creative cow magazine stereos copic

8/7/2019 creative cow magazine stereos copic

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THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN FILM, AUDIO, VIDEO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING AND DESIGN

MORE SIGNAL, LESS NOISE CREATIVECOW.NET MAY / JUNE 2009


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Creative COWC R E A T I V E C O M M U N I T I E S O F T H E W O R L D

M A G A Z I N E

Te Stereoscopic 3D Issue Creative COW Magazine4

THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING & DESIGN

CREATIVE COW MAGAZINEA CREATIVECOW.NET PUBLICATION

PUBLISHERS:Ron & Kathlyn Lindeboom

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF/ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER:

Tim [email protected]

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:

John Daro, Greg Foster,Brian Gardner, Jason Goodman,

Chris Heuer, Bernie Laramie,Jim Mainard, Ray Zone

LAYOUT & DESIGN:Tim Wilson, Mack De Cypress

MAGAZINE ADVERTISING:Ellen Parker

[email protected]

WEBSITE ADVERTISING:Tim Matteson

[email protected]

ONLINE SYSTEMS ADMIN:Abraham Chan

[email protected]

CONTACT US:[email protected]

(805) 239-5645 voice(805) 239-0712 ax

Creative COW Magazine is published bi-monthly by

CreativeCOW.net (Creative Communities o the World)

at 2205 Villa Lane,, Paso Robles, CA 93446. (805) 239-

5645. Printed at Rodger & McDonald Printing, Carson,Caliornia. Postage paid at Carson, Caliornia. U.S. sub-

scription rates are ree to qualied subscribers. Creative

COW is a registered trademark o CreativeCOW.net. All

rights are reserved. Magazine contents are copyright

2009 by Creative COW Magazine. All rights are reserved.Right o reprint is granted only to non-commercial edu-

cational institutions such as high schools, colleges and

universities. No other grants are given.

The opinions o our writers do not always reect thoseo the publisher and while we make every efort to be

as accurate as possible, we cannot and do not assume

responsibility or damages due to errors or omissions.

LEGAL STATEMENT: All inormation in this magazine isofered without guarantee as to its accuracy and appli-

cability in all circumstances. Please consult an attorney,

business advisor, accountant or other proessional to dis-

cuss your individual circumstances. Use o the inorma-

tion in this magazine is not intended to replace proes-

sional counsel. Use o this inormation is at your own riskand we assume no liability or its use.

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Perception & The Art o 3D Storytelling3D adds another element to the storytellers toolkit: depth

Big Pictures rom Tiny CamerasStereoscopic cameras come in all sizes, so says Bernie Laramie

FotoKem Adds 3D DI or the FutureAn industry leader redenes itsel, adding 3D DI to its workfow

All In! Dreamworks Animation Goes All 3DDreamworks Animation commits to 100% 3D or all its new lms

IMAX: The Biggest Name in 3D FilmsThe head o IMAX reveals what they look or in a good 3D story

The 3D ZoneAn expert on 3D lmmaking looks at its past to reveal its uture

The 3DVX: Uncompressed 10bit HD RAWHow lmmakers turned two DVXs into a stereoscopic rig

Turning Noseratu into Orlok the Vampire 3DNew generation tools speed the stereoscopic process

M A Y / J U N E 2 0 0 9

In This Issue:

Tim Wilsons Column ............................................ 8The Back Forty with Ron Lindeboom .............. 50

Cover photo o IMAX London by Robert Aleck, w ww.cynexia.com


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Tim WilsonBoston, MassachusettsEditor-In-Chief, Associate PublisherCreative COW Magazine

Utopians o the Image. Thats an evocative phrase, isnt it? Ray Zone uses itin his article in this issue o the COW Magazine. We look at the world andsee motion, he says, so put our pictures in motion. We live in a three-dimensionalworld, so we make those motion pictures in 3D. It is inevitable that the way we ex-perience the world makes its way into our storytelling.

Not that mimicking reality is the goal. The earliest lmmakers embracedtheways that lm is dierent rom reality. It guided them in the creation o lms un-

damental visual vocabulary starting with the Cut. Even though we see themtogether, nobody can be on both sides o an edit, in either time or space. Ater theinvention o the Cut, well, reality is gone, and anything is possible.

The same is true or all o the tools that we have at our disposal. For example,a quick look at the before and aftersection o any colorists reel will show you howthe artistry o color only begins with the colors you see in the world. From cavepaintings to CGI, rom relight to three-point lighting, rom cartoons to the canonso history reality is simply one o the tools that serves the storyteller.

As artists, we can more eectively manipulate audiences when we understandhow they perceive the world, and then start messing with it. And the more recog-nizable the elements we use to tell a story, the more persuasive we can be. As audi-ence members, we know that there are no killer robots, and that these actors arentreally lovers dying in each others arms yet it bothers us when we sense that its

not true. From the time that we rst heard stories as humans, we have wanted tobe persuaded by illusions. When we are, we never say, That could never happen,no matter how antastic, because in the world that storytellers and audiences entertogether, it just didhappen.

Depth is one o those undamental perceptions that we can use to make ourstories more persuasive. One orm o dimension or another has been part o visualstorytelling or a very long time, at least since perspective was added to painting probably earlier, but thats about as ar back as I can go without, you know, actu-ally looking it up. We have more ways to manipulate depth and to do so moreeectively than we have ever had beore. We are on the verge o a new age ocinematic storytelling, says Brian Gardner in these pages, in which we wont talkabout going to a 3D movie any more than we say that were going to the talkiestoday. 3D movies will just be movies.

Im oversimpliying that part o Brians very elegant discussion, and oatingmerrily down the stream rom Rays, but Utopia need not be a myth. Its possible touse 3D images in a way that neither mimics reality nor annoys us, that serves story-telling on an equal ooting with motion, sound, color, and the Cut.

Reading this issue, youll be reminded o how early we are in this stage o itsevolution, and the extent to which were still very much making it all up as we goalong. You might also recall that Utopia wasnt just a place, but a community, as youread stories by people taking extreme measures to tell stories the way that theywant to, and empowering the people around them to do the same.

In the end, even the most cynical o us has enough hope to sit in the dark andsay, Tell me a story. The artists in this issue add one more dimension o humanvisual perception to their stories as they reply, You aint seen nothin yet.

Storytelling, Reality, and Utopians of the Image

From the time

we frst heard

stories as

humans, we

have wanted to

be persuaded by

illusions.

When we are,

we never say,

That could

never happen,

because it just

did.



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Our human perceptual systems have been driv-ing changes in our entertainment media, onesensor at a time.

Since we are built to see motion, pictures naturallyevolved into motion pictures. Motion pictures evolvedto incorporate sound, color, 3D sound, and 3D vision.We use all o these, all day long. Theres no reason wewould want to give any o them up when we watch amovie.

When sound rst came out, a lot o people com-

plained that it was a gimmick. So, whatre you gonnado, have every movie be a musical now? They didntthink about the emotional impact o hearing just regu-lar dialogues nuances, nor o a ull soundtrack. Theywere so used to working another way that it neveroccurred to them to ask, what becomes possible nowthat wasnt possible beore?

Thats where we are with 3D. It has been treatedlike a gimmick, but we are starting to think about howit can be used as a creative tool.

My own goal isnt to make 3D real. I dont wantto make it a simulation. I treat 3D the same way thatpeople use a soundtrack. I use 3D to make the romantic

moments more romantic, scary moments more scary. Iuse 3D to create an emotional undercurrent.

