people should be learning more about…it’s still the fundamental basics of telling a story. And since we’re in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the most important thing we should be focusing on is storytelling, whether you’re writing a TV show or a book.”

Comparing the film creation business to the automotive industry, Kirsner said that “everything new” would be countered by people who will find reasons why such ideas are bad ones.

“There are three kinds of people in Hollywood – innovators, preservationists and sideline-sitters,” Kirsner said. “Innovators don’t always spend enough time understanding and addressing the factors that cause preservationists to resist change. A lot of it is about losing status and authority…my thesis is that if you didn’t have this innovation a hundred years ago, you wouldn’t have the movie industry. Technology is always pushed back in the movie industry. I think Hollywood is exactly the same as other industries struggling with innovation and I look at it as a perfect analogy for every other industry.”

The new technology is becoming cheaper and ever more accessible to the layman, most on the panel agreed.

“If it’s free to make content and to distribute it around the world, what are movie studios going to do?” said Kirsner, who used a recent quote from media mogul Sumner Redstone – regarding the folly of posting videos on YouTube to pay the rent – to illustrate a point. “Now there are people paying the rent posting videos on YouTube.”

Photos