MakingOf recently paid a visit to the Pixar Studios in Emeryville, CA and sat down with stereoscopic supervisor Bob Whitehill to discuss the use of 3D in “Toy Story 3.” Below is the full transcript of our round-table interview.
Q: After converting the first two “Toy Story” films to 3D, how was it making the third film in 3D and possibly going further?
Bob: It was really helpful in that we could figure out a lot of scale issues. You know, you’re kind of traveling between two worlds: the world that they live in, the toy chest and Andy’s room and then out into the human world so we had a pretty good idea about how we wanted to handle the “separations,” as we call them, the pixel separations and offsets. And it became quite easy, frankly, to sort of leap into “Toy Story 3” with all that knowledge we had gained from the first two.
Q: How would you characterize the approach to the 3D on this film?
Bob: I think that 3D is only part of the whole experience of the film. It’s like, a filmmaker would not want people to leave their movie, necessarily, and instantly turn to their wife or their kids and say, what great costume design or what great editing! They don’t want to pinpoint a specific part of the filmmaking process, they want people to say, what a great movie! So, my hope is that they’ll just enjoy the film, the emotion, and the story and get swept away in it and maybe by the time they reach their car, they’ll turn to each other and say, “how about that 3D?” And so that kind of encapsulates the philosophy here. Kind of plan for the long term, you know? If we’re all going to have 3D TVs in the future, I imagine if you’re watching four hours of 3D TV a day, you’re not going to want it to be too aggressive. So, in these early years, there may be a tendency to really push it where every shot should really scream 3D, and we don’t necessarily share that feeling here. I think we’re probably a studio that doesn’t mind if the feedback that came back was, I forgot that I was watching a 3D movie, because, hopefully what that means is that you were enthralled in the story, in the humor, and the emotion of the story, rather than thinking about if that shot was deep enough.
Q: Do you think that there will come a time when every movie is done in 3D?
Bob: I don’t see every movie in 3D. I think we’re definitely assured of a genre at this point. There’s enough attraction out there and enough box office revenue that I don’t think it’s going to go away. But whether it transfers into the next Meryl Streep movie or the next romantic comedy remains to be seen. I think a movie like “The Godfather” would be actually be kind of brilliant in 3D. Even though it’s not “Clash of the Titans,” I think that there are certain dramatic films, certainly beautifully shot films and beautifully lit films that would be that much more engrossing, that much more interesting in 3D. So it’ll be interesting to see, right? How it expands or contracts in the coming years. It’s up to smart filmmakers to use it well, to use it with care and forethought.
Q: How many hours, or weeks, or months, are you involved in 3D-ifying the film?
Bob: About a year, really. I want to say it’s about 14 months from the release date that the studio really gets cranky with a lot of people churning out these movies, we follow closely behind that. If you come in too early on the pipeline, you might miss some set dressing for instance. So if I set it too early and I come back to the shot four months later and there’s dandelions in the foreground that ruin the 3D or something. But you don’t want to wait too long because then you can’t make suggestions or changes or tap the editor on the shoulder and ask him to please make a shot longer because it’s going to look so cool in 3D. If we can jump in and get the 3D started and we can fine tune it and cull it…
Q: So you actually have a say in the length of a scene?
Bob: Not really, I shouldn’t have said that. There was one shot where Woody is escaping from the daycare center and he’s flying the kite where the camera is over him and you look down at the playground and it’s such a cool shot. It’s almost reminiscent of the shot in “Toy Story” where Buzz and Woody are flying after the moving truck, you know, “This isn’t flying, this is falling with style.” And so I kind of pitched that in the editorial meeting and they said, “Ok, we might be able to extend this shot for you.”
Q: We saw a 2D version of the film, how many people, do you think, will see the film in 3D rather than 2D?
