January 7, 1999

If Only DeMille Had Owned a Desktop

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New Low-Cost Cameras and Software Put Filmmaking Within Reach of Digital Auteurs

By MICHEL MARRIOTT

he camera glides in on a tableau: Jesus and His apostles gathered solemnly at a long table, each frozen in painterly poses familiar from "The Last Supper." Then Jesus suddenly comes to life, and in a flurry of special effects that owes more to Dali than da Vinci, he miraculously provides a banquet of breads, crackers and grapes from thin air and transforms water into a blood-red wine cooler called New Testament. Along the way, he transforms himself into a robed pitch man for the new bottled beverage.

	IMAGINATION MEETS TECHNOLOGY - A recent wave of digital movies includes "New Testament," by Swankytown; short 3-D versions of "Xena: Warrior Princess," and "The Cruise," a documentary that stars Timothy (Speed) Levitch.

This scene was not created by a major Hollywood studio or a high-priced special effects company like Industrial Light and Magic. Instead, this sequence, part of a five-minute, award-winning parody of American advertising excess called "New Testament," is the work of a two-person production house called Swankytown.

Thanks to a tide of new digital technology for filmmakers, Swankytown's founders say, they were able to complete the entire project with an ordinary 16-millimeter camera, two Power Macs and some off-the-shelf software at a cost of $1,700.

There's nothing new these days about digital technology's marriage with the movies. Moviegoers have been getting an eyeful of digital wonders on the big screen, from "Titanic" to "A Bug's Life." But those displays of digital wizardry were managed by filmmakers with tens of millions of dollars at their disposal for the tedious tasks involved. The flip side of the digital revolution, one that is just starting to make its presence felt, is the democratizing effect that cheaper and easier-to-use technology is having on control over the moving image.

In living rooms, basements and makeshift studios, people are taking advantage of powerful home computers stuffed with extra RAM and pumped up with gigabytes of hard drive memory to add sound and motion to digital images. Some are transferring film to video, where images, once digitized, can be cut with editing software and enhanced with easy-to-use animation programs. Others use digital video camcorders -- small, relatively inexpensive cameras that can load their already digitized images onto computer hard drives -- to breathe cinematic life into what had once flickered only in their imaginations, then transfer the results to film. Some movie makers have given up film altogether, choosing instead to shoot, edit and, in some cases, distribute their work digitally.

Digital technology has led to a new, decentralized approach to making movies: desktop filmmaking.

Computer technology can transform a process that has been mostly mechanical and chemical, labor-intensive and very expensive into a mostly electronic process. So cinematic visions can now be realized by manipulating digital code, lines of ones and zeros.

"A couple of years ago, with the same talent we have now, we didn't have these kinds of tools available to us," said Philip Pelletier, who with his partner, Verne Lindner, created Swankytown Productions in Hollywood in 1997. "Back then, 'New Testament' would have been impossible." Pelletier, a composer by training, and Ms. Lindner, an illustrator who taught herself computer animation and special effects, estimate that with traditional filming, editing and special effects techniques, their movie would have cost closer to $400,000.

Pelletier said he had decided to make this particularly irreverent film because he wanted to raise an issue: "Is everything up for sale?" So far, Pelletier said, "New Testament" has drawn little protest.

It was recently shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in a program that examined alternative depictions of Jesus in media. And it was a winner at numerous film festivals last year, including the New York Funny Shorts Fest. It has brought Swankytown loads of work and a Hollywood agent.

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"New Testament," which continues to be seen at film festivals, is also on the Internet (www.swankytown.com). Other digitally produced independent films are being shown on television and in theaters.

Rodney Ascher and Michael Garon, who bill themselves as Rodney and Syd, made "Somebody Goofed" by amassing images taken from drawings, magazines, encyclopedias, record covers and personal photographs. The result, done with After Effects software on a home computer, is a surreal blending of comic-strip-like characters moving like line-drawn shadow puppets against a fluid, filmed backdrop of actual places and people. The movie had its premiere in 1997 at the D. FILM Digital Film Festival. Ascher and Garon have since been asked to make high-tech film shorts for NBC's "Saturday Night Live."

More films made either fully or in part with low-cost digital technology are also finding their way to theaters. "The Cruise," a biting documentary about a tour bus guide in New York, was shot entirely in low-budget but high-resolution digital video by the director, Bennett Miller. The 76-minute feature earned a theatrical release last fall. Mark Edgington shot the haunting "Anna in the Sky" on 16-millimeter film but, faced with budget problems, transferred his movie to video and edited it on his home computer, using Adobe Premiere software. When he finished, he had developed a blueprint for how 16-millimeter film should be cut, saving time and money.

