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Apr 27, 2008
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Academy Wields Influence Over Digital
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by David S. Cohen, Variety
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences hasn't lacked for influence over the years. Simply bestowing the Oscars gives it clout.
Mainly, however, the Academy's function has been, well, academic: rewarding excellence, encouraging scholarship and preserving the history of cinema.
Yet recently, the Academy has acquired a level of influence on the future direction of the biz unlike any the Acad has had in some 75 years.
And it is doing so through one of its least-publicized arms: The Science and Technology Council.
The Council's first product was its report on the costs and difficulties of digital archiving, "The Digital Dilemma" (Variety, April 20, 2007). It has also been working on developing recommendations for an "Image Interchange Format" that would ensure digital images look consistent as they're passed from place to place.
The Sci-Tech Council has become one of the rare neutral bodies in the industry, which can move forward issues like the digital conversion of Hollywood without having to worry about partisan business interests.
Just 5 years old, the Council has a roster that reads like a who's who of movie technologists, all of whom serve gratis. Some of its activities are well within the Acad's familiar functions, such as archiving and public programs, but it also serves as a forum for discussion and research on emerging technical issues.
Council director Andrew Maltz says the org has evolved into one that's affecting the direction the industry is taking.
Chris deFaria, executive vice president of Digital Production, Animation & Visual Effects at Warner Bros. Pictures, speaks for many in the biz when he calls the Council's work "wildly appropriate."
The Council brings together many of the best technical minds in the industry to find solutions to a next generation of problems.
Though few remember the Academy serving such a role, several Academy bodies helped the industry make the transition to sound, training some 900 studio engineers and technicians and publishing a popular how-to textbook on the subject.Ray Feeney, prexy and founder of RFX and one of the industry's leading technologists, says "We view -- at least I personally view -- the conversion to digital as significant an upheaval in the industry as the invention of sound or the addition of color to motion pictures." After at least 50 years of tech stability, he says, "It's the Wild West all over again."
While some people view the digital future as a time of crisis, Feeney calls it "an exciting time of wonder," and says the Acad is taking a leadership role in guiding the industry "toward generally beneficial mechanisms for getting through this period of upheaval."
Maltz credits some of the industry's leading technologists, like Feeney, Jon Erland, the late Dick Stump, Richard Edlund, David English and Don Rogers -- who began petitioning the Acad's board to create a new tech council, with recognizing the need early on for such a politically neutral, technologically forward-thinking body.
"Their careers are based on looking out and identifying which way things are going," Maltz says.
Academy president Sid calls the Council's work a comfortable role for the Academy.
"The nonpolitical, nonpartisan role of uncovering technical issues and presenting them as the voice to the industry, not of the industry ... and in the case of the digital archival work, to other industries" is an important one, Ganis says.
Feeney credits some of the Council's success to the fact that it has not asked movie companies to open their coffers to support it.
Click www.variety.com for the complete story.
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