This is part of Eric’s live coverage of the Siggraph 2008 Festival in Los Angeles as it appears on DigitalContentProducer’s LiveBlog. Check it out for the full details and all of Eric’s articles.

A lot of focus this year at Siggraph has been on stereoscopic 3D and its emergence as a new language of filmmaking. If 3D is a new way of making movies, then the vast visual effects team that worked on Speed Racer discovered a reinvention of 2D filmmaking.

Visual Effects Supervisor John Gaeta calls the style pioneered on Speed Racer many things. Among them: “virtual cinematography,” “photo-anime,” and “2 1/2 D” layering. When he and Dan Glass first started working on the project, it was a liberating experience to force themselves to let go of the need for any kind of photorealistic element. This quality is something ingrained into any visual-effects artist worth his salt from the get go. Letting go of that instinct is like asking a cat to ignore a mouse.

The production panel this morning on Speed Racer was about a 1/3 as full as yesterday’s effects talk on Cloverfield and Iron Man. More than anything, that speaks to Warner Bros.’ failure as a studio to promote such a pioneering film. Getting a close-up look behind the way images were manipulated and layered by a visual-effects team that spanned 14 different effects houses and completed 2,000 effects shots in six months was a real treat.

In their quest to create a live-action interpretation of Japanese anime, Gaeta and Glass first looked at the title sequence of the original animated TV show. The animation may be crude but its budget limitations often forced the ’60s series to get creative with things like wacked-out perspectives and surrealistic backgrounds. Mimicking that creativity was something the supervisors encouraged for all of the houses who worked on the project including BUF, Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Industrial Light & Magic, who all had representatives on the panel.

Rather than depicting reality, the team embarked on a journey to create a new form of layered unreality. By shooting 360-degree panoramas of locations all around the world and bringing them back to life as layer upon layer of greenscreen backgrounds, the visual-effects artists acted as virtual cinematographers, simulating all kinds of impossible camera angles and settings. The location bubbles-as they called them-would be subject to all kinds of manipulation such as sphere distortion, pulling focus, lightning-fast zooms, and lens changing.

Digital Domain’s Kim Libreri talked about how his team was responsible for creating completely CGI cars that were virtually lit with a liquid look that would reflect the car’s surroundings as it sped down the track. This image-based lighting technology contributed to the film’s hyper-real look.

Simon Vanesse from BUF elaborated on the challenges of creating 2D images for things like smoke, which is an element that most effects crews can spend months trying to make look as 3D as possible. Vanesse says that BUF’s creations moved like 3D images, but were created specifically to look flat.

Industrial Light & Magic’s John Knoll, who supervised 38 shots in one sequence (the introduction of Racer X), was also on the panel and spoke about how the challenge of staying away from photorealism was way out of his comfort zone. He imagined the frame was an illustration and asked himself how he would color it in. After going with a severely saturated color scheme, he got the comment back from Gaeta and Glass: not saturated enough. At that point, rather than making just some of the colors extreme, Knoll moved the overall saturation average up way higher.

Kevin Mack from Sony Image Pictureworks was responsible for three sequences, all of them racing moments. He was happy, he says that all the people who had worked on the movie before he came on board had already figured out the universe they were creating in, even if Gaeta and Glass didn’t want to admit it yet. “When you’re doing something that’s never been done, you don’t exactly know you’re there yet,” he says.

As production design and cinematography become more and more the realm of the visual-effects teams, virtual cinematography will become more common. In Speed Racer, Gaeta says, the artists were using “expressive effects” the same way an anime artist will heighten emotion, prioritizing that aspect over a simple approximation of reality.

It’s a shame that the film’s lackluster box office performance will almost guarantee no 3D transfer in the near future because, as Gaeta told me after the session, he originally envisioned the movie as the ultimate View-Master experience. To have layers of flat images in stereoscopic 3D would truly be 2 1/2 D.

Tags: siggraph 2008, The Virtual Cinematography of "Speed Racer"

This is part of Eric’s live coverage of the Siggraph 2008 Festival in Los Angeles as it appears on DigitalContentProducer’s LiveBlog. Check it out for the full details and all of Eric’s articles.

“Live-action 3D is the future/Teach it well and let it lead the way,” Whitney Houston once sang, I believe. Oops, wrong bad joke. The big joke among people who make 3D stereoscopic films is that it is way more work than making a regular 2D film because you have to make the same film twice.

