Zap this: Video games are very big business. Now raking in more than $10 billion a year in North America alone, games have surpassed the behemoth motion picture industry to dominate the entertainment scene. Their profound economic and social effects so roused filmmaker Spencer Halpin that he plunked down more than $650,000 to make “Moral Kombat,” which co-producer Ramy Katrib calls “the first definitive documentary on the interactive entertainment business.” It’s also among the few documentaries to be entirely shot, edited and finished in HD.

To demonstrate the far-reaching consequences of gameplay, the film, which is expected to be released in the summer of 2005, travels from boardrooms to living rooms. But for Halpin, the most important interview in the film is the one with the San Jose Mercury News journalist and industry observer Dean Takahashi, who shared his feelings about violence in video games. Takahashi’s brother was assassinated in 1993 — the same year the hit game “Mortal Kombat” came out — in a case of gang warfare and mistaken identity. “Everyone on the set that day had puffy eyes,” says Halpin. “That was when we chose the title ‘Moral Kombat.’”

But Halpin is no sensationalist seeking high drama and cheap tears. He’s taken pains to present a spectrum of views as the film looks at how games are created, distributed, regulated, sold and received, and he bristles at any comparison to a Michael Moore-style attack. “We’re very careful to avoid the whole titillation factor,” he says pointedly. “Interactive entertainment is the next major media form and the most important issue in terms of the young generation. I want to show how and why games are developed and what experiences they offer, which can have positive or negative effects on children.”

The HD Advantage

The 120-minute documentary takes bold advantage of HD technologies. It was shot exclusively in 720p with the Panasonic VariCam, using the AJ-HD1200A deck and FireWire to digitize footage for editing in Final Cut Pro HD.

“This is the HD revolution: that we’re able to manage our work in HD with the same simplicity and efficiency we had in DV.”

“We relied so heavily on Apple technology for this project,” says Halpin. “I don’t know that we would have been able to do it without Apple’s new filmmaking workflow. And because we ran so much tape — we did 65 interviews that were three or four hours each — Final Cut Pro was invaluable in helping us manage that volume of material.”

Katrib — whose company, Digital Film Tree, provided production and post-production services including cinematography, editing, special effects and color correction — concurs. “What makes the new Apple workflow really impressive is that the HD files are not much larger than the old DV files,” he says. “We captured our 720p material at 24fps, at the pretty low native data rate of 5.6MB/sec. So we get all that extra HD image and higher resolution in a very compact form — it’s less than twice the size of a DV file.”

Mobile High Def

Katrib says Apple’s HD workflow eliminates the costly peripherals and time-consuming format conversions that jack up production budgets, bloat schedules and hamper creativity. “Now we can bring in film footage at its native file size, right onto a Power Mac G5 or PowerBook and edit in Final Cut Pro” he says. “We didn’t have to buy video card components for Spencer’s Mac — he was able to use FireWire in and out for audio and video — and we didn’t have to go through all those conversion steps.”

Being able to transfer HD footage quickly and easily gave Digital Film Tree a whole new way to work with its client on a high-def film. “Our production and post house is in Los Angeles,” explains Katrib, “and Spencer was working from the road, a temporary studio in Santa Monica and his home in Connecticut. We had this amazing, technologically creative back-and-forth going on during the entire process — it was unprecedented for an HD project.”

“Traveling around to do the interviews, I brought all the source materials and project files with me on a 1TB hard drive,” adds Halpin. “I worked on the film everywhere I went.”

It wasn’t always so. “In the past, working in HD meant you had these huge files,” says Katrib. “They required so much storage space it was impossible for a client to have his own copy of the native HD footage. So after you shot in HD, you had to downconvert your tapes to DV/DVCAM or Beta SP and give the client a low-res version to work with. That’s still the general practice in the motion picture industry.”

Editing Like a Native

But there were no such compromises on “Moral Kombat.” Says Katrib, “We took more than 66 hours of uncompressed HD footage, digitized the tapes to our server and copied them onto a single LaCie drive for Spencer. We would edit a section of film in our studio, then send him the rough cut as a Final Cut Pro project file. He was able to work on the full-resolution HD footage — the identical files we have in our post-house — right on his G5 or PowerBook. Then he would email the project files back to us — with his notes on the changes he wanted — and we’d just re-link it with our footage.”

Katrib raves about the efficiency of the new HD workflow. “It’s so cool and compact to work with native high-def images and send our edits back and forth so easily,” he says. “This is the HD revolution: that we’re able to manage our work in HD with the same simplicity and efficiency we had in DV.”

He adds, “The making of ‘Moral Kombat’ was such a huge breakthrough. We designed and applied a creative workflow that encompassed cinematography, editing, hundreds of effects shots and color correction, all in an interactive online environment. Now, we can even bypass the whole offline/online dynamic.”

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