I start by making a huge graph, the depth scoreo the movie, to show where every major element is inspace, relative to each other, and to the screen.

I also make notes about the size o the space. Forexample, when the 3D goes deep behind the screen,you get this large empty space, this eeling o thegrandeur o God, the vastness o the possibilities. Igenerally like to put that right at the act one climax,

as the character goes o to explore the new world, toconvey that sense o adventure. Thats an example owhat I mean by using 3D depth to underscore emo-tional dynamics.

ALL THE CRAYONSWhen color came into movies, people started withtechnical questions how do we chemically developthe lm? But they also had to ask questions like, whatdoes it mean to the story to choose a red dress ratherthan a yellow dress?

That was exactly the pattern when I started work-ing on Coraline. I began with the technical side. I


Brian GardnerLos Angeles, Caliornia USA

Brians diverse experience includes everything rom directing stage plays tobeing a technical director, 3D artist, or technology supervisor on visual eectsblockbuster movies, like X-Men, The Matrix Reloaded, Babe, and many oth-ers. I dont usually get interviewed, he tells us with a laugh. Im hoping that Ican change the industry by sneaking around, and talking to people in private,one-on-one. Were happy to help save him a ew steps as he reaches a lot moreones.

By working in the area between what you see, and what you can see, Brian Gardneris helping re-write the rules o 3D flmmaking right beore your very eyes.

Perception

& The Art of


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showed the crew, the camera crew, and the eects de-partment some basic rules about how to place thingsin depth, and hazards to avoid, like mismatched reec-tions and nearby objects straddling the edges o theimage.

There were also some issues specically relatedto stop motion, like planning 3D or orced perspec-tive sets, shooting single camera 3D through rain and

windshields, and resolving 3D strobing artiacts withmotion blur in post.

Once they became amiliar with these kinds othings, I ound that they became more and more in-terested in my story notes, and how that applied totheir 3D work. Why do I want Coraline in ront o thescreen, versus behind the screen? Once you under-stand the emotion you want to get out o the shot, youcan think about how to use 3D to evoke it.

Coraline was really the rst 3D movie to exploresot ocus through shallow depth o eld, which wasconsidered a big no-no in 3D. Its why the other stereoexperts who were interviewed or Coraline beore

me told the DP, Pete Kozachik, not to use it.When I met Pete, he was upset. It looked like they

were going to prevent him rom using depth o eldand rack ocus blurs in the movie, and he elt thatthese were incredibly useul artistic tools or him. Hedidnt want to lose them, just because was doing a 3Dmovie.

The rst thing I said when I got on is, No, Peteneeds this. Not only can you do depth o eld blursin a 3D movie, but you should do depth o eld blursin a 3D movie.

The general rules o using DOF in 3D are dier-ent than they are in 2D, o course, so Pete, John Ash-

ley, Chris Peterson, and I then spent several lunchesdiscussing how to approach it. I dont know what thenal percentage was, but I imagine that over a thirdo Coraline has some sort o shallow ocus. It workedvery, very well or the storytelling, because o Petesartistic vision as a DP.

I think that this emphasis on storytelling rst,rather than 3D itsel, is one o the two reasons why I

got hired. By the time that line producer Harry Lindenbrought me in, the producers o Coraline had spo-ken to a lot o stereoscopic experts beore me. Therehad been a ocus on technical aspects o the produc-tion not hurting peoples eyeballs was almost liketheir paramount concern. To me, its a given. I donteven put it on my list o issues.

Other people were trying to maximize the 3D im-pact. Some just approached it with the specic goal ogetting more butts in the seats. I got the eeling that,by the time I came along, everyone theyd talked tohad a dierent approach, but all with technical mind-sets.

I guess I was the only one who talked about 3Das a storytelling medium. While there are technical is-sues with 3D, lm has technical issues, cameras havetechnical issues, lighting and costume everythinghas technical issues. But 3D isnt a technical problemto be solved. Its an artistic tool, alongside other artis-tic tools.

I think that there are probably a ew people in the3D community who dont like the act that Ill advisepeople to use a shallow amount o depth or certainscenes, but I like to use all the colors in my crayonbox.

Thats why theres no such thing to me as an op-

timum amount o depth. That wouldbe like having an optimum amount olight. Sure, theres a certain amount olight you need i you want to see every-thing perectly, see all o the colors ac-curately but I wouldnt use that kindo light in a horror movie. You want topick whats appropriate or the storyyoure trying to tell.

The director o Coraline, HenrySelick, is very much about the story.Hearing me talk about how to invokeemotions with 3D must have struck a

harmonic in him. I could see his eyestwinkle. He then said a ew kind wordsto me, and I received the job oer short-ly aterwards.

MATH AND PERCEPTIONI think that the other reason I was hiredis that I can explain a lot o the mathstu in plain English.

People have a lot o alse assump-tions about the way that the human vi-sual system works. I hear people sayingthat your eyes are 2 inches apart, and

Creative COW Magazine Te Stereoscopic 3D Issue 9


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that i you look at something in ront o you, your eyeskind o cross as you look at the thing, whats calledconvergence. And the urther and urther away the ob-ject is, the less and less your eyes cross, so that i youwere to look at something at innity, then both youreyes would be looking straight ahead.

Which means that, to them, i you were to put in-nity on a cinema screen, then the urthest separation

one object can have between the let and right eyeswould be 2 inches. That was the mantra o 3D ex-perts, that you cant go more than 2 inches o paral-lax behind the screen.

I told Henry, well, thats the English-y explanationo what theyre trying to say with their math and itswrong.

Everybody thinks that the eye is like a camera.We have this nice little evenly-spaced resolution o xand y, and the image goes straight through your pupiland centers on the back o the retina, and all the veinscome up and eed it with oxygen rom behind, and ev-erything is in ocus all the time.

None o those things are true the reality is

much stranger than that.You actually only have about 3 degrees o high

resolution, and about 11 degrees o medium resolu-tion. Everything else is very low resolution. In act, eyesare almost entirely motion sensors. They see color orthe thing youre looking at, and about three degreesaround it. Everything else ades into grayscale.

And the only thing thats really in ocus is the

thing that youre looking at, and maybe a couple oother things around it. Most o what you see is out oocus. You just dont know that, because every timeyou look at something, its in ocus!

Also, the veins dont come up rom behind andeed the retina. They come through a hole into theeyeball, and spread out in FRONT o the retina. Yourvisual system actually has to erase the veins, and ll inthe missing parts o the picture.

You dont have to converge on something in orderto see it in 3D. You can look at something and still seethe thing next to it in 3D which means that all o themath about looking AT something is wrong.

So I told Henry, look, theres the science o the real


DEPTH SCORING

The thick Black horizontal line represents the cinemas

movie screen. Everything above that line will be in

ront o the screen, toward the audience. Everything

under that Black line will be urther away, behind the

movie screen.

The thin vertical dotted lines represent the cuts in

the sequence, rom one shot to another.

The solid Red line is the location in depth o the

Point O Attention what the audience is looking at.

Usually, the POA is the main character in the shot.

The dashed Orange line is whichever object is

nearest to the audience. It could be a character, a prop,or a piece o scenery.

The dark solid Blue line reprents the object ur-

thest away rom the audience. Oten this is a moun-

tain, some trees, or the ar wall o a room.

The dashed sky blue line is the sky (i visible). Since

this is an outdoor sequence, the sky is in this score.

