As long as there’s some money to be made, the 3D movie gimmick isn’t going to vanish overnight. Plenty of films have been darkened in some post-production 3D conversion that was less than choppy, while only a handful of movies have actually managed to make good use of that extra dimension. Unfortunately, most of them, are Step Up movies. Guillermo Del Toro’s upcoming giant robot apocalypse and massive monster slugfest, Pacific Rim, is busy shooting, and the man has also gone 3D, something which he spoke about, presumably through gritted teeth and with a gun to his head (Citation needed).
When Guilermo Del Toro first debuted his Pacific Rim footage, one aspect of it that really had the fans singing his praises was his insistence that the movie would not be converted to 3D, due to issues surrounding the scale of the behemoth mechs and monsters in his flick.
And that remained a solid fact during production, until last week that is, when news came around that Pacific Rim would indeed be getting the ol’ 3D post-conversion once production had wrapped up.
And according to Del Toro and his STYD interview, this is all thanks to Warner Bros acquiescing to his demands;
What happened was, in the weeks and months following Comic-Con, what I asked from the studio was to agree to four points that I wanted to do. The more the ILM shots arrived, the more I realized that there were only a few shots that would miniaturize. I asked the studio, number one, that we would not hyper-stereo-lize the thing.That we would not force 3D on the beauty shots. That we would keep the giant dimensions. They agreed. Number two, they agreed to something very unusual. Normally a conversion takes a few weeks. I asked to start it immediately so we could take the full 40 weeks to do the conversion. As an example, ‘Titanic’ took about 50 weeks to convert.The final thing that I asked that they agreed to, which was amazing, was that I asked them to give me an extra budget, which is considerable, to actually have ILM composite the shots that are CG native 3D.
We’re not giving elements. ILM is giving the composite in 3D from the get-go. That’s a huge, huge element. Now I’m going to be involved in supervising it. What can I tell you? I changed my mind. I’m not running for office. I can do a Romney.
ILM producing the 3D shots? Now that, ain’t so bad actually. In most cases, a 3D conversion is a rush job that drops the brightness and adds in unnecessary nausea, but when done right, it can indeed augment a film, especially when given enough time to do so.
ILM recently gave a 3D job to the first Star Wars prequel, and by all accounts, it was a bang up effort that actually made it worthwhile to rewatch Jar Jar Binks rape the legacy of Buster Keaton again.
Still, while not everyone is happy about films being 3Derized, if it has to be done, at least do it well.
Last Updated: September 25, 2012
