Lucas and Cameron Plot Together

Last week in Las Vegas Empire Online cornered a couple of A-list directors at an industry convention, to talk about how new developements in film technology will impact on filmgoers over the next few years. First up was director James Cameron who has devised a portable camera technology which enables the capture of high definition (HD) images in 3D. Although he has yet to shoot a project in HD, Cameron is investigating several options for the format, including a proposed water-based film project dubbed Titanic 2. "One of the great advantages of HD which hasn't really been thought about is the size of equipment and its relation to the scene you're shooting,' Cameron told us. Traditional film technology in which the film reel has to be physically adjacent to the lens is 'an ancient system... There will be much more flexibility and fluidity of movement because the physical size of the camera is so small.' Tests are planned for the camera to be placed in a submersible to depths of 3,000 meters and Cameron is also talking to NASA and the Russian Space Agency about shooting from space. Another digital entrepreneur, George Lucas, was also in Las Vegas to throw his weight behind digital production. Episode II, currently in post-production, has been shot entirely digitally. 'At this point we've not used any film elements at all,' said Lucas, 'including those for the model shots we are completing now. I think Episode II will look better in terms of the technical quality of the image than Episode I which I think looked as good if not better than anything I've ever done before.' Lucas claims to even edit in three dimensions. 'We cut levels of elements together - different backgrounds, characters of effects together,' he says. 'We could be dealing with as many as twenty per frame. We're constantly cutting people out, exchanging pairs of eyes or deleting a blink. If someone moves their head at the wrong time we can change that or extend a moment in time by seven extra frames.'