The amount o space between the two dashed

lines tells you the total amount o depth in the scene.

Their placement up/down on the score tells you the

placement o the scene in depth, relative to the movie

screen.

At a glance, you can see that the sequence starts

rather calmly (the smooth parallel lines o the let side

o the score), and gets dramatically more exciting as

it goes oninto the climax o the scene the jaggiest

lines to the right side o the score.

The lines vertically squeeze together and spread

apart, as the characters emotional state swings, driv-

ing his ailures and successes at each moment o the

scenes conict.

The main turning point in the characters emo-

tional crisis is the sharp peak at the middle o the score.

This is a gripping moment or the audience.You can see that Ive staged the scenes depth in

our movements, with markedly dierent line quali-

ties: curvature, separation, beats, and parallelism.

This divides the scene into our distinct emotional

stages, which I want the audience to experience during

these story beats.

Basically, I try to artistically direct the 3D to take

the audience on an emotional ride, so that they will

eel the story more intensely.

Isnt that what movie making is all about?


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world, which is the math theseother guys are doing. And thentheres the science o visualperception, what your EYESare capable o, and what yourMIND is capable o perceivingrom that.

Because eyes have to eraseveins to reconstruct images, themind is used to making thingsup. It sometimes creates a re-lationship between things thatthe real world may not haveput there. For example, you seea chessboard next to a person,and even i theyre not playing,you automatically assume thatthat person is smart just because o whats sittingnext to them. John Singleton Copley used to put ruitnext to the women in his portraits, to imply that theyare more ruitul people.

I use 3D to create similar perceptual associations.I I want to show that one persons lie is deeper thansomeone elses, then I actually make the space aroundthem deeper. You associate that person with depth. Ican put another person in a shallower space, and youautomatically think that that person has a shallowerlie.

I may not squeeze the space so much that peoplenotice this and say, Hey, this a deep space, and thatones shallow. But I play with the depth enough sothat people eel it. They subconsciously pick it up thesame way that they subconsciously associate some-bodys intelligence with a nearby chessboard.

PERCEPTION, DEPTH

One o the keys to using depth as a creative tool is tounderstand how it works in relation to the rame.When you watch a 2D movie, youre aware that thescreen is on a wall. In 3D, the screen acts more like ahole in the wall, a window into the world o the story,with action taking place in a physical space on eitherside o it.

I there is an actor who is only partially onscreenin 2D, you understand that the rest o the actor is be-hind the rame. But i you were to take that exact

same shot in 3D, and the character was on the audi-ence side o the screen, youd see hal the characteroating in the air!

Part o your perceptual system says, I can onlysee hal o the person, because the other hal o him isbehind the window, so hes behind the window. Thenyour stereo system says, The window rame is behindhim, but hal o him is way in FRONT o the window!Thats not possible!

We call that a window violation, when some-thing you see breaks your perceptual system. Thisconict causes eyestrain and headaches. I theres a loto motion, it can even induce vomiting. People are not

used to having their perceptualsystems in that much conict orlong.

In 1953, Raymond and Ni-gel Spottiswoode created ashort called The Black Swan.They believed that the movieworld should never come intothe audience world. It was anissue o separatism. They ratio-nalized that they could relocatethis window into a xed posi-tion, away rom the theater wall,by adding a static black maskto their lm, which was madeslightly dierent or the let andright views.

In act, they oated it halway out into the the-ater to prevent any 3D object rom accidentally com-ing into the audience world. There would never bea window violation, because everything would always

be behind the window.Audiences didnt like it at all. They could clearly

see this static window oating in ront o them, andit was distracting. Also annoying was that it createdretinally rivalrous areas, large areas at the sides o therame which could only be seen in one eye. It createdmore problems than it solved, and was never usedagain in 3D movies.

Now, when I was in college, I studied the stereo-grams o Bla Julesz, a perceptual psychologist. Heused what looked like random dots to create stereoimages on paper. One o my homework assignmentswas to replicate his experiments. And I messed it up!

But it was kind o an interesting mistake, so I startedto explore it which is the dierence between a tech-nologist and an artist. Technologists nd bugs, and xthem. Artists nd bugs, and explore them.

I started grappling with, Why is the rame o thestereo image oating up o the page? Why dont I per-ceive the paper as alling backward, away? Instead orandom dot stereograms, I started applying it to ani-

CORALINE

I really appreciate having worked with Henry Selick

and PK and the camera crew. You fght an awul

uphill battle on many jobs, against people whojust dont get it. This was the frst show that I ever

worked on where everybodygot it. It was amazing.

Someone would build a puppet, build a set, then

the next person would come over and plus it, add

something even cooler. Then the next person would

come along and plus that. I think that i Coraline

wasnt in 3D, youd still see that amazing magic.

Im hoping that the 3D adds to that without

being noticeable, or distracting rom it, and instead

pumps up the emotional volume and pluses it the

same way that everybody elses work plused it.



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mation and realized, Hey, Ive got this oating stereowindow, and I can move it all over the place!

I realized that I could lit it o the screen, or pushit behind the screen. I could tilt the top toward or awayrom the audience, kind o a Dutch Tilt but in 3D space.I could rotate it, and even animate it anything at all.By digitally manipulating the image borders, the win-dow can be highly dynamic.

With the rame moving around so much, youdthink that it would be easy to detect. But when com-bined with the animation on the screen, you cant seeit at all.

It turned out that the ailure o the Spottiswoodebrothers was that their oating window was static,which made it obtrusive. The new Dynamic FloatingWindows, which were moving all over the place, werenot even visible at all.

Their invisibility came because they are dynamic.It was hard or me to convince other industry

people that Dynamic Floating Windows would work,because the idea seemed so counter-intuitive to them.

They thought that the window changing so muchwould be too distracting to the audience.

This is like the evolution o editing. It took a littlewhile to gure how to make cuts invisible. Now, itsweird that a cut that changes camera position, maybethe position in time, sometimes even both the au-dience doesnt notice it. People are ne with it. Yet, aJump Cut, when the camera positions are more similar,is jarring. At rst, invisible cuts seemed illogical.

The discovery o Dynamic Floating Windows sud-denly opened this whole range o possibilities or 3Dstorytelling. It gave us the ability to get rid o all thewindow violations, and gave us a tool or dynamically

controlling how we use depth in a scene.The rst time I used dynamic oating windows

or storytelling was on Meet The Robinsons, and itwas a revolution that quickly spread. Almost every 3Dcommercial animated lm since then has used them Beowul, Bolt, Monsters vs. Aliens, Pixars Up,and even Fly Me to The Moon rom nWave Pictures, arelatively small production company.

Meet The Robinsons wasnt just the rst timethat I got to use Dynamic Floating Windows in a movie.It was also the rst time that I really started thinking othem as not just a x or a technical 3D problem, butas a way to use the 3D window as an artistic tool and a

cinematic element.I used them with stop-motion in Coraline, and

I intend to use them or a live-action movie that Imworking on, still in the planning stages. This may verywell be the rst time that Dynamic Floating Windowswill be used or live action.

I certainly hope so! Though, somebody may getthere rst, but it would be unortunate i someonebeat me to using my own tool or live action 3D!

ART IN THE GAP

I like to call 2D movies atties, because I think that

3D is a lot like sound was, in the way it revolutionizedthe industry.

Back then, sound came out and suddenly thosenew movies were called talkies. Some number oyears later, theyre not talkies anymore. Theyre justcalled movies, and suddenly the other things arecalled silent movies.

