Lucasfilm Focuses on Star Wars Television

According to Variety, in his keynote talk at the annual Siggraph computer graphics conference and tradeshow Monday, George Lucas said the company would be more focused on TV, all but ruling out producing or financing movies for others to write and direct.

"My life's too short to become a film studio," he said.

Instead, filmmakers who want to work with Lucasfilm will be steered toward two projected TV series.

"Lucasfilm is going more into television, but it's not a vision I'm running, either as executive producer or by laying out the groundwork," said Lucas.

He confirmed that the company is already at work on two "Star Wars"-themed TV skeins.

"I'll never let go of 'Star Wars,' " he told a crowd of some 4,000 computer pros at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The first is a 3-D animated "Clone Wars" series that will be made at Lucas Animation's Singapore facility. He said he'll start scouring Asia for talent and try to build up 3-D animation there.

"It's also a way for me to get my foot into anime, which I like," he said.

With the live-action series, he said, "we're going do something that would normally cost ($20 million-$30 million) and try to do it for $1 million," citing "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" as one show where he was able to stretch his production budget.

He said he'll shoot the series on a Sony digital camera system that anyone can buy at an electronics store.

Lucas added, "Television is an easier medium to work in (than film). ... It's more fun, there's less pressure and it's a great medium to experiment in."

As for his personal plans, he said that while he has hundreds of ideas for projects, he expected to go into more esoteric filmmaking "that focuses on the visual side of things."

Lucas delivered a sanguine assessment of the state of digital cinema technology. Though he admitted to some frustration at the slow pace at which the industry has adopted digital tools and projection, "The real leap has been made," he said.

"Digital cinema is here. It's not like we're going to reinvent the wheel. It's been reinvented."

He sounded a nostalgic note as he talked about visiting Peter Jackson at Weta Digital, where Jackson is working on King Kong. "It was like the early days of ILM. They're down there working in this little closet, suffering and not even knowing it."

With its new digs at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio, ILM could hardly be further from those days.