How 3ality Made Amazing Spider-Man's 3D Not Suck

[Crave Online]

Right by my home in Burbank, 3ality Technica is making 3D equipment for 3D movies to utilize. Their equipment is creating the 3D of The Hobbit, The Amazing Spider-Man, Jack the Giant Killer and The Great Gatsby. They recently acquired Element Technica who worked onPrometheus and Oz. 3ality Technica founder and CEO Steve Schklair sat down with me before the holidays to explain how these upcoming films are taking advantage of 3D.

The technical things that make ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ sling in 3D.

“Most of the requests on Spider-Man came from the director of photography, not Marc Webb. The director of photography dealt with the specific tweaks of ‘Well, we want to be able to hold this filter. We want to be able to change these lenses in this amount of time. We want this rig for this and this rig for that. We want to go wireless on steadicam. What can we do?’ It’s the tools that their crew is going to be using. In other words, ‘I want to do these driving shots but I don’t want to put six people in the camera car because that’s crazy. …

‘The Great Gatsby’s’ 3D driving shots.

“At the end of the day, even in Gatsby, there are driving scenes. So you’re going to have a camera car with a gyro stabilized head on it and a camera rig that’s going to want to go right next to the ground and up in the air. …

Baz Luhrmann got artistic about 3D.

“Baz Luhrmann spent time here, we talked a lot about 3D and its applications, showed him stuff and talked about ways in which it could be used as a communication tool, to help better tell the story. …

Selling out to Peter Jackson.

“Because they’re remote down in New Zealand and because this is the way Peter likes to work, everybody else rents their equipment. All features rent and then they return, but Peter has an empire down in New Zealand and he owns his gear, so they actually wanted to purchase the gear. …

Fixing Peter Jackson’s cable problem.

“We shot a test for Peter Jackson when he was looking at all the equipment available in the business before he chose to work with 3ality. The one thing he hated during our tests was the same thing everybody has to deal with, the tether between the camera system and the recording system. …

How 3ality makes 3D productions shoot faster.

“At this point what [Jackson]’s found, and you can see it in the video blog he did, and this is true of every movie that we’ve gotten involved with, they’re shooting on a schedule. Spider-Manwas a 2D schedule because they were going to convert from 2D to 3D in post. With the technology we designed, they’re all finishing on schedule and those are 2D schedules. …

3ality made it possible for ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ to avoid post-converting!

“It was a last minute decision to originate in 3D as opposed to do post 3D, but it was very dependent on our systems because we’d worked with Sony technology long enough. ….

Read the full story here: http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/181087-how-3ality-made-amazing-spider-mans-3-d-not-suck