Audio file: `The Digital Revolution: What to Expect from Film's Second Century'

The Commonwealth Club here in San Francisco organized a panel back in March called `The Digital Revolution,' featuring:

- Richard Chuang, co-founder of PDI/DreamWorks
- Jeff Fino, co-founder of Wild Brain (an animation studio)
- John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at ILM
- Stu Maschwitz, co-founder of The Orphanage

They talked about Pixar, `Bubble,' iTunes, DVDs, Robert Rodriguez, Bruce Willis, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, and indie movies like `Four Eyed Monsters' and `Radius.'

The audio is here (in RealAudio format, about an hour long).

Two quotes I especially liked...

Stu Maschwitz: "The democratization of tools is great, but everyone can buy a typewriter; not everyone can write the next great American novel. The most valuable asset and the most difficult thing to create is the thing you put in front of the camera, not the camera itself."

John Knoll on digital cinematography: "When three-strip Technicolor came up with an extremely different look, people got used to it. The same thing will happen with digital cinematography. As long as it looks good, people will accept it, even if it's not like what you saw 20 years ago."