Lionsgate & Crest Animation‘s Alpha & Omega was initially designed as a regular 3D animated feature. Even as production got into swing, the producers felt that delivering the feature in stereoscopy would be a tremendous value add for their audiences and would add to the entertainment and viewer experience. Now Crest was working on its first feature and it had never done stereoscopy before. Nevertheless, the studio and its talented team carried out a few tests and the results came out pretty good, encouraging the producers to take the leap of faith and take Alpha & Omega the stereo way.
Ashutosh Jayakar, the stereoscopy supervisor of Alpha & Omega says, “When it came to stereoscopy, we were beginning with a blank slate, as in we had never ever done any stereo work before this. But still we had the confidence that we could make it happen, At Crest its been a legacy that we always willingly accept challenges thrown to us and have always succeeded in delivering the end results. Also it was an interesting challenge, a skillset and knowledge that would be handy in the future as well, because stereo is here to stay. Its just like the silent era movies transitioning to sound, similarly regular3d to stereo is happening now, but it will be a great success once its possible to view it without the use of the 3d glasses”
Taking challenges and achieving greater heights has been the hallmark of Crest And here‘s how they went about the stereo.
“The decision to do stereo happened when close to 70-80% of the pre production had already been done, even production had gone into swing. Since this was such a critical project and we did not want to falter at any stage, though the confidence levels were high we still decided to hire a 3D specialist and zeroed onto Brian Gardner who had done couple of stereo movies and was reputed for his stereo knowledge. The deal was for him to come here and train us and then our team would take it from there and apply their learnings on to the film‘s production. Brian was here for around 3 weeks, he provided us with a stereo camera script which he had specially generated for this film”
Once we got well versed with the nuances of stero, we had to now come back to the drawing board and start designing the depth script for the film. The depth script depicts the changes and the flow of the depth in various sequences in sync with the story line of the film, resonating with the emotions and dramatic graph of the movie.
“We had with us, the animatics and few portions of the movie which had been rendered fully which we used to decide on the depth of the film.”
“The depth script involves a lot of calculations and since we were basing a lot of it on our perceptions of what the best depth would be for specific scenes, it involved a lot of trial and error to get the desired output. We had to ensure there was no loss of volume and that there was no eye strain in the results. One of the fundamental parameters of stereo is to ensure that the interaxial distance between the two cameras (which depict the left and right eye) should not exceed 65mm.”
We used parallel cameras instead of converging cameras the reason being converging cameras give a keystoning effect (vertical parallax) and we did not want to experiment too much as we were already tight on schedule. A lot of the lenses used in the shots were decided keeping the aesthetics and the beauty of the scenes for a regular 3D animated film. When stereo came in, a new challenge posed was that the volumes in each scene had to be more precise. The solution lay in the usage of multi rig cameras where different elements of a shot were shot on different layers with different parallax. We also had to animate the parallax within the same shot, most of the times.”
“Since cost wise it was not feasible for us to have 3D Display monitors for all the artists working on the stereo, we deployed the anaglyph method of viewing stereo. Once the first pass was done we viewed it as one single sequence on the Stereo Display monitors. We were working on a Maya 8.5 pipeline which did not have in built stereo tools like the 2009 one does, so we had to render out right and left play blasts separately and comp it outside Maya”
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Since the Matte Paintings were done for a regular 3D movie, we had to convert them into 3D Mattes which we did as per a technique that Brian shared with us.
A key point of stereo is that the left and right has to match with full pixel precision, at times because scenes had been rendered already as per regular 3D animation, we had to re-render the left eye again for most of the dynamics, particles and reflection shots. Some of the shots that looked like good stereo in anaglyph, did not turn out that well when viewed on 3D monitors, rather then re rendering those shots we manipulated the layers in comp itself to get the subtle nuances we required and that turned out to be a faster and easier method.” says Ashu adding, “A handful shots also called for re arranging of the background elements”
“At the end of the day, all that looks well is well and its the final visual that has to look right, whatever technique or improvisation/solution we apply in the process is to serve that final goal.”