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www.postmagazine.com 16 POST JULY 2015 he Marvel Cinematic Universe just keeps growing. The studio's latest offering, Ant-Man, marks the 12 th release in Marvel Studios' highly successful film franchise. Directed by Peyton Reed and featuring Paul Rudd as the title character, Ant-Man tells the story of con-man Scott Lang who, once in possession of a special suit, gains the ability to shrink in size, but become incredibly strong. This month, Post takes a look at the visual effects geniuses behind some of the summer's biggest blockbusters — Terminator Genisys, Pixels, San Andreas, Mad Max: Fury Road, Spy and Jurassic World (see page 24) — and here, speaks with Prime Focus World's Richard Baker, senior stereo supervisor, about his studio's stereo 3D conversion for Marvel's summer flick. What was involved in creating the stereo 3D delivery for this film? "As you probably already know, Ant-Man's 'superpower' is that he can shrink down to the size of an ant when wearing his special suit. The great thing about this film was that we were able to make the stereo work to enhance the different scales of the characters, manipulating and designing the depth so that it works for the scene. "One of the things Evan [Jacobs, Marvel stereographic supervisor] and I discussed at the start of the project was how we were going to play the stereo for Ant-Man, and I designed a series of test shots so that we could discuss the relative merits of the different approaches. For example, when Ant-Man is human-scale, the camera is normal scale and normal height. However, when he shrinks down to being very tiny, we have options: is the camera still a full- scale camera, or does it become an Ant-Man- sized camera in a big environment? Does it shrink with him? "The preferred route in the end was to go with the tiny-scale camera in the huge envi- ronment. As a general rule of thumb, the result was that we compressed the backgrounds and brought Ant-Man a bit more positive — out of the screen — so that everything looks slightly magnified in the background. We combined this with pumping up his volume a little more than we normally would, which served to minia- turize him in this massive world. "The shallow focus on these shots was inter- esting too — that macro filmmaking look that the filmmakers had employed miniaturizes the sub- ject anyway, and obviously the film has to work for audiences in 2D as well. But the 3D conver- sion allowed us to really enhance this effect. MARVEL'S ANT-MAN BY LINDA ROMANELLO PRIME FOCUS WORLD TALKS STEREO 3D CONVERSION T STEREO 3D Baker's (inset) team at PFW worked closely with Dneg.