Animation Goes 3-D
More than 50 years after its debut, 3-D movies are an idea whose time has finally come -- and nowhere is that more apparent than in animation. It's animation -- CG, in particular -- that to date has made the best use of 3-D and is in many ways best suited to the technique with its 3D virtual space.
Interestingly, CG-animated features themselves have been around for barely more than a decade. And as the digital technology that creates the 2-D animation has rapidly matured, 3-D adds yet another wrinkle to the challenge. With every major animation studio now wagering on 3-D as a key to theatrical success, they are each adapting it into their production pipelines in different ways and distinctly working out its aesthetic impact on the final product. However, there is a definite View-Master approach being adopted throughout the industry instead of the more gimmicky in your face reliance.
And that includes Henry Selick's Coraline from Laika, which has the distinction of being the first stop-motion feature shot in 3-D. "When you're doing stop-motion and weighing it against the other formats, you're trying to determine its strengths and weaknesses," Selick offers. "For me, the strengths are that it's all real stuff: it's all real props and miniaturized but the stuff really exists and 3-D captures that. This feels like we finally captured that experience of what you get when you finally visit the film in production... And we actually designed the film for 3-D, changing the shapes of sets and so forth... it was more about bringing people into the space as Coraline is seduced by this Other World that's full of magic in a place that she's starting to feel real good about."
But without a doubt, DreamWorks Animation has been at the forefront of pushing the 3-D envelope at the behest of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who believes 3-D is the future of animation. After being wowed by The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D, the DreamWorks Animation chief has been preaching the gospel of stereoscopic immersion, suggesting that it's more about extending the proscenium than breaking it. Thus, beginning with the March 27 release of Monsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks has integrated 3-D completely into its production process.
Phil McNally, stereoscopic supervisors at DreamWorks, had worked on 3-D projects where the process was added in post and was drawn back by the chance to integrate 3-D into the film at an early stage.
"What got me excited about coming back to DreamWorks was Jeffrey Katzenberg's explicit promotion of the idea of authoring in 3-D, which is something that is a creative decision and has all the creative opportunities separate from doing 3-D in post," he says.
McNally says achieving this meant getting 3-D tools into the hands of every artist so they could see their work in stereo at every stage. Artists begin using 3-D at the layout stage, with the earliest blocking of animation and camera work being done in Maya or DreamWorks' in-house software.
"We see the scene in 3-D, in stereo, on the desktop so we can see what we're doing," McNally says.
That's required the studio to come up with some of its own tools, even as applications like the compositing package Nuke have begun to add stereo tools. Stereo capability also had to be added to the editorial stage, so that footage could be viewed in 3-D through Avid. McNally says the stereo work is essentially camera work, and 3-D becomes more of an extra component at every step rather than a separate process.
"I kind of made the joke one time that it's a bit like having some animators that just animate in X and Y and then pass it on to another animator who moves it in Z. And of course it doesn't work like that all," he says. "Animation is, at least in the CG world, is a 3D process already. So in theory, there isn't an extra Z-component in the pipeline, it should just be that each individual artist is working in X, Y and Z all at the same time."
The difficulty with that is that few animators have much expertise in working with 3-D, and there is therefore a tendency to max out the 3-D effect. 3-D also exposes cheats that work in 2-D.
"A very typical thing would be eye line or the placement of characters in relation to each other or objects that look completely fine in 2-D, but when you put 3-D space into that scene you then unravel the fact that there was a cheat going on there," he says. "Or maybe that someone was closer to the camera and someone is further away and they're supposed to be looking at each other."
McNally says he will do a final pass and make sure the work is up to snuff and dialed in to where it needs to be. That's the last of three 3-D passes, starting with a "70%" pass.
"We call it 70% because the craft of the stereo settings needs to only be 70% good enough to be able to passed to animation," he says. "It's really only once animation is done that we can really dial in the final settings for the stereo."
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