Disney buys Star Wars maker Lucasfilm from George Lucas

Disney is buying Lucasfilm, the company behind the Star Wars films, from its chairman and founder George Lucas for $4.05bn (£2.5bn).

Mr Lucas said: "It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of film-makers."
In a statement announcing the purchase, Disney said it planned to release a new Star Wars film, episode seven, in 2015.

That will be followed by episodes eight and nine and then one new movie every two or three years, the company said.
The last Star Wars film was 2005's Revenge of the Sith, and Disney said it believed there was "substantial pent-up demand".

Disney will pay about half in cash and half in stock, issuing 40 million Disney shares in the transaction.
The deal follows Disney's acquisitions of Pixar studios for $7.4bn in 2006 and Marvel comics for $4.2bn in 2009.

"Our valuation of Lucasfilm is roughly comparable to the value we placed on Marvel when we announced that acquisition in 2009," Disney said, adding that the valuation was almost entirely driven by the Star Wars franchise.


Transition The first Star Wars film was released in 1977.
"For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next," said George Lucas.

"I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime."
Mr Lucas will continue as a creative consultant.
Kathleen Kennedy, currently co-chairman of Lucasfilm, will become president of the firm and will be the executive producer on the new Star Wars films.

Lucasfilm is also the production company behind the Indiana Jones franchise, and fantasy films Willow and Labyrinth.
Michael Corty, analyst at Morning Star, said Disney's deal was clearly part of a pattern in buying new franchises.
"Pixar was the first big one, then Marvel, and now this one here," he said.
"Because Lucas is private, I would assume most investors would be surprised."

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Disney can now digitally clone your face

  

The minds at Disney Research aren't only interested in tracking your face -- they want to map, shave and clone it, too. Through a pair of research projects, Walt's proteges have managed to create systems for not only mapping, digitally reconstructing and removing facial hair, but also for creating lifelike synthetic replicas of human faces for use in animatronics. Let's start with the beards, shall we? Facial hair is a big part of a person's physical identity, a quick shave can render a close friend unrecognizable -- but modern face-capture systems aren't really optimized for the stuff. Disney researchers attempted to address that issue by creating an algorithm that detects facial hair, reconstructs it in 3D and uses the information it gathers to suss out the shape of the skin underneath it. This produces a reconstruction of not only the skin episurface, but also of the subject's individual hairs, meaning the final product can be viewed with or without a clean shave.
Another Disney team is also taking a careful look at the human face, but is working on more tangible reconstructions -- specifically for use on audio-animatronic robots. The team behind the Physical Face Cloning project hope to automate part of creating animatronics to speed up the task of replicating a human face for future Disney robots. This complicated process involves capturing a subjects face under a variety of conditions and using that data to optimize a composition of synthetic skin to best match the original. Fully bearded animatronic clones are still a ways off, of course, but isn't it comforting to know that Disney could one day replace you accurately replicate your visage in Walt Disney World for posterity? Dive into the specifics of the research at the source links below, or read on for a video summary of the basics.

source: engaget

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