Even though Battle for Terra has been marketed as a sci-fi adventure, it has a lot more on its mind than battles in space. Images courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate.

Battle for Terra (opening today from Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate) turns sci-fi convention on its head by telling its story from the perspective of the aliens whose beautiful planet is invaded by humans fleeing a dying Earth. It's essentially War of the Worlds turned on its head. Featuring the vocal talents of Evan Rachel Wood, Brian Cox, Luke Wilson, Justin Long, Amanda Peet, Chris Evans and Dennis Quaid, Battle for Terra marks the directorial debut of acclaimed short filmmaker and vfx artist Aristomenis Tsirbas (The Freak). The film (based on Tsirbas' short, Terra) is the first in a series of animated features produced by Snoot.

Battle for Terra made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and later won the Grand Prize for Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Ottawa International Animation Festival, among other festival awards for its environmental awareness and animation.

The Montreal-born Tsirbas recently discussed the challenges of making his first animated feature, including the stereoscopic 3-D preparation. The small production team was based in L.A. and split into two departments: character animation, which was created in Autodesk Maya, and the remainder, which was modeled, textured, lit and rendered in NewTek's LightWave 3D.

Bill Desowitz: What was the biggest production challenge?

Aristomenis Tsirbas: Simply getting this film made. It's an enormous task to make any film; creating an epic 3-D animated adventure on an independent budget (under $20 million) even more so. To achieve the seemingly impossible, we started with a highly detailed animatic that was completed prior to bringing in a full team. All assets of the animatic, including camera and lighting, were used as a first pass for production, and most of the big creative choices were nailed during this less expensive phase of production.

The film was finished in three stages: a festival version, which was rushed for the festivals and did really well and got distribution interest; the finished version, which took two more months; and the 3-D version. I had to open my big mouth and say I built this film to be converted to 3-D really easily. I didn't tell the investors because I didn't want to scare them away, but later on, after 3-D started getting really hot, the idea was enthusiastically embraced.

Peaceful co-existence and a high-regard for nature, including this beautiful flying whale, are at the heart of Terra.

BD: How was the 3-D handled?

AT: We actually re-rendered the film again with the proper parallax shift for true 3-D. We could've actually done it with the press of a button. Our rendering software, LightWave, has a stereoscopic button. That adds a second camera and you have control over the distance between the two cameras, which is called intraocular distance. But 3-D is so much more than that. You can control a lot more if you have a more robust system that's more than just two parallel cameras. So we took the current film and made that the left eye and added a right eye. So we really stayed away from a lot of 2-D tricks; we stayed away from rotoscoping, anything that couldn't be translated exactly in a different perspective. At least half the film was rendered in camera as well, so we would take a camera, duplicate it and then just re-render everything and that would be it. The majority of the work came from figuring out a pipeline that would allow us to have nuanced control of the 3-D and education ourselves about 3-D and come up with our own methodology/aesthetic.

BD: And what did you arrive at?

AT: We did research on the limitations of the brain and the eye. Fatigue. Things receded in the frame and stuck out at the same time. So we had to be careful that the images diverged a lot, meaning they diverged to create depth or they diverged to let your eyes cross. However, you can go pretty extreme if things fly by camera. For example, if there's snow or momentary motion that whips by. You don't want to have something floating in front of a frame compositionally that's not the center of attention. So we had a lot of over-the-shoulder shots in this film. Typically, we'd have the shoulder sticking out too much and take the focus off the subject, so sometimes we'd have to recompose, which we were able to do by going back to the files and we had full control over rendering the left eye as well. A percentage of the files were re-rendered fully for both left and right eye to compensate for some of the limitations of 3-D.

BD: And what do you think about the prospects for 3-D?

AT: I think, personally, even though it's not there now, that 3-D will be part of cinema [as a natural experience] the way sound and color were. I think what we need are more serious films in 3-D so it's not seen as a fad or a gimmick. Our 3-D is not necessarily conservative, but it doesn't poke out at you a lot. And that was important to us. Coraline was a good, intelligent, conservative use of 3-D. I think that Monsters vs. Aliens had excellent 3-D simply because it was made for 3-D from the beginning and they did their research and came up with a system on a much larger scale than what we did for Terra. Seeing it after completing the 3-D for our film, I was really able to appreciate their choices.