Masterclass: James Cameron And Jon Landau Teach Bleeding Cool The Dos And Donts Of 3D Conversion
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Jon Landau: You can say to a movie studio “Let me pay the bill” at dinner and they’ll say “No” because that’s what they do. Studios are in the business of saying no. They were sceptical about this conversion.
It cost $18 million dollars plus the cost to open and market the movie because in my mind, it’s not a re-release, it’s a new release. When people go back to see this in the theatres, it’s going to be a new experience for them.
But we did our due diligence. We took one minute of film from 5 different scenes in the movie and had 15 different companies convert it, and we stood back and watched all the versions. We found a company, Stereo D that we found we could work with, and we could improve what they were doing so that the end result would be something acceptable to us and creatively we’d feel comfortable. If we can say “Jim Cameron is proud of this” then we’re happy.
James Cameron: Stereo D had their in house artists and then their supervisors, and then there was my team who would receive the shots as works in progress and they would kick them back and turn them around five or six times before they ever came to me and I’d say what’s not working, and where we needed more or less depth or volume.
Shots were converted all out of order, then we’d view complete scenes, then compete reels. Sometimes it would bump a little bit as we went along so we’d adjust.
I found that in wide angle shots it was ...
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