Bob: Yeah, I’m not sure what the exact screen count is, that sort of thing is determined a little closer to the release date. I think that it’s safe to say that certainly for the first several weeks when it has a lot of 3D theaters, more people will see it in 3D rather than 2D. We’ve reached that saturation level of theaters that, not only more dollars are going to come from the 3D screenings, but more people will be seeing it in 3D by June.
Q: 3D makes for a much different movie experience than a traditional 2D movie, is the process of making a movie in 3D much different from making a movie in 2D?
Bob: Yeah, there’s so much thought and planning that goes into these movies that if you were truly just thinking about 3D, you would frame a lot of these shots differently, block the shots a little differently, you might edit them a little differently. The fact is though, we’re able to inherit what is a more traditional movie making pipeline and style and put that into 3D and it can be a really rewarding and good experience. But, yeah, if we really dug down and went under the hood and they said, “Ok Bob, what can we do in this shot to make it better in 3D?” and I say something like, well, I’d move the camera up and bring this character forward and I could probably find hundreds of things to change, just to suit the 3D. I guess if you asked a lighter, maybe they would say, “Oh yea, if it was just about lighting, I would change this…” The animators might say, “Oh well this is such a great shot for animation, we’ll do this…” So I think there’s a constant collaborative process, and like you’re saying, I think we’re just taking baby steps toward really thinking about 3D in all of our processes. Something like “Day and Night” is so brilliant because it was conceived originally in 3D and it works so well. “Toy Story 3” is more like a traditional movie, you go and see it in 3D and it’s going to be great, engrossing, and rewarding, but it’s not conceived in 3D.
Q: Do you think that 3D will get to a point where it can be likened to the transition from black and white to color?
Bob: I don’t think that it’s going to go that far. I think there are enough people who just don’t like 3D, I think a lot of that is due to 3D not being very good over the past few years. But some people just may not go there. There’s a certain part of the population who can’t even see 3D, so I don’t know that it’s going to be as widespread as black and white was to color. I have seen, like, test football broadcasts in 3D and golf broadcasts in 3D, and they look great, they’re really cool. So I can see people doing that. I can see over the next three years that people are going to buy 3D TVs and soon we’re going to see our favorite shows in 3D and, of course, films are going to continue this way. Not every film, like I said, needs to be in 3D. People are really hoping for an answer that’s going to be very back and white, but we’re going to just keep moving forward and see how this all works out.
Q: What’s next, after 3D?
Bob: Well, the next big hurdle is glassless 3D, called Auto-Stereo, so you don’t need to wear glasses. So that’s an interesting technological hurdle.
Q: Is that like holographic images?
Bob: No, it has to do with a way to enable yourself to see separate images in each eye without glasses. There’s actually ways you can do it now, but you can’t move [laughs] you have to stay still so that they can beam a certain image into each eye. There’s a censor, you can actually use the Wii system and you actually have to wear something, not glasses, but something that tells the Wii where you are in space and it can directed images on your TV to where your eyes will be. So that’s coming. And there’s always talk about increasing frame rates. You know, right now film is at 24 frames per second, and that was just legacy from decades ago, and people don’t think that’s enough. Certainly with 3D, it might not be enough. Right now, we’re doing what’s called Triple Flash, so right now you’re seeing every single frame three times into each eye. So these projectors are capable of showing 144 frames per second. So if you are capable of capturing that, you would just see much more fluid motion. And that might be something that we see in the next ten years, people advocating for higher frame rates. There’s also higher resolution that people are shooting for. You know, largely the digital projectors are 2k as they say, which are images that are like, 1980 wide, and they have 4k projectors now that have much bigger resolutions, so it will be much crisper and sharper.
Q: Do you have any plans for Pixar to use these new technologies?
Bob: Well, we aren’t really a technology company, more of a content company. But we do have very smart people here that are working on some pretty cool things. Like a camera that can record in stereo without needing two lenses, one for each eye. So there might be some technical innovations that come out of this building, but it’s not really our primary business.
Q: Can you explain your role and how you got into 3D?
