A Deal with the Devil

Ted Schilowitz made a name for himself - and for the Red Digital Cinema camera company - by thinking outside the box and leading a rebellion in the industry. Now he is back, leading the charge again, this time with a supercomputing strategy that is driving what he believes will be a revolutionary way to present films.

It's a lot to digest all at once. But welcome to Schilowitz's world.

First, a little history. Last year he left Red with plans to take some time off before launching into something new and exciting. Two days later, he found himself at Twentieth Century Fox with the title of Futurist. That led him to Barco, where he is sharing his expertise as Cinema-Vangelist. Moreover, he joined supercomputer company SilverDraft and helped launch The Devil & Demon Strategy brand, serving as president. Now, to tie it together: Barco is exploring something it calls Escape, which changes the cinema experience by using additional wraparound screens (and its projectors) to immerse viewers in the content. Fox is exploring content for this new format. And, Devil & Demon supercomputers are part of this story, rendering (in a fraction of the time of a normal renderfarm) one of the key pieces of content that Fox showed off in the Escape format - for the first time at the recent CinemaCon in Las Vegas, with an encore presentation during NAB.

Here, Schilowitz discusses his new roles and visions with CGW Chief Editor Karen Moltenbrey.

You had a busy week at CinemaCon.

I did. We just launched a new cinema-of-the-future concept that I have been working on in secret with Barco for about six months now, and the news just blew up. It has a lot more pixels and information that requires a lot more computing power and graphics power than a traditional motion picture.

My role at Fox is about driving the future, and I am responsible for helping them look at next-generation cinema.[To this end] Fox said it is looking at creating scenes of a new movie, called Maze Runner, in the Escape format and showing it at the Zanuck Theater on the lot at Fox and to movie-going audiences worldwide in theaters equipped with the Barco Escape setup. Fox has shown a real commitment to this by creating one scene from Maze Runner, directed by Wes Ball, as well as Wes' next project now in development at Fox called Ruin. Both were shown to CinemaCon audiences and will be shown at NAB on Monday night.

How did you get from taking a break to all this?

The idea was to retire and relax a bit after driving so hard for seven years as one of the guys who helped create the camera and develop it, and put Red on the map. But, that [break] lasted for just two days. The president of feature-film postproduction at Twentieth Century Fox called and said, Your rest is over. It's now time to come play with us.' I was really surprised. I had no idea what I was going to do after I left Red other than take the time to see what might be around the corner for me. But things happened really fast. I got involved with Amy [Gile, CEO and founder of SilverDraft] and came up with the Devil & Demon idea. And then I got involved with Barco on its secret project. Now I am helping to define the future of all kinds of media-related opportunities.

How did you get involved with SilverDraft?

I was introduced by a mutual friend, a very future-thinking kind of guy. They had this amazing supercomputer technology for the VFX and film industry that fits on wheels and was called the SilverDraft Rig. It's basically a truck with a supercomputer inside. We have since rebranded it The Devil's Playground, and launched The Devil & Demon Strategy. Just recently, Fox used The Devil's Playground for the new Barco movie concept.

What attracted you to SilverDraft?

The technology and the spirit. They are in the early stages of the company, and I felt there was really something going on there, that this was some incredibly powerful technology and they needed someone to help define the strategy around it. It was similar to what I did at Red: taking some extremely powerful technology that had the potential to take the world by storm and change the rules, and crafting a story that makes sense to people. Even though many think of Red as a camera company, it is really a computer company because the camera itself is actually a computer. Everything we do on the Red side is all a big data [exercise] - shooting data, loading the data into the computer. Every single step of our creative motion-picture process today is visual computing; all the steps are digital, and the computers work in different formats. So, this was a logical next step for me, to tie what I knew from Red on the camera computing side and apply that to the computing part of what people needed on the back end after they shot stuff and had to render the very high-res material. They needed a better toolset than typical desktop computers.

SilverDraft was born from some pretty high-level research?

Amy's idea for a mobile digital and visualization system led her to Virginia Tech's Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, one of the supercomputer industry's leading experts. His underling technology fills our supercomputer logic, making our machines faster and more powerful than any regular computer.

When did the company launch?

SilverDraft has been around for a few years, but we relaunched it with the Devil & Demon Strategy a few weeks after I joined last fall.

What is your vision for Devil & Demon?

Computer companies need to be more than compute companies if they are going to strike a nerve and move a needle in our creative industries. The work that needs to be done in our industry is very heavy and computationally and graphically intensive. The idea of trying to network together desktop computers and jack them up with components necessary to get the job done doesnt really g

LINK:	http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/In-Focus/2014/A-Deal-with-the-Devil.as...
	See more stories from cwg

Most recent headlines