Eleven vfx houses were commissioned to create more than 1,000 vfx shots for Shark Boy and Lava Girl. All images courtesy of Dimension Films.

You’d think after the critical and box office success of adapting Sin City for the screen, filmmaker Robert Rodriquez would have taken a break before his next project… that is, unless you’re familiar with Rodriquez’s manic work ethic. If you are, then it won’t come as a shock to find out that his latest film, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D is appearing a mere two months after Sin City hit theaters in April. The family friendly flick, written by Rodriguez and his kids, charts the adventures of a 10-year-old outcast (Cayden Boyd) that prefers spending time with his two imaginary friends — Shark Boy (Taylor Lautner) and Lava Girl (Taylor Dooley). His life takes an amazing turn when he’s swept into their outlandish world for a real adventure.

Both Sin and Shark Boy were actually in production at the same time last year and both were created using Rodriquez’s trademark elements of almost exclusive greenscreen shooting, intense CGI and visual effects work, and in the case of Shark Boy, improved anaglyph-based 3D technology. The films also shared many of the same visual effect houses, which created the unique and awe-inspiring environments showcased in both films. Eleven vfx houses were commissioned for Shark Boy and Lava Girl to create more than 1,000 effects shots seen in the film. Industry leaders and frequent Rodriguez collaborators Hybride, CafeFX, The Orphanage and Post Logic worked with Rodriguez project newbies — Hydraulx, Industrial Light & Magic, R!ot Pictures, Tippett Studios, Amalgamated Pixels and Intelligent Creatures — to make all the sequences come together as one film. At the center of that effort was Rodriquez’s own Austin, Texas-based company, Troublemaker Digital. Comprised of a small yet prolific team of artists, they collaborate closely with Rodriquez in all stages of production on his films, helping to blueprint and expedite his increasingly complex visions for the screen.

Shark Boy and Lava Girl marks Rodriguez’s first foray back into 3D filmmaking since Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over in 2003. In that time, 3D film technology has changed a bit, with new HD cameras and improved CGI platforms, but the lack of digital projection in movie theaters means the 3D finished product is still grounded in the old school anaglyph method, where the red and blue (or cyan) channels are split and then re-assembled, so the image appears three-dimensional when viewed through 3D glasses with red and blue or red and green lenses. The Troublemaker Digital team learned a lot from their previous work on Spy Kids 3-D and applied those lessons to Shark Boy and Lava Girl, according to Alex Toader, 3D visual artist at Troublemaker. “Spy Kids 3-D was very successful and Robert is a big fan of 3D, so we always knew a project like this would come down again. We were mentally prepared,” he adds.

3D visual artist Alex Toader (left) and Chris Olivia, previs supervisor at Troublemaker Digital, learned a lot from their previous work on Spy Kids 3-D and applied those lessons to Shark Boy and Lava Girl.

“We actually felt much more comfortable with the 3D anaglyph process and making a 3D movie,” Toader continues “We changed from Maya to XSI right before Sin City. When we came into Shark Boy and Lava Girl, we were still learning the package, so that was the biggest challenge.” Chris Olivia, previs supervisor at Troublemaker, adds, “The experience on Spy Kids 3-D was brand new for most of us who had never worked on stereoscopic imagery before. It was a great learning experience finding out what works better in 3D and what doesn’t. The philosophy is basically two images. You don’t really change the artistic approach too much. You figure out what is going to be split apart and the limitations of the anaglyph system, where you use the red and cyan filters. It’s just not as clean as a polarized 3D, like they use with IMAX. It really prepared us for Shark Boy.”

“On Shark Boy/Lava Girl, we had time for pre-production,” Toader adds. “We had to create the world and the look for things. Some things we hit right off the bat and some things we had to go into deeper discussions and go more in-depth on what worked for the particular scene. Some things work naturally in the greenscreen and 3D process and some environments or characters or visual effects, sometimes you have to work with them more. Robert’s also more aware of some of the issues and decisions that he has to make immediately. The more he knows about the process, about a program or the visual effects, it opens up his eyes for tying in other things and that opens the door, even more, for creativity.”

Toader admits that working on a 3D film has its own set of particular challenges. “On a regular feature, you can do all kinds of things, but when you design for a 3D picture, you have to keep a lot of things in mind, like if it makes sense to design a prop that might not be seen or even if a part of the environment may hurt your eyes looking at it in 3D. It’s an ongoing process that is easier in some aspects and more complicated in others. For example, in this film, there is the complexity of characters and their interactions in completely CG environments. There are complicated camera moves and added particle effects, and everything happens twice for both eyes and everything has to look 3D. It’s not as simple as it looks on paper.”

Olivia concurs: “First and foremost, we create these really cool worlds and try to come up with the most interesting visual environments we can with cool effects. On top of that, Robert was always saying, ‘Make sure it looks cool in 3D!’ So we always made sure scenes had a lot of depth and there aren’t a lot of big flat areas with the same color. Texture helps the 3D effect. We’d have a background and it was a matter of figuring out what we want to come out at the camera. Most of it is driven by the story, but a lot of times we’d add something in there, maybe like an ice crystal poking out in the foreground, to give that extra sense of 3D.”