"They said we couldn't cut fast in the beginning. But we said we're making a hard-core action film. We have to be able to cut fast. We sent the technology team away and they came up with the Blend tool [to address that problem]. The reason you can't fast cut is if you have something really deep and then you cut to something coming out of the screen, you get that eye strain. So the Blend tool guides your eye from shot to shot during the cut and reduces the strain. We could cut fast and shallowed out the shots when they were on screen for 1.5 seconds.

"What was interesting about the test audience reaction [and the desire for more 3-D] was that Jeffrey [Katzenberg] told us to go in and break it. So we went in and found 10 or 12 places where we could really push the 3-D and out of that, four or five of them threw you right out of the movie. So we cut back and went back to the old version. But there were also a couple of places where it worked really great like Insecto shooting silk out at the camera, so the angle was changed."

Burgess points out some other subtle examples, too: "The shot where Susan has just grown to her new height and she's been drugged and falls onto the ground and reaches forward toward Derek with her hand. That's a shot that we lengthened and re-lensed to make sure that the hand was able to just hang out over the audience.

"There were a few places where we added shots to move the camera above things. For example, when the Quantonium [energy] is being sucked out of Susan in the extraction chamber and we wanted the goo to come from her up into camera."

The vfx team had to deal with a complex software and hardware setup to create the over-the-top visuals, with the added complication of 3-D.

At first, Ramasubramanian says it felt more like a hindrance than a creative tool. "But then there was a moment when we went to see an early explosion shot in the dailies room and everyone suddenly experienced a palpable difference and realized that the extra work was worth the effort. There were growing pains of learning how to use the stereo hardware (in partnership with HP and Intel) and setups at desks and software issues (in partnership with Autodesk using Maya) where you need to understand two camera techniques and then other techniques that had to be figured out later on. So if you have an object that is very reflective, for example, B.O.B, if the normals are changing too fast, it may be accurate in real life, but we can't leave it at that: we have to manage the left and right eye. We came up with tools where you could adjust how much depth there is in the reflection... we controlled the intraocular separation when computing reflections and refractions on B.O.B.

"Another thing was motion blur. If things blurred too much during an explosion, they became too transparent and you weren't able to place them in depth accurately. So we had to come up with ways of cheating the motion blur where we didn't let the streak get too transparent and preserved some of the opacity. There is a creative aspect to the whole thing. You have to decide what the stereo storyline is. But we found our sensibility through the process."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of VFXWorld and AWN.