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"What
I'm hoping people will see in 'Monsters vs. Aliens' for the first time
is stereoscopic filmmaking that feels completely integrated into the
flow of the story."
Unlike most 3-D movies,
which are conceived and shot in two dimensions and then rendered later,
the film was made start to finish in three dimensions, with directors
watching daily takes through 3-D glasses.
Producer
Lisa Stewart said it made sense for the story, which she characterized
as "an homage to the 1950s and '60s monster horror movies where 3-D
really first came into the fore." The film follows Susan (voiced by
Reese Witherspoon), who's transformed into the 49-foot-t
all Ginormica
after she gets hit by a meteor on her wedding day. When aliens attack
the planet, it's up to Ginormica and her fellow monsters — a gelatinous
blob named B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a mad scientist called Dr. Cockroach
(Hugh Laurie) and a fish-ape known as the Missing Link (Will Arnett) —
to save the world.
The characters, concepts
and landscapes lent themselves to three-dimensional exploration. But
there were concerns about the technology. What were its limitations?
Would filmmakers be reduced to a series of coming-right-at-you sight
gags?
"There was an initial fear that it
was going to be a gimmick like it was in the '50s, where we're suddenly
going to be asked to throw a bunch of stuff out through the screen,"
Stewart said. "But that was not at all what he wanted to do. ... It was
about how can we use this (technology) to tell the story that we're
already telling, how can we use it to our advantage."
They developed the story as they typically would, she said.
The magic — and complications — began when they started shooting.
"There
was a lot of trial and error at first," Stewart said. "And there were a
lot of preconceived rules of what you could and could not do in 3-D."
For
example, quick cuts during action scenes were thought to be impossible
because such drastic perspective changes caused too much eye strain.
"In real life, there's no such thing as a cut," noted Captain 3D.
His
team solved the problem by creating a tool that digitally blends depth,
so "you get the feeling of a fast cut with the comfort of a slow
dissolve," he said.
McNally's team
developed virtual cameras to allow for more realistic action shots, so
when Ginormica skates through the streets of San Francisco on two cars,
it feels like a real camera, not a computer, captured the action. The
team also learned to manipulate depth frame by frame, switching
seamlessly from 2-D to 3-D to make fast-action scenes easier on the eye.
McNally,
who has been doing "stereo photography" for almost two decades, said
movie fans have been receptive to 3-D pictures since the '50s — it's
just that technology kept tripping up the format. Not anymore:
Computer-generated images and digital projectors have advanced enough
to make 3-D cinema viable.
Old-fashioned
3-D films relied on two projectors playing simultaneously, one showing
a left-eye image and the other a right-eye image, mimicking the brain's
perception of depth through the merging of these separate images.
If the timing or alignment of either projector was off, moviegoers ended up with a blurry picture, eye strain and headaches.
Digital
projectors fixed that. A single projector runs at 144 frame
s per second
(instead of the typical movie pace of 24), projecting sequential images
for the right eye and left eye so fast that they appear to be
simultaneous.
"It literally projects left
eye and right eye three times per movie frame," McNally said, adding
that the projectors also allow for "perfect synchronization and perfect
alignment" — no more shaky pictures.
The result? Seamless 3-D cinema that studios and filmmakers are betting on for future projects.
Studio
chief Jeffrey Katzenberg promised last year that all future DreamWorks
Animation releases would be in 3-D, beginning with "Monsters vs.
Aliens." And at least a dozen 3-D films are set for release this year,
including Pixar's first 3-D venture, "Up," and James Cameron's
live-action 3-D epic, "Avatar."
While
ticket sales for 3-D movies, which typically cost a few dollars more,
could boost box-office totals, moviegoers may stand to benefit most.
"I think the 3-D is really cool," Rogen said.
"I
loved it," said Kiefer Sutherland, who plays General W.R. Monger, the
Army officer in charge of the monsters. "I'm 42 years old, and there's
that one shot where the meteorites are heading toward Earth and they
slowly pass over your right shoulder, then slowly over your left
shoulder and above your head, and I still looked around to see where
they were coming from."
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