The same thing is going to happen with 3D. Right

now, we call them 3D movies, but a ew years romnow, theyll just be movies, and the old 2D moviesreally will be seen as atties. Thats the way historygoes.

I believe that art is that gap between what youexperience in reality and what your perceptual systemis capable o experiencing. I you can play in that gapand show things that the real world might not natural-ly present, but that you can present on a movie screenthats where the art comes into it.

I see 3D undergoing a revolution. It has gone roma technical problem ocused around cameras, into acinematic tool, and now, into an artistictool.

I cant talk about the specic movies, but Im cur-rently working on two shows almost like an art direc-tor, where Im coming on airly early, talking abouteverything the set designs, and costume design,and how all o it ts into the gap between reality andperception, the space between what we see, and whatwe can see.

Thats the space where people can perceive some-thing emotionally, even i it wouldnt naturally presentitsel in the real world, even i they cant consciouslysee it and cant put their nger on it.

They FEEL it. I love playing with that.


CHICKEN LITTLE:

A GENERATIONS WATERSHED

Ray Zone calls the release o Disneys Chicken

Little 3D the watershed event in this generation

o 3D exhibition and says that it might never

have happened without Brian Gardner.

I stay ater hours on a flm that isnt 3D,

Brian told us, just to do sections o it in 3D and

show it around, in hopes, he adds with a laugh,

that maybe I can convert people!

Ray recalls that Brian was working as a visualeects doctor on Chicken Little in March o

2005, and just or his amusement, made a second

eye view o it. Disney execs happened by as he

was playing back an anaglyph view, and were so

impressed that they decided to release the flm in

3D in November!

It was the frst wide release or RealD (84

screens), and the rest, as they say, is history. Or

depending on how you look at it, the uture.


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SPLIT BY A TABLE

While todays digital technology has xed the pro-jection problems o the 50s, it introduces somenew ones.

3D cameras capture let and right eyes at thesame time, but single-projector solutions romcompanies like RealD and Dolby dont play themback at the same time. They use a time-alternatingsystem that triple-ashes very quickly: let eye/right eye, let eye/right eye, let eye/right eye, oreach rame.

This creates a certain amount o alse depth.Lets say that something moves rom let to right.For some brie period o time, your let eye is go-

ing to be seeing the next rame, and the right eyeis going to be seeing the previous rame.

When youre trying to use those images,your brain cant tell how much o that parallax isstereoscopic parallax, and how much o it is mo-tion parallax.

I something goes up and down, then one eyewill see it at one height, and the other eye will seeit at another height. Your eye is not very orgivingo vertical misalignment, so i that jump is too ar,

your eye cant use the two images. The misalign-ment can also induce or ampliy a strobing or stut-tering look.

One o the ways that these issues maniestthemselves is interpenetration. We had a charac-ter in Meet The Robinsons who walked closelybehind a table and then stopped. The alse depthrom the projector made it look like the top hal ohim was in ront o the table.

When he stopped, the top hal snapped back,and the top and bottom were reunited behind thetable!

So when youre planning 3D movies in this

new digital age, you actually have to plan knowingthat there will be certain artiacts rom the projec-tor. You have to make that character walk urtherbehind the table than he might have otherwise

The audience will not notice the alse depth,as long as the character onscreen is not being splitby a table.

n


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Ater I worked on James Camerons Alienso the Deep, an IMAX 3D production, I

became interested in 3D mysel. When my riend JePierce said that he was interested in putting that kindo a company together, it was really just a question ohow we were going to take advantage o the opportu-nity we saw coming.

Je has a great creative background, and he hasa good tactical sense o how to make things work. I

thought that my experience as a producer made agood combination to marry together, so we oundedStereoscope as a production company, to create 3Dcontent.

We are a new company in the 3D world, around ayear old, which means that quite a ew o our projectshave not yet been released. Weve also been doing 3Dpost, both or ourselves and others. Our experiencehas shown us that 3D workow has to begin in theplanning stages, and proceed rom there into shoot-ing.

The studio we set up or our own 3D shooting has

also become a testing acility that other lmmakersare using. One aspect o testing is a little abstract, totry to understand what 3D is capable o. There is alsomore project-by-project testing. Here is the movie Iwant to make, now how do I do it in 3D? Or, how will 3Dshooting work underwater, or or motion control, oror high-speed shooting? Finding these answers rep-resents a growth curve or all o us or them as lmmakers, and or us as a production services company,

trying to help them achieve their vision.

THE RIGS

We have seen that there are still only a ew compa-nies making anything specically to serve the rapidlygrowing 3D community. Combine that need with thevery, very ast evolution o camera technology, andyou have a healthy environment or creating somedramatic new stu.

Lately, we have ocused on the use o new smallerrigs. We are especially excited about the work we havebeen doing with the tiny Iconix cameras. Theyre un-


The stereo rig pictured here is

1.75 inches across, with an inter-

ocular distance of 16mm. The

pictures its taking? Theyre for

an IMAX feature. Please insert

your favorite size joke here.

T I N Y S T E R E O S C O P I C R I G S

Bernie LaramieLos Angeles, Caliornia USA

Bernie is Stereoscopes co-ounder and COO. He has been a producer or morethan 30 years, or such series as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dark Skies,and Proler. He was the post supervisor or Max Headroom, and a design con-sultant to Lucaslms Droidworks or the creation o the Editdroid NLE, releasedin 1984. Bernie is also a member o the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, theEditors Guild, and SMTPE.


17/52

der two inches, and can actually shoot up to 2K, andother resolutions that are a long way rom most o thesmaller cameras beore this, which have mainly beenused or security monitoring.

We are now beginning to see an entire line osmaller cameras coming out. Were currently work-ing with one rom Toshiba, the IK-HR1S HD, and one

rom the German research rm, Fraunhoer, calledthe Cumina. The size or all o these is typically onlyan inch or two in any dimension, and they allow us tomake very small stereo rigs or POV, or that can t intoextremely tight quarters.

We have just started an IMAX project called AirRace 3D. It will ollow people on the Warbird racing

circuit, the old P-51 Mustangs. Rigs built us-

ing these small cameras will get us into thecockpit, underneath the dashboard, and oth-er very tight places. They will allow a cool newvisual approach that has seldom been donebeore in IMAX, really opening up an entirenew world.

We also have a beam-splitter systemwrapped into a comortable handheld unit,but we are going in other directions as well.Prism systems look like lots o smoke and mir-rors, but they can be a simple way to get 3D insmall spaces.

We use two cameras that are looking at

each other. A very high quality prism splitsthe image, so that we have a ull stereo HDsetup in about two inches o space. This isone o the ways that we will be able to shootHD rom, say, underneath oot pedals, behind

the joystick, and so on.Periscope systems work some-

thing like a standard periscope,only with two mirrors or the twocameras, providing a 3D view asthey look out into the world. Theyare ideal or situations where thecamera needs to come rom un-

derneath the dashboard, or be-hind the airplanes cowl.

We have also been playingwith the Vision Research Phantom65. It is most known or its abilityto shoot at very high speeds orvery smooth slow motion, but itsan exciting camera or us becausewe can capture its ull 4K uncom-pressed signal to a stereo pair o2K images with a single camera,and a single lens.

We have developed a mirror

system or this, called Narcissus.There are our mirrors in ront othe lens. The lens looks directlyat two mirrors, and those mirrorsin turn look at two other mirrors.We segment this in post to windup with two 2K streams rom thatsingle 4K sensor in that singlecamera.