This summer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was shot in stereo with dual Sony HDC-950 HD cameras mounted on Pace Technologies‘ 3D HD rigs. The movie’s Visual-Effects Supervisor Christopher Townsend was on hand to explain that there is no cheating space when you’re filming live-action 3D. You can’t use any of the solutions normally associated with 2D movies, such as flat matte paintings for backgrounds, 2D compositing, or any 2D cueing traicks at all. Journey to the Center of the Earth is the directorial debut of longtime visual-effects supervisor Eric Brevig and the movie was the first ever full-length stereoscopic motion picture shot in HD to be released in digital 3D.

Townsend made our eyes hurt in his demonstration. A lot. In illustrating the challenge of making good 3D that is dynamic and easy on the eyes, he showed some examples of bad 3D. Stereo occlusion and mismatched left/right focus scenes of Brendan fraser swimming were enough to strain the eyes and hurt the brain. Since Hollywood doesn’t release any 3D without a serious attention to detail and quality, it was kind of cool to realize what 3D theater viewing would be like if it wasn’t done correctly. Over an extened period of time in a full-length film, I can see the brink madness being on the horizon.

Speaking of madness, there comes a time when you just get sick and tired of putting the glasses on and taking them off over and over again. “Here’s one example,” Townsend would say, “Please put your glasses on.” Ten seconds later, the lights come up and he brings up another topic. Then its lights down, glasses on again for another example. It’s a good thing most 3D movies require the use of the glasses throughout the entire film because when I’m engrossed in the complicated moral dilemmas of a Brendan Fraser movie, I don’t want to be thinking about my 3D specs the whole time. Of course, this being Siggraph, our glasses were the coolest of the cool. The staff handed out some pretty stylish Ray-Ban-looking 3D glasses, so the conference hall was filled with an army of Risky Business-era Tom Cruises all moving their arms in sync.

Townsend echoed his colleagues’ enthusiasm for the burgeoning new format, which seems to be just on the bubble with catching on in a mainstream way every year when he says that the transition from 2D filmmaking to 3D filmmaking will someday be looked at historically. “It will be as important as the transition from silent to sound or black-and-white to color,” he says.

An impressive clip from U2 3D was shown by that film’s Visual Effects and Imaging Supervisor, David Franks, who commented on the need for immersive surround sound. Also, a strange and wonderful Bjork music video for “Wanderlust” was shown by its creators (known as Encyclopedia Pictura) that blended CGI effects with puppetry and live action. A 7ft. long beast with three people inside of it was shot on greenscreen to blend with a colorful “river god” and waterfalls that flowed like long strands of rope. This completely misses the point of this panel, but you view the entire video here.

Is stereo worth all the extra trouble? Townsend says yes, that the technology won’t just be used for action movies in the near future. Live-action 3D should totally immerse you in the story, which is why he went so far as to say that he looks forward to the 3D version of My Dinner With Andre. A 3D image of Wallace Shawn burned in my brain for 90 minutes? Now that’s scary.

Tags: Journey to the Center of the Earth, live-action 3d, siggraph 2008

Last night I went to the enormous Nokia Theater in in downtown Los Angeles where hundreds of Siggraph attendees and Hollywood filmmakers gathered to pay tribute to legendary Hollywood effects guru Stan Winston, who died this past June.  Watching the promo reel of Winston’s work made me realize something that Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Ken Walston said was right on:

Winston created memorable moments in movies even when they films themselves were not so good.

 ”He was fearless,” says James Cameron. Stan Winston always had the charisma to talk nervous producers into letting his creature effects and make-up studio create expensive, experimental visual effects for their movies. Cameron should know, because some of Winston’s most famous and groundbreaking work was done for Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

The man left a huge legacy of classic,  award-winning visual effects moments from movies such as Jurassic Park, Aliens, A.I., Iron Man, Predator, and Edward Scissorhands. Jody Duncan, author of “The Winston Effect” interviewed Cameron and some of Winston’s other collaborators on a couch in front of the giant movie screen about the keys to Winston’s success.

Flanked by a life-sized Iron Man suit and an Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator statue, actor Matt Winston says that his father always knew he wasn’t creating merely a special effect. In his eyes, “he created the star of the film.” He also mentioned that his Dad loved to terrify him as a little kid, dressing up as ghouls and werewolves and hiding in dark doorways or popping up outside his window while he was trying to sleep at night.

Duncan stressed that Winston was always pushing boundaries in creature and make-up effects, and wanted that kind of work to be recognized as the art form it is. Shane Mahan from Stan Winston Studio agreed. “Stan always wanted to do what hadn’t been done before,” he says.

