03
|
Thursday, August 05, 1999 - More on Brilliant Digital Entertainment (A Letter) |
|
|
|
I received the following letter with more information about Brilliant Digital Entertainment: I have also been following Multipath Movies. Since your article on Multipath Movies included Xena and Ace Ventura, I have to guess you haven't been to their site lately. Superman is now available as a preview on their site and it is simply AMAZING. The download is 1.2 meg and the 3D Movie runs almost 5 minutes. The faces are very very realistic. After viewing the preview, do a preview of Lex Luthor. This stuff is state of the art for the Internet. After seeing this, I had to buy the movie which sells for $14.99 at CompUSA. (Sounds a little high, but you can unlock any other movie (Xena, Ace, Popeye, Nightmare) on the CD from $3.00 to $5.00 and it comes with a Nightmare Series Movie Free) Another amazing feature they have, is that they now SELL their toolkit. Thats right, in the developer section, they have demos and a download of their Internet Tool that transforms 3D Studio Max files into Internet Movies. Most of their movies are 200K..... In addition they are going to have their Nightmare series of titles on FOX KIDS [website] for free starting in Sept. Watch for it. And finally, all the movies are going to DVD before Christmas. Kelly Fansler
[Actually, I had been to there web site and seen Superman, which is very good, but I wanted to review the entire line of stuff, and I didn't want to mislead anyone that all of their stuff uses smooth skinning. This brings up another topic, which is how well this stuff will transition to linear media. Lots of people have had the idea of repurposing their interactive stuff for linear media (and vice versa) and it never works out. At Virgin, we did lots of licensed titles and we generally redeveloped almost all of the art. One experiment I did with Floops was to make a video tape of all the episodes for the kids to watch as we got ready for bed. It worked fine for them because they were already used to the interactive version and young kids love repetition. But I tried it out on a couple of adult friends who had NOT seen Floops on the Web and only saw the video tape. They were unimpressed! Watching Floops on TV caused them to naturally compare it to regular TV cartoons and they found it wanting. So I think some extra work will be involved in linearizing the interactive stuff. The BDE material is already reasonably linear and has much higher production values than Floops, so the jump won't be so big, but it's still something they should test market and tune, IMHO. And thanks to Kelly for his letter. -- Stephen ] [But wait! There's more. Kelly followed up with this: As far as the transition from Interactive to linear, they have already made the jump to TV. Gravity Angels has been converted to video and sold to TV stations across seas. They are fully rendering the content prior to moving it to video and DVD. The DVD may be interactive. From what I have read, you will use your TV remote to make choices. Contact Brilliant Digital for more information on whether this is true or not. Kelly <I think it's very smart to use the interactive capabilities of the DVD player, because it forces you to look at the content in a different way, just as one does when watching Floops on the web rather than video tape. Hopefully Jed Fisher will let me know what's going on with all this. -- Stephen> ] |
Back to 'Random Blts' Table of Contents
Back to Above the Garage Productions