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It Came from the Third Dimension

Apr 9, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

DreamWorks rethinks 3D production with Monsters vs. Aliens.

           

Directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon combined their visions for scary monsters and a Dirty Dozen adventure with CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg's push for 3D for DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens.

By the time Jeffrey Katzenberg announced last year that DreamWorks Animation would forevermore author all of its computer-animated feature films in a native 3D format (dubbed InTru 3D and developed in partnership with Intel), Monsters vs. Aliens was well into development as a 2D project. The feature began life as a melding of concepts between directing partners Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon. Vernon yearned to make an animated 1950s-style scary-monster picture, while Letterman had been pushing a sort of Dirty Dozen adventure concept. Katzenberg put them together, and the resulting story is Monsters vs. Aliens.

Only well after the project went into development, however, did Katzenberg drop the bomb that the picture would have to be authored and exhibited, wherever possible, in stereoscopic 3D. The two directors, Producer Lisa Stewart, and other principals involved with the project promptly took "a collective deep breath," in Stewart's words. "We weren't sure what that meant," she says. "We were all a little afraid that he was asking us to add a tremendous amount of 3D gimmicks."

Letterman says the ensuing months were a bit overwhelming as filmmakers battled to hone their idea in such a way that 3D would serve the story rather than the other way around; learned to understand and accept a new workflow and the cultural changes related to that workflow; and labored to get everything done on time despite the fact that DreamWorks was continually retrofitting its animation pipeline for 3D while the movie was being made.

Katzenberg has long been an advocate for stereoscopic 3D as a mainstream digital cinematic experience. He convinced his filmmaking colleagues that his intention was to find a way for them to make Monsters vs. Aliens as they envisioned, with numerous action beats—normally a foe of the stereoscopic format due to quick-cutting issues—rather than the gimmick some feared. (There is one clever 3D gimmick that has nothing to do with the story. In the opening shot of the movie—which was inserted tongue-in-cheek by filmmakers to mock the notion of 3D tomfoolery—the DreamWorks logo transforms into a film burn of the 2D image melting away, bursts out of the 2D world, and re-forms itself in eye-catching 3D space.)

Thus, the DreamWorks technology team took on a mission to provide whatever filmmakers needed to execute their story while viewing it in the stereoscopic format throughout all phases of production. Their accomplishments include the development of a new blending tool designed to meld deep and shallow shots to allow for visualizing fast cuts without leaving viewers with eye strain; creation of a new 3D-viewing tool inside Maya; creation of an enhanced proprietary 3D video player dubbed "Mov Play" that permitted Avid editors to play back and watch material in 3D as they cut in one of several stereo formats; the buildup of stereoscopic viewing stations all around the studio; desktop 3D monitors for animators; and liberal borrowing (with permission and encouragement) from James Cameron's Avatar project to execute a moving virtual camera in 3D space during production.

"[Without getting too specific,] numbers did have to get shifted around [in the movie's budget] to support the studio in encompassing a new 3D pipeline, and some of that was a guessing game since we had never done this before," Stewart says.

Katzenberg estimates the implementation of these changes added about 10 percent to the cost of making one of DreamWorks' CG movies today.

"When anything new comes along—and in this case, everyone involved had to adapt to a new language—there is a learning curve to it," Katzenberg says. "Then you get to the other side of the learning curve, and you have to maintain the quality and efficiency of the work, so all those costs go up exponentially. Right now, it's more expensive [to author a CG feature film stereoscopically] than to do it with live action. But for us, it's more exciting and creates a movie-theater experience that is special and unique, beyond what consumers can see at home and different even from [films traditionally produced in 2D and then converted to 3D]."

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