That included embracing the new digital age of special effects when most traditional-based effects supervisors could only feel threatened by it. In 1994, Digital Domain was founded by Winston, Cameron, and former Industrial Light & Magic exec Scott Ross. The top-notch effects house is still thriving today.

A screening of the new Blu-ray Disc master of Terminator 2 on the big screen followed the tribute. When speaking of Winston’s Oscar-winning work on that movie, Cameron says that his fearlessness was infectious. “Everyone was terrified of having [such an important character like] the T1000 be CG,” he says. Winston, at least outwardly, was confident it would work. Of the 150 visual-effects shots in the movie, a whopping 43 of them were CGI.

Cameron also mentioned that he learned how to build a team from watching Winston.

Stan Winston Studio, says Mahan, will be renamed Legacy Effects, in tribute to its former namesake, and continue to forge ahead in creating physical effects and make-up design.

Tags: James Cameron, siggraph 2008, Stan Winston, tribute

Well, it’s 2 am in Los Angeles, and now seems like a pretty good time to run down my big day at the Siggraph 2008 International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies. I walked through the big technolgical dream/nightmare that is the main show floor many times today, but I can’t stop too long to gaze into any one exhibit because I’ve been racing from panel to screening to competition to computer. Blogging for DigitalContentProducer.com has been great fun and its given me an opportunity to see exclusive clips of upcoming major motion pictures, hear the filmmakers themselves discuss what they feel the future of the industry is, and given me the night to go to parties and special LA-only activities like Grindhouse Film Festival night at the New Beverly Theater.

During the Animated 3D Cinema: Imaginary Worlds Brought to Life panel, Phil “Captain 3D” McNally from DreamWorks Animation showed clips from a newly 3D-izes “Kung Fu Panda.” I haven’t seen the 2D version yet, but what was fascinating about this was how much different the actual cut of one scene was to make it work with 3D stereoscoping. In order for the viewer’s eyes to adjust, one action sequence itself had less cuts and longer takes, resulting in a scene that was 14 percent longer than the original.

He also showed a very funny clip from DreamWorks’ upcoming “Monsters vs. Aliens,” which besides being a spoof of giant monster/’50s sci-fi movies, is also the first film to be authored by the studio in 3D from its inception. After a giant alien robot lands in the desert, a U.S. president (who looks like a horn-rimmed Ira Glass by way of Bruce Campbell) bent on showcasing his strength climbs a giant staircase to be the first man to approach the robot. His first choice to make contact? The five-note keyboard pregression from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F” theme from “Beverly Hills Cop,” of course. Read more here.

There is an entire 3D symposium happening at Siggraph 2008, as many in the industry feel that this is the future of filmmaking. (Many in the industry also have a lot of cash riding on this prediction as well.) One thing all of the speakers I saw today agreed on was the need for story to come first. Duh. Sure, that’s kind of a given, but I suppose it was nice to be reassured that Hollywood knows a couple of fast-flying objects that seem to jump out at the screen every couple minutes will not be enough to keep us movie fans in the seats for their 3D movies for very long. 

If that’s the case, though, why was Robert Neuman, stereoscopic supervisor at Walt Disney Animation the first one to mention it? The movie he was promoting, “Bolt,” looks like just the kind of harmless kiddie fare that is more concerned with following a formula than it is about an original story. A talking dog (voiced by John Travolta) meets up with a talking cat and a talking gopher (or some cute furry creature of that nature) to save the dog’s owner? Is it just me or have you had enough of talking animal moves? There are a whole lot of other things out there to animate with new technology besides freaking animals. The 3D looked good, but no thanks.

One movie I’ll be lining up to see either this fall or next spring is Henry Selick’s “Coraline,” based on the book by Neil Gaiman. Selick is the stop-motion freak who gave us “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach,” and from the clips I saw, this meticulously pieced-together picture is going to be dark, spooky fun. Brian Van’t Hul, the visual effects supervisor for “Coraline,”  was on hand to answer questions about why his group, Laika, would work on such a painstakingly long animation process when computers can do virtually the same thing so much faster. The work itself is actually its own reward, he said. A tactile, visual experience during production will surely rub off on the final product, and shooting with one only camera breeds experimentation.

Either way, it’s refreshing to see something that isn’t as smooth and perfect as straight computer animation and someone taking chances with a different kind of story. The clips I saw featured some bizarre stuff such as walking insect chairs, sad ghost children with button eyes, and an acrobatic marching band that hides in the sleeve of a giant circus ringleader. Read more here.

More to come from Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles….

Tags: bolt, computer animation festival, coraline, monsters vs. aliens, siggraph 2008