While the Berlinale celebrated film events like their 2018 opening film Isle of Dogs, technicians and producers at nearby Studio Babelsberg are tinkering with innovations such as walk-in movies.
If the film industry is a “dream factory,” Michael Düwel is something like a factory floor manager. He is managing director of the Art Department at Babelsberg Studios. In twenty studios on 25,000 square metres, whatever directors and their set designers come up with is realized.
Whether The Grand Budapest Hotel, Monuments Men or The Hunger Games, Babelsberg Studios are involved in most major movie productions.
Germany is still an expensive production country for films so there are always calculations involved in what is built and what is easier to animate. So Düwel and his 50 staff digitize their own productions. In the 3D laboratory next door, a giant robot arm and several 3D printers stand next to trowels, spatulas and knives. All of it makes new fantasy worlds and many more orders possible – even from companies that have nothing to do with films. For instance, the crew in Potsdam are now also printing elephant heads for malls in Dubai. “In five years, Potsdam will no longer just be a film location, but an international technology site,” says Andrea Peters, Acting Director of MediaTech Hubs Potsdam, a consortium of 30 companies, research institutes and corporations. It is part of an initiative by the Federal Ministry of Economics, which has selected twelve German cities to become such digital hubs.
Potsdam wants to become home to the future of media technology – and of film.
But what might it look like, this future of film? We get an inkling in Babelsberg where we meet Daniel von Braun in the rooms of Baby Giant Hollyberg, an animation and virtual reality studio. Here, everything is produced that cannot be filmed. “For example, we blow up the White House or torch the Reichstag,” says Braun. But there are also people who specialize in animating natural movements such as realistic hair or the flow of water.
But there are still limits. “Animating faces is extremely difficult,” says Braun. The more real it needs to look, the more expensive it gets. At the same time, however, broadcasters have less and less money due to declining ad revenue. The entire market is in the process of rearranging itself. Braun’s studio therefore increasingly relies on its own productions and on “edutainment.” For example, children can use virtual reality glasses to travel with animated companions inside the body instead of sitting in front of books and blackboards.
“The great thing about Virtual Reality is that there are not any storytelling rules yet,” says Braun, “we can invent them.” Movies in which the viewer can move around don’t have one storyline, but dozens to thousands of them depending on which character you look at, where you go or what you ask.
Ernst Feiler, Technical Director at Ufa, one of the oldest European film production companies, knows where this all might lead.
For him, the logical next stage in the development of movies is the “volumetric film.” This means that scenes are shot by cameras built all around; so many that afterwards there is a complete three-dimensional image of the scenes. “The difference to 360-degree shots is that you can move freely in the scenery,” says Feiler.
Ufa has already developed a walk-in film together with Microsoft and the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin, where viewers with VR glasses can walk around the actors and watch them from every angle. But there is still a long way to go before these technologies move into feature films. “We’ll probably see something like this in advertising first,” says Feiler. “For example, I could virtually stand face to face with Manuel Neuer at the Adidas store.” This offers closeness and that will someday also ensure its success in wider films.
“The closer we get to perceptions in everyday life, the more emotions we can convey.” And that is, after all, what movies are all about.
abridged and translated with permission; by Hendrik Lehmann, Der Tagesspiegel, 17 February 2018
