New company focuses on entertainment, education, fine art

Magic Box Productions, founded less than a year ago by a former NHK Broadcasting wunderkind, plans to create the context for some of today’s hottest buzzwords: digital high-definition television, virtual reality and interactive media.

Hirofumi Ito, now 38, produced and directed hundreds of programs for NHK, Japan’s public television network. More recently, he founded HD/CG New York, the first high-definition computer graphics production facility and an affiliate of NHK. (HD/CG’s first production, “Lost Animals,” recreated the form and movement of extinct animals and has won 12 international awards.)

Ito founded Magic Box in December 1991. Located in Beverly Hills, CA, the company defines itself as “a team of producers, artists and engineers … creating the next generation of digital media.” It is both a think tank and a production facility, with members of the company either developing new technologies on their own or fostering the development of them through alliances with other companies. It is funded by a single anonymous Japanese investor, who believes Magic Box can change the face of entertainment.

B-MOVIES, AND HOLLYWOOD’S KNOCKING

The company’s proximity to Hollywood is intentional, since the U.S. movie-making industry is one of its primary foci. And by all accounts the interest is reciprocal: Magic Box had visitors from Hollywood’s film community before its doors were even officially opened.

Much of the film work at Magic Box is still under wraps or in negotiation. But Sally Rosenthal, head of the interactive technologies division at Magic Box, tips her hand a bit. “I am bored with the way technology is used in films today,” she says. “Like Hirofumi, I prefer B-movies to mainstream movies. We all like bad films a lot. In fact, it’s fair to say that we are all enchanted with the idea of making bad films as well as special effects for mainstream films.”

Live action plus 3D. The first film that will list Magic Box in its credits, however, is as far from a bad drive-in movie as you can get. Ito was recently named director of a feature-length film about a Japanese official, known only by the name Sugihara, who during World War II saved the lives of thousands of Lithuanian Jews by issuing them visas against the orders of the Japanese government, enabling them to emigrate from Lithuania through Japan to their final destinations.

The film’s live action footage, which will be produced in the United States, will be shot in high definition with 100 percent computer-generated 3D backgrounds. It will be the first film of its kind in the world. Magic Box recently purchased a Sony digital high-definition recording facility, one of the few such systems in the world.

To celebrate and demystify. “The reason to be interested in Magic Box,” says Rosenthal, “is because the people there have a new attitude toward computers and technology. The attitude is to simultaneously demystify technology and celebrate the magic of it.”

(In at least partially keeping with that philosophy, the Magic Box logo was designed by Susan Kare of the original Macintosh team, who’s designed charming and friendly iconography for nearly every graphical user interface in the computing world, including Microsoft Windows and PenPoint from Go.)

In addition to Rosenthal and Ito, there are two other core members of the Magic Box team. Momoko Ito is an international negotiator who specializes in technical and media entities. Jean Kim, a computer graphics and HDTV expert, once worked at Captain America, the company that helped produce one of NHK’s first live satellite high-definition productions. Now she is working on a five-minute demo for NHK based on the Chinese fairy tale Magic Monkey.

The company is small and intends to stay that way. “Our company is different from the existing computer graphics production companies,” Hirofumi Ito said in a recent interview with the Japanese edition of Pixel magazine. “We are not the type of company that has rows and rows of workstations. We are a company that generates ideas and plans.”

Hirofumi Ito says Magic Box will hire computer graphic production companies to help with its projects, which extend well beyond the film industry. The company is also involved in developing advanced computer graphics technology, such as its V-Clay 3D modeling software.

ROUND, YES, BUT NOT A MEATBALL

V-Clay is based on “metaball” technology (by the way, spell-checking software insists on changing it to “meatball”) originally developed by the legendary Jim Blinn, now of CalTech, formerly from the Jet Propulsion Lab, who’s well known for his humanistic approach to complex computer graphics problems. Metaballs provide a more organic look to 3D models than traditional polygon-based software. V-Clay has recently been licensed to SoftImage, which will distribute the product for use on Unix-based workstations and the Silicon Graphics Indigo computer.

Magic Box is also involved in producing large audience-participation events including location-based theme parks as well as sporting and game events — similar to the 5,000-participant interactive Pong game showcased at the Siggraph 1991 show that Rosenthal produced (see Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 30).

More fun to do. To that end, Magic Box recently acquired worldwide marketing rights to the Cinematrix Audience Participation system, the same system used for the Pong game.

Developed and patented by Loren Carpenter of Pixar, the technology is a mechanism by which people use reflected light to give instructions en masse to a computer. Though much more fun to do than to describe, Cinematrix is a breakthrough technology for creating the kind of audience-participation experiences that Magic Box has planned.

Right now most of what’s going on at Magic Box involves traditional tools, such as ink on paper: much contract negotiation is under way. This is a company you’re likely to see much more of, both on the big screen and behind the scenes.

Janice Maloney