While beam splitter rigs usedon many current major 3D produc-tions have worked well, they havea ew major issues: they are big,



18/52

use two cameras, and lose at least one -stop olight loss.

With the Narcissus rig and a ew o our othermirror/prism rigs, we knew we were going to beshooting in a high stress environments, in limitedspace and at rame rates up to 1050ps. At theserame rates you need a lot o light, and unlike thebeam splitters, our mirror/prism designs have vir-

tually no light loss through the system. We haveused our Phantom65/Narcissus rig on a Steadicamat 144ps, and been very pleased with the results.

The other major advantage is using a singlecamera and a single lens to make the whole rigmore compact. We also eliminate much o thevariation between eyes seen in an image cap-tured in a dual camera system.

We have already used this on a proj-ect called Rally Around the World, anIMAX lm on competitive road rallying.The rig is built to military specications,so, even though it includes our mirrors,

it is very rugged, not delicate at all. Wehave put the camera on the car, on thebumper, wherever we want. Even thoughthere are high g-orces and tremendousvibrations, the mirrors allow us to easilycontrol the 3D depth while we are shoot-ing.

RECORDING AND MONITORING

We record to a number o dierent de-vices. One we have used quite a bit is theRave rom SpectSot, a VTR replacement

that records up to 4:4:4 2K. It also hasa dual I/O that allows us to record bothstreams to a single unit. Since these littleIconix cameras we use have optical berout, we can tuck the Rave in a remotearea ar away rom the cameras, and re-cord straight rom the CCDs.

We have also used the Codex porta-bles, as well as something rom a reallycool manuacturer, FFV (Fast ForwardVideo). They make a small, almost shirt-pocket recorder called the Elite HD. Ithas HD-SDI out o a two and a hal inch

hot-swappable SATA drive that recordsJ2K at 100 Mbits/second.

O course, it helps to see what yourerecording. We wanted a more ecientway to monitor and adjust both camerasin a stereo rig, which is why we startedworking with SpectSots 3D Live.

We can preview and control the ele-ments that are critical to proper shoot-ing, such as interocular and convergenceadjustments, one eye or the other, or whats unique both together.

3D Live gives us the ability to know



19/52


20/52

that the shots we are getting are going to be usable inpost while were still shooting.

Even i we choose to keep rolling and not to do alot o convergence and interocular adjustments at thetime, we can add notes to the metadata about whatwere seeing during the shoot, and use that metadatain post.

(The critical part o our 3D post is the QuantelPablo 4K. We also use Avid DS Nitris or editorial, some

Final Cut Pro, and some motion graphics systems.

WHATS NEXT

Although I cant tell you the specics o the project it-sel, I can tell you about one o the rigs weve recentlydeveloped or a government project: a 2D rig that com-bines eight Iconix cameras or shooting 360 degrees.

The individual cameras are about one inch bytwo inches, so the entire 8-camera rig is only about sixinches wide. I can hold it in my hand! We are now inthe nishing stage o post or the rst project we shotwith it.

We are also just starting on a 3D movie calledDance Machine, a rather ambitious project eaturingmany, many kinds o dancing. It will be an all-locationshoot in Roswell, New Mexico and will eatureseveral o the small, rugged rigs Ive mentioned. I wewere doing something like a Hannah Montana 3D con-cert, we would go with a ull-sized camera like the SonyF900 or F950. Our goal here, though, is to be able to gohandheld, or placed into extremely tight quarters.

We are also working on a direct-to-DVD movie onbelly dancing, as well as a 14-episode web series calledStacks. The immediate plan is to publish it on You-Tube in 3D. Were not sure, but we think that this willbe the rst 3D webisode series.

Moving orward, there are two big headlines.The rst is that, despite hard economic times, we areseeing widescale adoption o 3D theaters. We will seemuch more expansion, especially outside the US.

The main ocus now is obviously and correctly ontheaters. We have a reliable environment where peo-ple can distribute the content they are creating. How-ever, that same opportunity is about to present itsel

in the home. Since Je and I both had backgrounds intelevision, we knew rom the beginning that this wasgoing to be the key push or our talents.

We are obviously just now at the beginning othat, both or the distribution o theatrical movies

and or the creation o original pro-gramming. There are still only a ewmillion 3D television sets out there,and we are just now in the specica-tion stage or production and deliverystandards.

Our experience is that creating3D content or all o these platorms

is a case o using integrated tech-nologies, across the entire workow.It is not solely dependent on camerarigs, or special post processes. It be-gins with testing, where producerscan work through some o the detailso how they will approach the shoot,and how they will work all the waythrough post.

The key is to remember to look atthe big picture.

n



21/52

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3DDI is generally the same as 2D DI, with somevariations depending on the cameras used,and how the stereo rig is congured.

Parallel rigs are usually used or back o the house,longer shots, and vistas. The convergence point o par-allel cameras are at innity.

A beam splitter is two cameras, perpendicular toeach other, with a two-way mirror angled betweenthem. The camera thats pointing orward shootsthrough the mirror. The other camera points down, and

is getting light bounced to it rom the reective side othe mirror. The advantage o this approach is that youcan get much closer to your subject, so it works wellor Steadicam dolly shots and close ups.

Once the ootage comes into post, we begin mak-ing adjustments to balance the two eyes, as the camerathat is shooting into the mirror tends to have a more oa yellow kind o green cast to it. Its not necessarily lin-ear. Depending on the angle o the mirror, sometimesits just on hal o the rame. While its not a rule, thereis oten more vertical misalignment with beam splittercameras than parallel cameras.

Parallel rigs tend to have the kinds o problems

that you can imagine rom two cameras next to each

other: they just cant get as close together as your eyesare, and there are oten problems, such as lens ares, ora corner o duvateen slightly reaching into the rame,that only show up in one eye, and not the other.

The advantages o each rig, especially related todistance, are why most shoots use both rigs.

CAPTURE AND CONFORM

The rigs we see are, all equipped with dierent avorso cameras. I can tell you about two projects in a littledetail because theyve shipped already, Hannah Mon-

tana/Miley Cyrus: The Best o Both Worlds in 3D andJonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience. Hannahused Sony 950s and F-23s, and Jonas was mainly F-23s.

Both recorded to the Sony HDCAM SRW-1 deck,recorded 4:2:2 x 2, interleaved. That is, the SRW-1 canrecord two 4:2:2 eeds to a single deck. Both o thecameras connect via HD-SDI, and the deck recordsFrame 1: let eye/right eye, then Frame 2: let eye/righteye, and so on.

We use the Quantel Pablo or virtually every as-pect o our stereo post, and one o its great advantag-es is that it digitizes both eyes simultaneously rom our


John DaroBurbank, Caliornia USA

John is a 3D colorist and DI specialist at FotoKem. He has also been a membero Creative COW since 2003, spending much o his time in the Avid and Ater E-ects orums. Stereo imaging became a hobby o mine since my rst version oPhotoshop, he says, and I love getting to work it with it proessionally.

FotoKem: 3D DIHow an industry leader redefnes itsel or the uture

FotoKem opened as a flm lab in 1963, and has continued to evolve and expand. Here are some othe tools theyre using as the industry, and their business, now adds another dimension.


23/52

SRW-5800 studio deck. This makes it incredibly easyto conorm: it loads both eyes rom one EDL, alwayskeeping the stereo pairs together as one source clip

The Jonas Brothers and Best o Both Worlds con-certs were similar projects, the big dierence beingthe time to complete each one. Hannah Montana wasdone in 11 weeks. For Jonas, we had our months, withthe last two being heavy on the DI side o things.

