Re:Activision-Blizzard layoffs after reporting record results
by Animats on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @01:15AM
(#19150874)
Directing has changed, too. I used to know a B-list Hollywood director. Directors used to come from a theater background. Theatrical directors make a script work by walking through it on a bare stage and making changes until it works. This doesn't work in films with lots of effects. If you try that on an effects film, you go way over budget. Which has happened more than once.
Big movies are now waterfall projects - everything is preplanned. As one ILM guy said, a Star Wars movie is three years of preproduction, three months of principal photography, and three years of postproduction. Movie directors now are more like animation directors - they storyboard, they plan, they previsualize, they have a full previz version created, and only then do they get the green light for full production. Upper management gets to see all this work, so there's more interference from above.
Scoring's changed, you can simulate a whole orchestra right there in your laptop long before committing to hiring an actual one. Or you can do any of the many things that has changed music since samplers started becoming affordable in the eighties. Also editing's easier.
Acting's changed, what used to always involve getting together in the same place with everyone else in a scene can now just involve hanging out on a green screen stage, pretending that a crude puppet standin is the other person in the scene. Or you might be wearing a motion capture rig that'll be used as the basis for a photoreal animated character who'll end up being composited into the shot over you.
Animation's changed, now you're as much a technician as an artist, you may be expected to pick up a new software package for a new production. Personally I left the animation industry in part because it looked like all my future gigs were likely to be on a software package I kinda loathed.
Directing's changed, you need to be aware of all these possibilites, maybe you decide to not use most of them, but if you do, you get to talk with the people who know them in more detail and figure out how to use all this power.