Tech firms in debt to Star Wars
After filming the first Star Wars film with special effects far from special, George Lucas spent millions to develop a complete digital editing system to populate his sequels with armies of X-wing fighters and Gungan warriors. Then, he virtually gave it away.
"We were 10 years ahead of the commercial reality," said Bob Doris, co-general manager of Lucas' computer division during the mid-1980s. "He inspired some very worthwhile ventures ... but the innovations weren't close to paying for themselves."
So Lucas sold many of his technologies cheaply - technologies that would later appear in home stereos, mobile phones, medical imaging devices and virtually every Hollywood studio, driving billion-dollar companies and employing thousands of people.
Apple Computer chief executive Steve Jobs paid $US10 million ($A13.05 million) for the team that became Pixar, and the company went on to make $US3 billion at the box office.
And so it goes with Lucas, who was famous for saying "I'm not a venture capitalist."
Lucas recognised the absurdity of his situation as he made the first Star Wars film. There, he was trying to tell a futuristic story about intergalactic revolution, space travel and androids, and Hollywood was stuck using 50-year-old film-making techniques.
To create space ships or alien creatures, his artists built small models and hoped for audiences with vivid imaginations. The first "Death Star" was made out of plastic.
Lucas aspired to something much more grand, and after the first film was released in 1977, he gathered a small group of computer artists and told them to spare no expense in creating a system that would include software capable of rendering 3D images.
First, the computer team created "EditDroid," the first digital-editing system. It allowed films to be transferred to computer disks so editors would not have to fiddle with cumbersome film reels. Lucas sold that technology to Avid Technology, which went on to sell the forerunner of modern film-editing bays.
Then he sold the computer division - later to become Pixar - to Jobs in 1986, arguably in one of the worst deals in film history.
Using talent and technology that Lucas had let go, Pixar developed RenderMan, the software that has since transformed the film industry by infusing computer images with real-world qualities, such as shadows, glossy reflections, motion-blur and depth of field.
Emeryville-based Pixar used RenderMan in 1995 to release the first entirely computer-animated film, Toy Story, and then five more hits.
Other studios used RenderMan or software inspired by it to make the form-changing cyborg in Terminator 2, the massive waves in The Perfect Storm and even the computer-generated smoke and fire in the final instalment of the six-film Star Wars saga, Revenge of the Sith, which makes its debut on May 19.
In all, the software has helped studios win 33 of the past 35 Academy Awards for special-effects.
But Lucas - already financially secure because he owned the Star Wars franchise - had good reasons for unloading some of the technology. Most of the editing and production tools were so advanced that there was little market for them at the time.
Also, he wasn't motivated by profits - he just wanted to make better films, said Doris, who left with three other Lucas staffers in 1986 to form Sonic Solutions, which makes DVD-creation software.
In fact, dozens of groundbreaking technologies were initially developed at Lucasfilm's San Rafael headquarters, known as Skywalker Ranch.
"Half the technology companies here are spinoffs" of a Lucas' company, said Robert Huebener, a former LucasArts videogame developer who in 1998 founded a competing firm in nearby Redwood City.
Perhaps not half, but the list of companies that in one way or another got their start at Skywalker Ranch is long.
Besides the Lucasfilm divisions Industrial Light & Magic for special effects, Lucasfilm for film production, Skywalker Sound for audio post-production and LucasArts for video games, Lucas inspired Pixar, Avid and Sonic Solutions.
Other spinoffs include visual effects developer Visual Concept Entertainment, production studio Digital Domain and video game software companies BioWare and Nihilistic Software, to name a few.
Some of these companies found other applications for the technology developed at Skywalker Ranch.
THX, the theatre sound system developed in 1983 and rolled out to more than 2000 cinemas across the country, is now in car and home stereo systems. Sound effects designed by Skywalker Sound's Gary Rydstrom are available on Apple computers. Before Pixar became a powerhouse in animated film-making, the company sold computers that helped doctors create digital three-dimensional models.
Lucas may not have profited from this galaxy of businesses, but he earned lasting respect and gratitude from his fans as well as many in the film industry, said BZ Petroff, who oversees production at San Francisco's Wild Brain Inc. animation studio.
"Back in 1980s you'd have a director of photography on a crane performing incredibly complex and long camera moves going through these miniature sets," Petroff said. "Now, you have a 25-year-old getting the same shots on his computer."
Special effects had fallen out of favour in the 1970s when Lucas began the Star Wars saga, the filmmaker recalled as he promoted the final film in the series last week. Some studios had dismantled their special-effects departments entirely.
"I'm most proud," Lucas said, "of the fact that I was able to take special effects out of the cellar."
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