With Hannah we were involved rom editorial dai-lies through nishing. Jonas we were involved romthe time the tapes were pulled out o the deck. This in-cluded logging the tapes, dailies screenings, editorial3d previews, an ever changing on-line conorm, nalcolor grading, 3D convergence choices, and ultimatelydigital cinema packages and tape deliverables.

I put on-line in quotes because things were pret-ty well online already. We initially loaded the originalootage onto the Pablo, and played stereo video out toa Quvis DDR disk recorder. We then sent the drives toDisney or their dailies screenings.

They started to cut, and by a week or so into the

dailies screenings, we started to see our rst EDLs.They came back to FotoKem, we pressed a button, andin the snap o your ngers, we had our conorm. Wedidnt have to load any tape, because the ootage romthe dailies was already on our drives.

So, most o our 3D projects come in at 1920, shotHDCAM SRW interleaved, at 4:2:2x2. Were work-ing on a VFX-heavy project now, being shot with theSony F-35 at 4:4:4, which requires two separate decks,ganged together.

(The ootage weve seen rom the F-35 has beenabsolutely amazing. I cant get overit by ar the most beautiul images

Ive seen out o digital tech. I have nodoubt well be seeing much more be-ing shot with this camera very soon.)

Were also starting to see some Sil-icon Imaging and RED cameras bring-ing in 2K les, which typically comein on FireWire drives or LTO tape. Fo-toKem has a new division called next-LAB, which handles every aspect ole-based workows. Weve just start-ed it, and its already booming. Theyconvert the RAW les to DPX les thatI load into the Pablo rom our shared

Isilon storage.Most clients are shooting 4K with

the RED. When we receive the R3D les,nextLAB debayers the images and pro-cesses them to oversampled 2K imagesbeore we load them to the Pablo.

3D GRADING

Crews do the best on their sets, but they have timecrunches and deadlines, and sometimes the camerasarent necessarily matched perectly. Maybe the blacklevel on one eye is a bit lited, maybe one eye is slightlymore magenta or something.

My preerence is to balance both o them rst,then bake that in so that the stereo pair is matchingidentically. Thats because the way that we are work-ing right now, we grade on one eye and then we applythat grade to the second eye. I the eyes match, youjust throw the correction rom one onto the other andyoure done.

Thats in a perect world. Usually we are under the

same kinds o time constraints and deadline pressuresthat people aced on-set. In cases like that, Ill gradeone eye, apply that grade to the other eye, and thendo a balance correction to match those eyes together.

Ater coloring, we make a convergence pass. Thisis usually unsupervised, and is more technical thancreative typically to remove the bumps or misalign-ments that are part o the nature o live ootage.

When the cameras arent calibrated perectly, Imay need to rotate and scale some shots to make theeyes match. I I have some o the problems in only oneeye that I mentioned earlier (lens ares, objects slight-ly reaching into view, etc.), I use the Quantel Pablo to

composite the good eye into the eye with problem,warping to match perspective and lens distortion.

Ater this, a creative convergence pass is donewith the client to heighten the emotional impact othe stereo and help tell the story. During this pass, wemay choose to make the stereo a little more subtle incertain spots, just to give the eyes a break, or a littlemore extreme to punctuate key moments.

Because the worlds not perect, I sometimes haveto combine the technical and creative convergencepasses into one to meet the deadline.

The Pablo has great compositing and convergenceeatures. Convergence tools are basically a symmetri-cal DVE, andtake place in real time. I its a complicated3D ace replacement or something, Id denitely usea Flame, but or color, editing, compositing, layering,graphics, and working with stereo ootage, Pablo is anall-inclusive box.

For all the previews, we play the Pablo through an



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NEC digital cinema DLP projector using the RealD sys-tem, showing on a silver screen rom Harkness.

RealD has an external peripheral called the ZScreen that we mount on our single projector to getstereo. It oppositely polarizes each eye while tripleashing the image: going let eye/right eye, let eye/right eye, let eye/right eye beore advancing to thenext rame. It denitely reduces icker, and it really

saves the headaches during long sessions.I wear the RealD glasses even when Im grading a

single 2D eye. They have a slight yellow-green tinge tothem, so without the glasses, the image would look aslight bit more magenta than I would normally want itor a neutral picture. Once I put the glasses on, though,I can compensate or that.

When it comes time to get to the trim pass, I al-ways work with both eyes, in stereo, making any ad-ditional color corrections needed as it plays

Working in Pablo takes place in real time, at ullres no proxies! Two streams o les this size, with allo the eects we can lay on them, are going to need

rendering on output though. Pablo balances real-timeperormance with background rendering.

As I nish grading the rst shot and move to thesecond, Shot One starts rendering in the background.When I move to Shot Three, Shot Two starts rendering.By the time I get to the end o the sequence, every-thing is ready to play out rom the beginning, with nowaiting.

This process creates new media, but the conver-gence tools do not. They just allow you to make choicesabout what appears on screen. Theyre very interactive we can tweak this, change that, and keep moving.The client oten says, Push it til it breaks! Now come

one step back. They want to see it happening.

DELIVERABLES

We had a LOT o deliverables on the Jonas project,starting with the digital cinema package. This is whatgoes to the theater where youd see it in stereo.

Ater that, we did a lm out or international mar-ket. Weve also nished a DVD extended version. Forthe DVD, we did versions in 2D and anaglyph 3D. Botho those went out to tape or mastering.

Anaglyph is important because this is how people

are watching 3D DVDs now. Thats why Ive taken thetime to develop some special tricks or anaglyph mas-tering. We essentially take the red channel rom oneeye, and then the blue and green channels rom theother eye, and combine them with an additive transermode.

Thats at its most basic, and that s about all Im go-ing to say about that. The rest o what I do is the secretsauce, and I dont mind saying that my anaglyph is abit superior to a lot o the others out there.

DOWNSTREAM

Most immediately rom here, I think that were goingto start seeing more 3D rigs coming directly rom themajor camera manuacturers, rather than productioncompanies have to abricate their own. Sony, Panavi-sion, Arriex I would expect to see all o these andmore with stereo cameras and stereo rigs in the nearuture.

Youll also see a push to on-set workows, as theline between production and post-production contin-ues to blur. Imagine shooting to Codex, S2, or otherkinds o DDR. You could turn over the disks to the on-location post group, such as nextLAB. They processthe shots or editorial while simultaneously making3D dailies packages.

With a 3D-capable NLE on the set, the shots couldbe quickly tied together in a sequence or the directorand DP. They could make sure on the set that sequenc-es o shots are landing in 3D space along the lines that

they envisioned, and they will cut in with othersalready shot.

Sotware companies will continue to de-velop the 3D toolsets. Avid is already shipping a3D-capable version o Media Composer that canacquire and work with streams rom both eyeson the timeline. The next step will be the abil-ity to make ofine convergence choices on thespot.

Online machines downstream will need toread the metadata generated on-set rom thesecameras and NLEs, and be able to apply it to theull-resolution media in the online. It will hap-pen.

Last year about 70% o the work I did was



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in stereo. I expect thisnumber to get closer to90% this year as studiosproduce more and more

3D content. In short, thetrend is up no punintended with Disneysanimated 3D lm!

