Director Joe Johnston On Captain America 3D Conversion

Lets face it. The future is only in 3D because it offers a good stab at financial self-preservation for film studios. It is an effort to stop people pirating movies with video cameras and mobile phones and loss of revenue. I’ve seen enough of these new wave 3D movies (including Piranha 3D) to come to the conclusion it adds nothing to the experience other than audiences sit in the dark wearing stupid glasses.

Marvel recently announced both Thor and Captain America will be undergoing post-production 3D conversion surgery in time for their releases next year. Now 3D conversion is something of a bugbear with directors. Even Michael Bay thinks it looks shit.

Director Joe Johnston has recently been defending the choice to go with post-production conversion due to the technical issues of shooting 3D, explaining to Earth’s Mightiest:

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“The cameras and their necessary hard and software made up one of the most cumbersome and unwieldy packages I’ve ever had the misfortune to work with. I couldn’t move the camera at a high rate of speed, I couldn’t fit it through tight spaces, lens changes took 45 minutes…if the two lenses weren’t perfectly calibrated to the exact same focal plane, the shot was unwatchable. It’s harder to fast cut an action sequence because your eye needs time to re-establish the depth of each shot. The biggest drawback is that it would have added 30 days to the schedule. For all these reasons and more, I decided to shoot the picture 2D and convert it.”
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Continuing on with this theme, he said:

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“Conversion has gotten a bad rap because of pictures that have done it badly. If you shoot the movie and decide at the 11th hour to convert it to 3D, you don’t have the necessary information to process what we call the ‘left eye’. We’re shooting a whole separate pass on every setup to record the information necessary to convert to 3D in a seamless and undetectable way. When conversion is done right, you can’t tell the difference between it and full 3D. Everyone touts Avatar as the new standard for 3D. It’s beautifully done to be sure, but it wasn’t entirely shot in full 3D. The filmmakers wisely chose to shoot about 30 to 35 percent of the picture in 2D and convert. I challenge anyone, myself included, to watch the picture and spot the 2D conversions.”
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It’s interesting to hear an advocate for 3-D post-production surgery and George Miller plans on shooting Mad Max: Fury Road in a similar fashion. 2-D or not 2-D, that is the question!

Source: Cinematical.