Bob: My role is, I touch every shot, really. I go in and I dial in those separations that we talked about downstairs and kind of figure out how that’s going to work. It starts with a big pitch to the director and the creative team about how I want to approach their movie and feel them out on that and just go through and set all those parameters and those offsets. And my background is actually sort of like a virtual camera man, you know, I was in the layout or camera and staging group for years, doing computer animated movies. I had experience doing a theme park ride in 3D a couple of years ago. So that’s my background and when it came up again here at the studio, I volunteered to kind of be the 3D guy and it’s sort of grown from there. It’s kind of a fortunate mix of personality for me because I’m a fairly malleable and easygoing person, so it was perfect for the studio at the time where 3D was worried about, to have someone come in and not say “No! It has to be this deep and this has to happen, we have to change our pipeline,” I was kind of just on the side, like, “Oh that’s our 3D guy, he’s going to do our 3D” and it just kind of worked pretty gracefully.
Q: How long does each shot take?
Bob: We have some shots that take up to 30 hours to render a single frame and other shots are much quicker, maybe a couple of hours. What we have to do is essentially render two movies, we have to render the left eye and the right eye. So we try to piggyback on the mono production, as we call it, as much as possible. So that when they finish, we use that as our left eye and quickly render the right eye before we have what’s called “bit rot,” where something might change just overnight, the code, or someone will check in a new shader for a piece of trash and all of a sudden your left and right eye don’t match. So you want to try to run that right eye immediately after the left eye. And in fact, we kind of run them simultaneously, hoping that the left eye will be approved in mono and then we have our take. It’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of tracking to get two movies rendered for as little expense as possible.
Q: Do you always begin with the left eye?
Bob: Yeah, I think it’s just a choice. I think a lot of studios do. I’ve heard of one studio that the mono becomes their right eye. There was a worry at first that we had to offset them both from the mono, because then an object that comes forward won’t be perfectly centered if we use the mono for the left eye. But the fact is, nothing really comes that close to camera or is that centered that we can’t just use that mono as the left eye.
Q: Have you already started working on your next Pixar project?
Bob: Yeah, we’re just getting rolling now on “Cars 2” and “The Bear and the Bow.” They did a really cool look of film test of the main character riding her horse through a forest and we did a 3D pass on that, it’s really, really cool.
Q: Do you have any interest in directing, down the line?
Bob: No, you know, the directors are so talented, they have so much stamina and insight, that I just, don’t have. [laughs] I don’t know, it’s funny, people have asked me that before and I think, no one would bat an eye if I said that I can’t play basketball for the Warriors, you know? And that’s how I view the talent of these directors, they’re otherworldly. As much as I’d like to be that guy, I think I’m pretty good where I am and I’ll continue doing that.
Q: Did you work on the short, “Day and Night”?
Bob: I kind of consulted, yeah. A woman named Sandy Karpman did a lot of the stereo for it, a lot of the 3D and she’s working with me on “Toy Story 3.” I just went in at the beginning and we talked about, how far forward should those cut out characters go? You know, 15 pixels forward and then use the rest of the depth for the world behind. So it was great to be involved in that level, just doing an oversight pass at how this was going to work.
Q: When you started working with 3D, what was the feeling towards it? Was there a lot of skepticism? What did John Lassester think?
Bob: John’s a real supporter, which is great. There was some vocal opposition to the idea and there still is. There’s still posts to internal news groups for any article that’s written somewhere that says “3D is going to die,” you know, one guy posts it. But I think we’ve gradually broken down a lot of barriers and concern by not having things be too difficult to watch or distracting from the main point of the story. So, I think we’ve done a good job of pleasing most people. It was interesting when we had the friends and family screenings, when we have new films come out, and that’s when they announced “Up” and maybe four other projects that were going to be in 3D and those were the ones that everyone wanted to come to, so that was exciting, that even the studio population was gravitating toward watching the 3D option.
