[Philip Lelyveld comment: this story uses Transformers 3 as the launch point for a broader discussion of 3D with quotes from industry experts]
[excerpts]
In the run-up to the June 28 bow of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” Paramount and Michael Bay made it a selling point to tout that the pic was “shot in 3D.” The effort aimed to clearly differentiate the franchise’s latest installment from pics converted to 3D after lensing, a process that has generated growing ire on the part of moviegoers and contributed to lower grosses for 3D pics.
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Somewhere from 47% to 52% of [Transformers: Dark of the Moon] total running time was converted, depending on what shots are counted as “converted.” However, since some of the movie is all-CG, in fact less than half of the running time is truly “shot in 3D” — that is, captured with a stereoscopic camera.
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Lack of creative planning and the last-minute rush to convert movies to 3D has given rise to conversion’s bad rep, said Turner. “We’ve got to stop these 10-week-turnaround conversions. I spent almost a year on ‘Alice in Wonderland.’
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Legend3D topper Barry Sandrew said, “We actually spent a year and a significant amount of R&D just preparing for ‘Transformers 3,’ because this is the most vfx-heavy movie that’s ever been converted.”
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On a Web listserv, DreamWorks Animation global stereoscopic supervisor Phil McNally noted tartly, “A cardboard cutout head over a blurry background is NOT an interesting or creative depth composition. When you can intercut 2D shots into your sequences without anyone noticing this is a clue that your movie is NOT interesting in 3D.”
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Bay himself noted that “native shots are a little bit warmer, the roundness is just a slight bit better, but a movie audience just would not know the difference.”
The bottom line, said Turner, is that in order to justify the premium on 3D tickets and avoid leaving auds feeling cheated, “You’ve got to have a stereographer who’s willing to push it and know the limits, and you have to have a director who’s willing to cooperate in that situation and help design those 3D scenes.” Too often, he said, 3D is just something sent out to a vendor and the director just says, “It looks good to me.”
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Read the full story here: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118040081