Digital to move film to very different mass market
has been on the rise recently. It closed Monday at $20.83, up 5 cents, — based on the early buzz for Rise of the Guardians, a 3-D animated fantasy adventure about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and other legendary figures who team up to fight evil. The film is due in theaters on Nov. 21.
Also stoking the stock: a new longterm distribution deal with Fox and an announced slate of 12 films in the next four years — a level of productivity that would surpass that of any previous animation studio. “We’ve built our company up to be able to reach that,” Katzenberg, 61, said.
The studio executive toured his personal career path — touching on his involvement with animated films
“We can say to our storytellers ... if you can dream it, we’ve got somebody who’s going to figure out how to make it happen.”
Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation
such as Shrek and (during his time at Disney) The Lion King — as part of the 14th USA TODAY CEO Forum, this one in conjunction with Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, The Office of Student Affairs and The Student Association here last week.
With an audience of 300 in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium, and hundreds watching in overflow rooms, Katzenberg noted that he didn’t really attend college. He registered for his first semester at New York University but skipped midterms to witness the 1971 police strike.
His involvement in politics led to a job as “a gopher,” running errands for Paramount, where a producer witnessed his work ethic. “What I learned then ... is, give 110% of yourself at everything you do, (and) no matter what the assignment is that somebody gives you, exceed their expectations just by some little amount.”
Other tried-and-true tips that Katzenberg propped up with personal experiences: Don’t take “no” for an answer; believe in yourself; get into the stream. “What you want to try to do is head in the direction of something that interests you and excites you,” he said. “If it’s being a page at NBC, take it. It doesn’t matter. Get in the stream. Then exceed. Whatever job you have, exceed the expectations of those that are doing it. These things will lead you to it.”
Katzenberg sat for an hour-long interview with USA TODAY’s Mike
Snider, then took questions from students. “If I can somehow or another encourage a few kids out there today that their biggest dreams and future opportunities are out in our part of the world, it’s a successful visit,” he said. The following excerpts from the conversation are edited for space and clarity.
Q: How does DreamWorks Animation stay on the cutting edge and push the technological envelope?
A: We’re 2,400 people — the largest animation company in the world, and about 350 of the people who work there — we consider them all artists — are actually in what we call animation technology. Everything from physicists to software programmers, computer engineers. How to Train
Your Dragon director Dean DeBlois, as part of the story for dragon films he’s working on right now, has dragons that go underwater and can breathe fire underwater. Someone from animation technology is going to figure out how that works. And they will. That’s what’s great. We can say to our storytellers, there’s no limitation on your imagination. If you can dream it, we’ve got somebody who’s going to figure out how to make it happen.
Q: How has technology changed over the years?
A: An average animated movie has 130,000 frames. Each frame goes through 12 departments. And each frame can have as few as 10 iterations and as many as 100. If you do the math on that, it means, on average, most of our movies have between 3 billion and 4 billion iterations before there’s a final movie. I have no idea how that gets organized or managed. It seems a completely impossible notion.
Q: Does cloud technology help with that?
A: In 2001 for the first Shrek, we had 5 million hours to render out (process the animated graphics for that film). Today, on Rise of the Guardians, 11 years later, we have 75 million hours output a movie. It’s not possible for us (to process) on our own campus — although we are one of the largest private computer centers in the world today. We realized this seven (or) eight years ago and started to go to re- mote sites in Santa Fe (N.M.), and Las Vegas and rendered it in the cloud.
Q: DreamWorks recently signed a new distribution deal with Fox. What does this mean for DreamWorks in the future?
A: We had a partnership for seven years with Paramount. We’ve had 13 movies. Every single one is a hit. Our move to Fox is really about what I hope is the next chapter for DreamWorks, which is the opportunity for us to become more of a family-branded entertainment company that has spread out into new opportunities, new businesses, new platforms. News Corp. has both the platform for us to do that and the ambition to do that.
Q: How has 3-D fared in theaters, and what trend is it on?
A: It’s been a mixed bag. It kind of started at a pinnacle with the first movie we did, Monsters vs. Aliens, and later that year, 2009, Avatar. Unfortunately, there were people who came along and said, we can make a fast buck by making cheap crap. Very quickly thereafter, a bunch of bad movies came out, and it was really damaging. Today, slowly, I think with Ridley Scott or Ang Lee or Spielberg (or) Marty Scorsese, you have great filmmakers who are using it as a creative tool. That is its greatest promise.
Q: How has streaming of movies affected Hollywood?
A: Right now, we’re in this sort of period of transition into a digital world. I really do genuinely believe what will happen is that going to a movie theater is going to continue to migrate higher and higher, and to more of a premium experience, not unlike sports.
People are going to pay for what they watch by the inch. Everything will become available within a very short window after that theatrical experience. Sports learned that it didn’t matter, that these are not competitive experiences. People who want to go have a communal experience and want to be there in a big way. It’s not competing with somebody who wants to watch it on a BlackBerry.
Q: Pay by the inch? Please explain.
A: Here’s what I mean. Take a movie like Madagascar 3. About 150 million people pay us about $10 from beginning to end on the movie. Some people go to the movie theater, some buy a DVD, some get it from HBO, some from Netflix, some from Redbox. But you sort of take it through the whole course, (the) whole life of the movie is about 150 million people, and it’s about $10, on an average.
Ten years from now, two and a half billion people are going to pay us, on average, $1.50. Literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people for 65 cents will watch it on a smartphone in all parts of the world. Then you’ll pay $2 to watch it on your iPad. You’ll pay $5 to watch it on a big high-def flat-screen TV, and you’ll pay $15 to watch it in a premium movie theater, $25 to watch it in IMAX and $10 billion to watch it, in Richard Branson’s spaceship somewhere.
The one thing that the movie business has done, which is very different than music, is we have always made our product available to people in different shapes, different forms, different prices. You can own it, you can rent it, you can borrow it. Please don’t steal it. Digital will move us to a mass, mass, mass market, radically different from what we have today. All the stakeholders will change in terms of what their stakes are.