"The filmmaker of the future," said Chris Gore, publisher of Film Threat Weekly, a magazine that covers underground filmmaking, "is the person holding a computer mouse."

Struggling filmmakers once talked about film stock and developing costs. Now they excitedly discuss the finer points of DCR-PC1 digital video cameras from Sony or Pandemonium 2.8 from Xaos Tools or exchange insights into morphing and creating convincing shadow passes on their Macintosh computers. "What is exciting about it is that a lot of the software to produce these effects can be literally bought off the shelf," said Gore, noting that many of the programs cost $400 to $2,000.

	A TASTE OF SATIRE -- "New Testament," a low-budget movie produced with digital technology, uses special effects to show Jesus miraculously producing a banquet of breads and grapes -- and promoting a red wine cooler called New Testament.

Small-budget productions can loom large on screen by using digital technology to drop vast cityscapes into the background, populate ancient battlefields with thousands of soldiers in period costumes, sweeten a night scene with shooting stars or add an autumnal sunset. And some say newer digital camcorders are beginning to capture some of the richness and depth that is the hallmark of film (especially when the camcorder images are transferred to film).

Devin Crowley, a 31-year-old filmmaker with a master's degree in film direction from Columbia University, said buying a Sony DCR-VX1000 digital camcorder for $3,300 (the same kind Miller used to make "The Cruise") had been a breakthrough in realizing his project, which is tentatively titled "Show Me the Aliens" and is a full-length send-up of people who believe that they have been abducted by aliens from outer space. The chief advantages of digital video, Crowley said, are a deeper and sharper image -- much closer to film than standard analog video -- and its low cost. For example, it cost Crowley about $13 to shoot an hour's worth of tape, which does not have to be processed, and $650 to purchase and develop 15 minutes of 16-millimeter film, which he used in a small portion of the project. Crowley said he could also afford to let two video cameras run (he borrowed a second one) while he and his actors improvised a scene. He said that "would be insane" with a film camera, which cranks away money as it runs.

Standard videotape is also a very unstable medium to edit, many filmmakers say; it rapidly degrades with each edit. Digitized video does not. After it is shot, Crowley's footage will be transferred to digital tape of higher quality for editing with Avid software.

Crowley, like many digital filmmakers, is making movies first and then shopping them around to distributors and investors in the hope of having them put on film for theater releases.

"The great thing is that you don't have to be rich or fortunate or have great connections to have a fully finished project," Crowley said. If his film does not find a distributor, he added, he will try to raise the money to transfer it to 35-millimeter film. That would require at least $100,000.

Arthur Jafa, a longtime cinematographer who likes to call himself a "visual artist," said he had been working on a movie shot with a digital video camera. He also agrees that digital's lower production costs are opening up the medium. "The problem with the American cinema essentially is that it is cost-prohibitive for people to participate in it," said Jafa, who was the cinematographer for the widely acclaimed independent film "Daughters of the Dust." With the significantly lowered cost of digital technology, he said, comes "room to play, and with room to play comes room to innovate."

Some say newer digital camcorders are beginning to capture some of the richness and depth that is the hallmark of film.

The technology is making it possible for filmmakers to operate more like painters and other artists, first producing their works and then presenting them to the marketplaces of the world. In Hollywood, filmmakers must first present their ideas and then try to secure financing.

Digital technology means another change as well. "You would own your film," Jafa said. "Very few in Hollywood ever do."

Bart Cheever, the executive producer and co-founder of the D. FILM Digital Film Festival, a five-year-old global showcase of films made with digital technology, said computers were opening up possibilities. "A lot of new stories are going to be told," he said, "and new perspectives are going to be seen."

Increasingly, black and Hispanic filmmakers in particular are looking at computers and software as an alternative means of producing their work. Stanley Nelson, a black filmmaker whose documentary about black journalists, "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords," is to be broadcast next month on PBS, said he had used film for interviews and digital video for documents like newspapers and photographs. He said he planned to do more with digital.

"This technology offers a real opportunity for filmmakers who currently have been very marginalized by the industry to create their own footholds in cinema," said Kay Shaw, founder and owner of Amber Images, a company based in New York that distributes, markets and promotes films primarily by blacks, Hispanics and American Indians.

More new filmmakers should consider using emerging technologies while they are in their infancy, she said, "instead of tagging along after it has all been monopolized and controlled."

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