Q&A: Academy Award-winner Jon Landau on Multiverse, Film, and Virtual Worlds

Jon Landau, who won an Academy Award for his role as producer on Titanic, took the stage on Thursday at the Virtual Worlds Expo to talk Multiverse Executive Producer Corey Bridges about the evolution of virtual worlds and some of the ways they're enabling new production tools in film. I sat down afterward with Landau to talk a little more about the tools he's using and where he thinks virtual worlds are going. I also spoke with Bridges about the raft of big announcements Multiverse made, but that's a Q&A for a slightly later time.

Virtual Worlds News: What are you doing with Multiverse?

Jon Landau: I’m on the advisory board. When we heard about this idea several years ago, I felt there was a potential in the area of virtual worlds and that the approach that Corey Bill and the team were bringing to the space was very unique and very exciting. That’s what Jim and I saw, the idea that Corey talks about of making it open source that every man can program and no longer do you need to go through years and years and millions and millions of dollars of development that were only justified if you had a big business plan behind it. This allows the exploration of a new medium in an exciting way.

I think showcased by their Times Square space, their ability to get that level of visual quality is even greater than we thought it would be at this stage. The idea of putting tools into everybody’s hand—as we look around and see the stuff that happened on the Internet with music sharing and everything and the idea that the community wants to share things, I think Multiverse is giving the individual the ability to share virtual worlds and virtual experiences in a way that can include the GEMS I was talking about, that it can include gaming, which not every virtual space can do, that it can include education, which not every virtual space can do, that it can include monetization, that it can include socialization in a way that’s not just text-based, but really community and experiential based.

VWN: You mentioned in your keynote that you really enjoy the extra layer that social networks like Facebook offer for community and keeping in touch. Have you played around with the Multiverse app yet?

JL:  I have not yet, but I look forward to it. Corey’s shown me some of the demos and I think it’s really great. The idea—I was in China not too long ago, and I sent blogs home every day to people in my office. Coincidentally, two women in my office were reading one at the same time in a common space and they got  to the ending and both burst out laughing at the same time. That was by coincidence.

The idea of being able to do that on purpose,  through a shared experience where they both go into my blog through Places and can read it at the same time and experience simultaneously what I wanted to share with them, that’s very exciting.

VWN: You were also talking about using virtual world tools as a way to scope out sets.

JL: Absolutely. We would build virtual worlds of sets that were not ever going to be used virtually. That were physical sets. But we were able to explore those worlds, to see what worked, to see how big certain things needed to be, where walls could be by deciding on camera placement.

VWN: When you say “virtual world sets,” I was curious, is it something that’s in a virtual world environment like Multiverse or is it more of a 3D single-user environment.

JL: At the end of the day, our movie’s going to be no different from Middle Earth or Skull Island or New York for Transformers. It’s a photographically realistic world where we’re using digital technology to create as much as we need to to create a world a with the breadth and scope that we want.

VWN: I just mean, for the technology you’re using, and you say you’re sending James Cameron in with a virtual camera to scope all these things out and he’s rehearsing with virtual actors, are they actually actors using avatars? How does that all work?

JL: It’s not something I want to get into right now. We’re saving those types of stories. We’ll follow up a year from now and I’ll tell you about it. It’s everywhere you can imagine it going.

VWN: It seems almost like 3D storyboarding.

JL: I’ll keep it generic and say that I think virtual worlds give you the opportunity to do real-time, 3D storyboarding. Storyboarding is traditionally a panel-by-panel process that can’t really give you the full sense of the experience while virtual worlds enable you to go live and breathe in those worlds with motion.

VWN: You were also talking about the need for convergence and sharing assets with Ubisoft. I’m more in this space than in gaming, but it seems like once you’re starting to use those 3D worlds…

JL: If you’ve catalogued them and if you’ve built a database with them, it’s all shareable. It’s like you don’t have to write a document in Word for someone to open it up in another “word” application. You save it in a format that anyone can open up the text. There are certain things you lose along the way, but virtual worlds work in the same way. Whether you work in StudioMax or Maya or Motion Builder or SketchUp, there’s a way to create a shareable object that these other files can open up and use—and not just look, but use!

VWN: That’s on the tech side, but you were also talking about the need to factor in the “theme” or emotional side. Does this change the way you approach that?

JL: It does. It changes the way we’re approaching movies and stories! And this goes back to which comes first the chicken or the egg? I think we need to create the right themes in the stories we’re setting out to tell and as people create virtual worlds, they need to think about what they want those worlds to really represent and what is the full experience—not just the initial experience of “Oh, it’s about playing a baseball game or it’s about killing orcs,” but what about what are you going to get out of it in the end. That’s why people are going to go back to them.

VWN: I’m just curious, is there anything you can point to as you’ve been going through Avatar and doing the development of the game, and it’s changing the way you approach it? I was talking to the guys at Disney and they were saying with Pixar that Moore’s Law is one of the most important things. It affects them on a day-to-day basis.

JL: I think it’s given us much more interactivity with the video game developers than we ever would have.  I think they would have gone off into their holes and done whatever they would have done, but I think it has opened up that dialogue. Technology has also made it so we could easily communicate with the Montreal studios through a collaborative virtual workspace and things like that.

VWN: To wrap it up with an open-ended question: as you’re going through and working with Multiverse and exploring virtual worlds, is there a single big point that you see it changing the film industry, that you can point to and say, “this is the biggest effect we’re going to have”?

JL: I don’t know that virtual worlds are going to change the film industry. Finding a way to collaborate the way between the two mediums is going to change the way the two mediums interact. Just like I don’t think television has changed film and I don’t think the Internet changed film, I think it provides opportunity. We’re still making the same movies: It’s how we go out there and market those movies, how we go out there and exploit those movies, how we go out there and expand on those worlds.

If it was going to happen in one way, I think it’s going to be the demand by the public for richer and fuller experiences. As you create movies, you want movies that have the opportunity to fill worlds that are outside of the film. Just generally speaking because I think the audience is going to want them.

VWN: Instead of asking, “what’s the merchandising opportunity,” ask, “what’s the virtual world opportunity?”

JL: That’s right. It’s about expanding the role of the IP, the intellectual property. How do we expand that? How do we express that? How do we make that available? And not just exploit that. I think merchandise is the exploitation of that, and virtual worlds give you the opportunity to expand that.