I think the num-ber o editorial pre-view conorms will allas NLEs gain ability towork with stereo oot-age and while the o-ine machines get bet-ter equipped to handlestereo, the nishing

machines will also gainmore powerul tools tox more complicatedissues, giving us evenmore power as moreproductions move into3D.

Just as the 2D DItoolset continues to ex-pand, so will the 3D DItoolset.

n



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When Dreamworks Animation began in 1997, itvery much had a start-up mentality, and the

company kept that entrepreneurial spirit as it has rein-vented itsel many times over the years.

We were a relatively small team then, just bigenough to ocus on one movie at a time. The numbertoday is more like 1500 employees, and we are able tohave many more production pipelines open. We arenow typically working on three greenlit movies at thesame time, with at least three behind those that are

ready to t into the next slot. At any given time, wemight have eight or 10 productions in some stage odevelopment.

Our rst lm, Prince o Egypt, was released in1998. It was a 2D animated lm with a lot o CG eectsin it things like re, or the eects around the partingo the Red Sea. People tried to come up with words orit. I think somebody called it a tra-digital lm! Im notsure that it t exactly, but it was an interesting combi-nation o words to describe our hybrid approach.

The kinds o visual eects we were adding werequite uncommon in any kind o animated lm at thetime, partly because CG was expensive, and partly be-cause the registration o the CG elements with the 2D

assets was a challenge.At the time, there were not many sotware sys-

tems to do those kinds o things, which led to Dream-Works creating its own technology team. I was in theearly group o olks added to the sotware develop-ment team, to begin building the tools that could sup-port the kind o lmmaking we wanted to do. We madethose kind o lms with Prince o Egypt, through El-dorado, Spirit, and Sinbad.

Ater Sinbad, we branched out into all CG lms,

trained traditional artists to use CG tools, and rewroteour toolset.Research and development was the arm o the

technology organization that was responsible or allthe applications that the artists would use to make thelms. Some o that was integration with third-partysotware like Maya, and writing plug-ins. We also didthings like determining new algorithms, or example,or creating water solutions or the ocean suraces inSinbad.

The general charter o R&D in those years was topush the envelope, to try to do more in an all-digitallm than had been done beore, bearing in mind thecreative appetite o the show.


Jim MainardLos Angeles, Caliornia USA

Jim is the Head o Production Development or DreamWorks Animation, and was respon-sible or the studios transition to stereoscopic 3D lmmaking. Beore the entertainmentbusiness, Jims background was aerospace, where, among many other things, he was thePrincipal Systems Engineer or the Hubble Space Telescopes ground station planning sys-tems.

DreamWorks wasnt the frst to make a modern-day 3D animated movie. But they were the frst

to commit to do nothing else, and to commit to start-to-fnish 3D authoring or all o it.


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ALL IN

Research into 3D production began a little over threeyears ago. The original plan was to do our next lm in3D, and we had chosen as that one lm Monsters vs.Aliens.

The big surprise came when, within just a ew

months o deciding that, DreamWorks CEO JereyKatzenberg said in 2007 that he wanted to do all thelms in 3D, and that the rst o those would be releasedin 2009. We obviously still had to build the same toolsto make one lm in 3D, but this certainly upped thegame quite a bit. We now had to quickly ramp up everypart o the company to get all o our shows ready or anew kind o production.

That involved training programs or the artists. Itinvolved rewriting and reormulating tools. It meantgoing to third party vendors to get them to add unc-tionality, and where they couldnt or wouldnt, we hadto build it ourselves. And then we had to bring all o

that together into an integrated package.At the same time that Jerey was actively in-

volved in engaging the exhibitors to get more screens,we were working with standards groups to try to helpidentiy and support the light levels that would be re-quired, and try to vet the systems already installed tomake sure they were producing similar results.

On the creative side, we had to discover the chal-lenges o color grading and the implications o whatthat meant or 3D lmmaking. Along the way, weound that none o the cheats we had been using in 2Dwould work anymore. Once you add depth, they be-come quite obvious. We now ound ourselves requiredto, or example, turn to volumetric rendering in caseswhere we might have gotten away with a cheap cam-

era trick or a blur beore.I was pulled out o R&D and asked to to take this

on as a studio initiative. Jason Clark (Stuart Little,Monster House) rom the producing side was alsobrought on early, to help get the productions thinkingin the way that they would have to think to make a 3Dlm. And then we brought on Phil McNally, ormerlywith ILM and Disney, as stereoscopic supervisor

My charter was to move orward, to get the stu-dio up and ready or making 3D lms whatever weound out that meant. Our goal was to institutional-ize the knowledge o 3D lmmaking into the studio,so that everyone, regardless o their role, understood

how 3D lmmaking impacted their job or their role.That became a way o working. We were not look-

ing to create a specialized team that would post pro-cess 3D or anything like that. We wanted to make surethat our best and brightest creative olks in every de-partment understood the implications o 3D, and thatas a studio, we were making the most o it.

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, AND IN SPACE

There are many implications or working in 3D. As lm-makers, they start right rom the beginning, in com-posing a scene.

In traditional or CG animation, the animation

generally occurs rom let to right, within sort o a pro-scenium stage, largely so that you can see charactersclearly against their backgrounds. But as soon as youadd depth you have opportunity to rotate that spaceand actually put the characters in depth rom eachother as opposed to simply let to right on the screen.

3D also impacts the way that you set dress the en-


Above, Prince of Egypt. Below, Monsters vs Aliens.


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vironment: it is important to add depth cues, to give asense o the volume o the space. The classic exampleis that, i you want people to see how long a road is,you show telephone poles going into the distance.

Lighting is even more important. It is important

that the eye goes to where you want it to in stereo.Particularly or olks that are newer to looking at a 3D

lm, the tendency is look around in awe at everythingin the entire beautiul environment. Wow, look at theleaves on that tree. Thats amazing!

Unortunately, they are doing that as the story isunolding. Thats not what you want to accomplish.You want them ocused on where you want them o-cused! In general, the rules o cinematography still ol-low. The eye is drawn to brighter places on the screenand drawn away rom darker places. Thats a generalrule, but its an example o why lighting is so critical.

People also generally look at things in the ore-ground beore they look at things in the background.Its just a human reaction things closer to you are

more meaningul than things ar away.With 3D space you can determine whether they

are close to you, but with also where they are rela-tive to a space that includes the screen. That is, youreyes are ocused on the screen, but the question is, re-ally, where do they converge? Where are they ocusedwithin the entire volume presented to them?

The general rule is something like a third o the to-tal volume o the viewing space can occur behind thescreen, and about two-thirds can occur in ront o thescreen. Thats important because, i you think about amovie where you never play anything orward o the

screen, then you have very little depth towork with in order to compress an entirereal world behind that screen.

Think about watching a movie in atheater. Theres a black border around thescreen, and it unctions like a rame ev-erything happens inside that rame, andbehind it.

However, there is a trick in 3D com-position that brings that black border outinto the audience. I you do that, theneverything is still, essentially, playing be-hind that rame. Everything eels insidethe screen, but yet, it is not.

Things work a little dierently in most IMAX the-aters, where the edge o the screen is at, or near, the

edge o your peripheral vision.As such, the rame is no longer important or rele-

vant. The vanishing point, the maximum depth is actu-ally on the screen, so that EVERYTHING plays orwardo the screen,

What we do on our lms is to provide mechanismsor adjusting the convergence to allow us to play thatmovie appropriately. IMAX does the work in makingthis adjustment to our creative leaderships expecta-tions, setting it to play in the right place in the the-ater. You dont want it playing so ar orward that itsnecessarily looming over you.

