The
annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) doesn’t
often generate a notable quote. Then again, last April’s conclave in Las
Vegas was the occasion for a notable event — the surprise appearance of
the legendarily reclusive filmmaker George Lucas at a Sony press conference.
Talking about his recent use of high-definition video equipment to shoot parts
of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace as well as all of the
upcoming Episode II, Lucas remarked — in front of me and hundreds of other
reporters and Sony personnel, which helped ensure that he’d be widely quoted
— “I will never, ever make another film, on film.”
While I had already known that Lucas was intimately involved in the development
and refinement of Sony’s premier high-definition camcorder, the HDW-F900
(shown at right), I had no idea that he, of all people, had so completely come
around to embracing digital video. Coming from a man who learned his craft cutting
and gluing together bits of celluloid — just like all of us above a certain
age who’ve taken filmmaking courses — his statement is a milestone
in the triumphant advance of digital media against the bourgeois rear-guard
forces of analog systems.
