Follow HDS and Visual Effects Studio Customers at SIGGRAPH
by Jeff Greenwald on Aug 2, 2012
When I look at 2012 and reflect on the top 10 grossing movies worldwide, I also contrast their gross ticket receipts during their opening weekend, it is clear that a BIG weekend that has great weather, positive industry buzz, good critical acclaim, and an interesting plot contributes mightily to a profitable return on an increasingly bigger and bigger investment by the studios.
Here are the top 10 as of August 2, 2012:
Movie Studio Total gross/screens Opening/screens Open
|
1 |
Marvel’s The Avengers | BV |
$615,996,809 |
4,349 |
$207,438,708 |
4,349 |
||
|
2 |
The Hunger Games | LGF |
$406,079,037 |
4,137 |
$152,535,747 |
4,137 |
||
|
3 |
The Dark Knight Rises | WB |
$304,045,972 |
4,404 |
$160,887,295 |
4,404 |
||
|
4 |
The Amazing Spider-Man | Sony |
$244,281,030 |
4,318 |
$62,004,688 |
4,318 |
||
|
5 |
Brave | BV |
$218,894,314 |
4,164 |
$66,323,594 |
4,164 |
||
|
6 |
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax | Uni. |
$214,030,500 |
3,769 |
$70,217,070 |
3,729 |
||
|
7 |
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted | P/DW |
$209,903,246 |
4,263 |
$60,316,738 |
4,258 |
||
|
8 |
Ted | Uni. |
$195,855,985 |
3,303 |
$54,415,205 |
3,239 |
||
|
9 |
MIB 3 | Sony |
$175,842,488 |
4,248 |
$54,592,779 |
4,248 |
||
|
10 |
Snow White and the Huntsman | Uni. |
$153,387,395 |
3,777 |
$56,217,700 |
3,773 |
What is clear to me when I look at this list however, is that all of these movies have employed a significant amount of VFX, animation, and post-production work to help intensify, enhance, and build the exact reality for the audience, as requested by the film’s director. Simply taking a camera, shooting a scene, editing out the retakes and slapping together files, has been relegated today to YouTube, Sundance Film festival, and maybe amateur Blair Witch projects.
Today, post production, lighting, color enhancing, 3D conversion, HD camera technologies, which includes animated characters (Ted, Lorax, etc), all contribute to the world that we all seek when we “escape” to the movies. There will still be a place for dramas and reality TV but Hollywood has honed the art of developing artificial reality that scares, entertains, and delights. HDS is proud to have studio customers who worked on 7 of these top 10 films.
This week (August 7-9), HDS will exhibit at SIGGRAPH at the Los Angeles Convention Center where 25,000 artists and studio heads will attend. HDS technologies enable our media and entertainment customers to be creative with compute and storage infrastructures that are highly scalable, available, reliable, and deliver faster file renders, transcoded videos, and films that are quickly broadcast over cable, the Internet, and traditional TV airways. Five HDS customer studios (Arc Productions, Lux VFX, newbreed Studio, Rainmaker, and Tippett Studio) will highlight their 2012 videos projects in HDS booth #622.
We hope you can join us, but if you can’t, I will blog about highlights throughout the show. Talk to you soon.