There are things that we can do as lmmakers to

make that easier as well. We can over render. Mon-sters vs. Aliens was virtually all rendered at 1920, butwe could decide to render 2048 pixels. That would al-low some exibility between the let and right images,to accommodate that dierence in the playback scale.It depends on whether we think the shots would needadjustments.

BY THE NUMBERS: Monsters vs Aliens$175 m budget$331 million earned worldwide in rst 50 days$59.3 million or opening weekend, on 4104 screens28% o those screens were 3D, and accounted or 58%o the gross.03% thats three-tenths o 1 percent o screens ac-counted or 9% o the gross: 143 IMAX screens broughtin $5.2 million.



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coming out. We need to be careul that we are thinkingabout the technologies that will be there in the nextdecade.

When the 20 year anniversary o your moviecomes up, you dont want your library to be dead. Iyou have perceived that stereo means a let and a rightimage or 3D viewing going orward, you probablylooking at it little short-sighted.

You probably have to think about archiving the

movie as 3D geometry plus textures that will be ren-dered separately. You can even imagine that, in theuture, the display systems will receive the geometry,and receive the textures, and will render that moviereal time or you.

The right thing to do, and the goal or any o thestudios that are making these kinds o lms, is to havetheir technology groups ocus on eliminating the sci-entic implications o decisions, and just allow creativ-ity to rule.

n

WHERE WE GOLooking at the numbers or Mon-sters vs. Aliens, i I were an exhibi-tor, I denitely would have wanteda 3D screen in my complex, whenthe lm came out. Or maybe two.So despite all the sort o nancialthings going on in the world today,

I think that well see the number oscreens probably double this year.By the time James Camerons Av-atar comes out by the end o theyear, we could certainly be push-ing 4000 screens or maybe more.

Audience expectation isclearly high. Our polling showedthat people wanted to see it in 3D,and came back later to see it whenthey couldnt get in. That tells usthat theres still capacity to growout there. Internationally, were

seeing similar patterns, but thenumbers o 3D screens is so small I think its on the order o 1000screens outside North America that its going to take some moretime.

Creatively, our objective is to hide the hard sci-ence rom artists, and let them get back to doing whatthey do best, just creating art. I think we have mostlyaccomplished that today. Even our training manualsocus more on space and volume than on the mechan-ics o the eye, or interocular distance, or the way thatthe brain orms a 3D image rom disparity between

the let and the right eye.I think that the science rontier that remains is

more on the display side.In particular today, there is the idea that there is

a let and a right image, and that thats how you cre-ate 3D. But practically, or moving in the direction o atruly 3D display, autostereoscopic display that doesntrequire any glasses, new development needs to takeplace. Peopl eel okay about them but I think thatgetting rid o them makes 3D ubiquitous.

Currently, theres such a narrow viewing angleon an autostereo display that you can only move yourhead something like six degrees. Most o us cannot

imagine watching a movie sitting on our couch andonly moving our heads six degrees. Its just not verypractical. But I think that there are technologies com-ing that will allow autostereoscopic displays to hap-pen.

Thats the next place where the big science willdone. I think well see it. There are big places withsmart people working on it. It might be a decade out,but we need to be prepared or it.

There are implications or the studios as well. Aswe think about archiving a movie or the uture o cin-ema, we dont want to get caught where we are stillmaking black and white movies when color TVs are

BY THE NUMBERS: TECH

500 artists working or 4.3 years: 20,456 human hours35,000 sq. t data centerHundreds o HP xw8600 workstations9000 cores in HP ProLiant blade servers (primarily theBL460c)

One node o HPs HALO telepresence technology or every

75 employeesHP Remote Graphics Sotware to bridge acilities 300miles apart17 million les per rendering set1920x1080 rames45 million computing hours 8 times as many as hours asShrek, nearly double as many as Kung Fu PandaI only one compu ter had been used to render, it wouldhave taken 4071 years.4 kinds o 3D glasses used during productionFinal storage: 120 terabytesApproximate additional cost to budget added by 3D pro-duction: $15 million, 8.5%



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Monsters vs. Aliens is a line in the sand, a point-at which things changed.I think that the rst line in the sand was Polar Ex-

press. Jerey Katzenberg reers to it as the eurekamoment, when the world said, holy cow, when 3D isdone in a certain way, and exhibited a certain way, ithas the opportunity to not only be a dierentiated ex-perience, but to produce signicant incremental rev-enue. I believe that Polar Express was the impetusor this giant new 3D surge.

Monsters vs. Aliens was a line in the sand be-cause it was the rst that was properly sold as a wide3D release, that generated north o 50% o its revenuerom 3D, and that was authored with 3D tools.

This is as opposed to being a movie that was notmade in stereo, but made in 2D, and kludged into 3D.It was also, on the exhibition side, the most screensever or a 3D lm until that point.

When we look back in 10 years, and think aboutwhere and when things changed, my guess is thatthe three 3D moments that produced that change are

Polar Express, Monsters vs. Aliens, and James Cam-erons Avatar.

MORE SCREENS

Adding new screens to show all o this 3D content isnta logjam or IMAX because were not part o the DCIProllout. The credit markets have been tricky right now,but were sel-nanced. Conditions are a problem orus in the grand scheme because we are part o thecommunity, but theyre not a problem or us in termso our own rollout.

[Ed. note: The Digital Conversion Implementa-tion Partners is a partnership between the top threetheater chains, with commitments rom ve major stu-dios, whose expansion plans have been tempered byrecent economic conditions.]

We actually have more than two hundred DigitalIMAX screens coming over the course o the next 18months. Weve already sold them, and are now install-ing them as quickly as we possibly can.

We were once just a company in Toronto whose


Greg FosterLos Angeles, Caliornia USA

Greg Foster is IMAXs President o Filmed Entertainment. Beore joining thecompany in 2001, he was the Executive Vice-President o Production at MGM/UA, playing a key role in over 150 lms, including Get Shorty, Rain Man, Species,Thelma and Louise, King Pin, A Fish Called Wanda, Moonstruck, and several othe James Bond, 007 pictures.

IMAX has made a big commitment to 3D exhibition: 200 new screens coming on line as

quickly as possible, with IMAX producing all o their documentaries in stereoscopic 3D

THE BIGGEST NAME IN 3DTALKS ABOUT WHAT THEY LOOK FOR IN BRINGING 3D TO THEIR SCREENS


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theaters were in most o the cool museums, sciencecenters, and aquariums around the world that youcould possibly be in, and we made abulous 40-min-ute documentary lms. As wonderul as they were, wewere starting to get a little bit too ar on the educationside, and a little bit too distant rom the entertainmentside.

We used to do some 2D and some 3D documenta-

ry lms, be we have started making only 3D lms. Wehave also moved the bar a little bit more in the middleo the education/entertainment continuum, in slowand steady steps to make sure we werent oendinganyone.

At the same time, we created a technology calledDMR (Digital Remastering) that lets us take commer-cially-released Hollywood lms and convert them intoIMAX. We have now created ostensibly three or ourlm businesses.

The rst is our documentary movies. Deep Sea3D just crossed $80 million at the box oce. JohnnyDepp and Kate Winslet narrated, Howard Hall directed,

and Danny Elman did the music. It was also producedand written by Toni Myers, who has produced, edited,written or directed around 20 IMAX eatures, includ-ing IMAX: Hubble 3D, which is currently in produc-tion. Under the Sea 3D is out

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