Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/10459
o Anybody poke a spear at you lately? How about a tusk? A gun muzzle? Chances are, as you view the ever increasing product coming to theater screens in stereo 3D, you’re seeing a lot less jabbing and a lot more “spatial filmmaking” — developing that magical Z-axis as a new aspect of storytelling and environment creation rather than as a brief gimmicky thrill. Of course, few among us are above enjoying some good, brief, gimmicky thrills, but movies are 90 minutes to two hours and more in length and the goal these days is to immerse the viewer in a milieu and really take you someplace. This is especially true of today’s CG movies. DreamWorks’ chief Jeffrey Katzenberg laid down the law after 2003’s traditional- cel/CG combo, Sinbad— future animated films would henceforth be produced as “3D animation.” But, spatially, what we called “3D” then was really 2D. Today vir tually all CG releases are the new kind of 3D that requires glasses, as are a growing number of live-ac- tion movies — even some indie films. Currently, there are maybe 3,500 stereo screens in US theaters.That figure will only grow as exhibitors experience in- creasing demand for stereo 3D screens to display this new form of storytelling. 3D DRAGONS The job title “stereoscopic supervisor” has been around since, oh, 2007. But when you put yourself out there as “Captain 3D,” you are re- ally making a statement about how important stereoscopy is in your career — and the film industry. Phil “Captain 3D” McNally is a case in point. He’s been stereoscopic supervisor on DreamWorks Anima- tion (www.dreamworksanimation. com) films star ting with Meet the Robinsons through the current How to Train Your Dragon and on to Shrek Forever After, now in its final stages, and this fall’s Megamind. The paucity of stereoscopic screens was one big drawback to 3D’s prolifera- tion, but McNally notes that even in the early days the number of 3D screens was roughly doubling with each major 3D release.“We’re now getting the momentum behind the content,” he says,“and there’s more content than there are screens, as we’re seeing with our own How to Train Your Dragon.The pressure is now on the screen side. It’s like we’ve pushed the cart over the hill and we’re now starting to roll down.”That cart is full of new product, in- How To Train Your Dragon: DreamWorks keeps its 3D within the 20-24-pixel depth range. cluding next year’s Kung Fu Panda II— into which stereo opportu- nities have been worked from the very beginning of production. At this point,3D should look like it’s part of the filmmaking and storytelling, McNally says, “instead of being bolted on after the fact.” McNally likens a good stereo experience to a memorable dream — three-dimensionality is an integral part of it. Filmdom’s first century of moviegoers actually had to train themselves to see and understand a story in only two dimensions, he asserts. With a number of DreamWorks Animation films moving through the production pipeline at once, McNally spends his days looking at stereo imagery — “pretty much everything at every level.” As with any CG film, initial work starts with a small group sketching storyboards in 2D. “But the minute that we go from very early storyboards — into even previs — as soon as it goes into a computer graphic environment, in our case it’s typically Maya, then we have the capability of setting stereo.”The idea is to give CG artists — and directors, too — the ability to recognize opportunities to exploit 3D space.They also get feedback on whether a cut works as well in 3D space as it does in 2D. By the time the animation department completes its final pass, McNally says, “the last thing we do is dial in the stereo in a way that can be animated within the shot.We can have multiple stereo rigs so that a foreground character might have less depth to be less distracting while we’re looking at the full depth of the background.The bottom line for previs is that we want good stereo that is fast and doesn’t hurt — we don’t want eye strain.” As for the high intensity achieved by the quick-cut style used in action films, McNally believes that 3D films can generate the same levels of excitement at a slightly slower pace — a stereo film’s sheer amount of data is intense in and of itself.This makes previs all the more important as far as judging how to set a scene’s depth. For Monsters vs. Aliens (2007), McNally’s first movie as stereo super, he set up a variety of depth tests — simple spheres and grids that ran through a range of depths.One thing DreamWorks determined was how much depth you need to make a sphere look round in the Z dimension.“It’s very important for your char- acters not to look as if they’ve been squashed or stretched in space.That volume is the separation between the two cameras — the inter-axial or inter-ocular distance.” A second lesson was how much an object can be moved be- hind or in front of the screen without causing viewers discomfort. “We’re designing for a 40-foot screen and our images are 1920 pixels wide. On a 40-foot screen, 10 pixels of separation which recede beyond the screen is the equivalent of infinity in real life.That’s not very much depth to work with. So we tested how far beyond that we could do and still have an acceptably comfortable depth and we found that 20-24 pixels of depth is still very watchable for almost everyone in the audience.This is about double eye-width and what we’ve found is the space be- hind the screen is more limited because people don’t like to di- verge their eyes.” So DreamWorks does not go beyond the 20-24-pixel depth range — a.k.a. just over one percent of the screen’s width. How- ever, just going “back” is not enough to make, say, background trees appear far enough away.“So you have to use the space in front of the screen to give yourself a depth budget to work with — to provide good volume on characters as well as comfortable depth in the far background.” McNally and company found that you can use slightly more pixel depth in front of the screen — 1.5 or maybe two percent. Combined with the 3D space created be- hind the screen,“now you’re up to 2.5 or three percent as a very comfortable amount of depth from the nearest point all the way www.postmagazine.com May 2010 • Post 23