Life Of Pi Chapter 22

How Life of Pi made 3D work

Richard Parker: Conceived in 3D

Afterward James Cameron crammed the spectacular globe of Pandora into our eyeballs in 3D with Avatar, Hollywood has been falling over itself making films in three dimensions.

The results have been a little hit and miss, with 3D ticket sales plummeting in the U.s.a., and pundits like Danny Boyle and Christopher Nolan challenge the format is less than spectacular.

Co-ordinate to Bill Westenhofer, who won the Academy Award for visual effects at this year'south Oscars for his piece of work on Life of Pi, the trick with 3D is to make information technology a crucial role of the entire filmmaking process.

"I'one thousand going to exist honest about something - I was not a 3D fan going into this motion picture," Westenhofer tells TechRadar in a incomparably 2D Skype interview.

"I loved Avatar, but much like you were implying, there are a lot of films that I didn't demand to run into in 3D, second was fine."

As a visual artist tasked non only with creating a virtual tiger that plays a crucial part in the film, but doing it in 3D, Westenhofer is well placed to describe the challenges of working in the 3D format.

Needless to say, the extra dimension adds a lot of extra work.

"3D is difficult, especially for visual effects, at that place'south a lot of things that are significantly harder to do. Compositing, for example," he explains.

The crucial element, according to Westenhofer, and the thing that made Life of Pi successful in 3D where so many other movies failed, was the vision shown by director Ang Lee.

"I complained forth the style as we were doing information technology, but what set this apart was [that] the moving-picture show was conceived from the become go as a 3D movie. Ang took a lot of fourth dimension to study 3D, he wanted to put his own mark on it, he wanted to tell a drama with 3D, and he conceived the sequences, thinking about how 3D would tell the story better," he says.

Decease by a thousand cuts

Co-ordinate to Westenhofer, the large thing that many filmmakers fail to understand is that a lot of the filmmaking techniques employed in 2d films don't necessarily translate to 3D.

"A practiced example of [Ang'southward approach] is that almost modern films have about 2000 cuts in a two hour run time. Life of Pi has only 960," he explains.

This approach leads to longer scenes, which allows viewers to immerse themselves in a scene rather than trying to take in a lot of information quickly.

"There are a lot of really long scenes Ang lets you blot. 3D is something that y'all can take more time to absorb a frame. At that place were no gimmicks - we weren't trying to constantly throw things at the screen. We but wanted to have a comfy representation," he admits.

Bringing the pain

There are plenty of people who discover 3D a painful experience to spotter, whether it'due south considering they can't physically translate 3D or due to some for of binocular dysphoria. But Westenhofer claims that for a filmmaker, role of making 3D work involves thinking almost the viewing experience on the big screen.

"Correct now for yous to brand 3D film y'all have to actually think almost the largest projection," he explains, "because the the i thing that falls apart [for 3D] is something chosen the vergence, which stops in the far distance."

Vergence refers to how your eyes focus on objects. If an object is close, your eyes converge, rotating towards eachother to allow you lot to see the object clearly.

If an object is further away, it diverges, generally until the point that your eyes are looking straight ahead.

Because 3D movies are essentially tricking your encephalon into seeing three dimensions though, it's possible for filmmakers to make your eyes diverge fifty-fifty further in guild to try and focus on an object.

"If [the vergence] is wider autonomously that the width of your eyes, your eyes are going to bend outwards to fuse the two [different images], and it hurts. Nosotros learned pretty quickly during effects daily viewing sessions that you could hurt someone. If there's a mis-render in 1 of the eyes, everyone's ripping their glasses off," Westenhofer explains.

Having spent the past decade editing some of Australia's leading engineering science publications, Nick'due south passion for the latest gadgetry is matched simply by his love of watching Australia crush England in the rugby.