Powerful new tools like the ones used to make Monsters vs.

Aliens give filmmakers unprecedented power to manipulate imagery and create immersive cinematic experiences.

Images courtesy DreamWorks AnimationHigh-end filmmakers aren't just making movies these days. They're building virtual worlds before shooting a single frame of film, using digital tools that blur the lines between animation and live-action, virtual sets and physical soundstage, photorealistic cartoon characters and motion-captured human beings.

Over the past few years, digital moviemakers have mastered new technologies and learned to micromanage massive teams in order to bring complex collaborative visions to the screen. The goal: to create truly immersive movies that knock the socks off even the most jaded moviegoer.

"Every technological advance in filmmaking points directly to something like Star Trek's holodeck, where you don't go in and watch the stories — you are actually in the bar or you're climbing the rock or whatever is there," said Phil "Captain 3D" McNally, the stereoscopic supervisor, who handled the 3-D elements in DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens, which opened Friday. "That's lucid dreaming as realized by Star Trek technology. If you have a choice between watching a movie and going on the holodeck, I guarantee you'd be going on the holodeck."

As with earlier advances — from silent films to "talkies," from black-and-white to color and from sound to surround sound — the new technological tools at moviemakers' disposal are changing not just what audiences see and hear, but the way directors and their crews work.

Movies of the Future

Tintin

Pointing toward a new model for world-building in big-budget features, director Steven Spielberg finished filming actors earlier this month and handed the baton to producer Peter Jackson. The digital environment for Tintin and its sequel will be constructed over the next 18 months at New Zealand's renowned WETA Workshop.



A Christmas Carol

Motion-capture pioneer Robert Zemeckis won novelty points with Polar Express and added 3-D to the mix for Beowulf (pictured). In November, he steers texture-mapped human actors, led by Jim Carrey, toward a 21st-century spin on the Charles Dickens classic.

Goon

Reputed to be a detail-obsessed control freak, David Fincher pushes technology with each new movie. Teaming with visual-effects wizards at Blur Studio for Goon, the famously meticulous director will likely spawn a comic book hero unlike anything seen before.

Unlike previous 3-D cartoons, Monsters vs. Aliens was conceptualized from the get-go as a story designed for depth.

"When I worked on Chicken Little and Disney's Meet the Robinsons, the movies were created first in 2-D, then put it through a process of adding depth, which to me is like saying, 'Here's a painting, now turn it into a sculpture.' That's not the same as sculpting," said McNally.

The teams working on Monsters vs. Aliens authored, designed and filmed every frame in 3-D, giving the filmmakers extraordinary ability to manipulate the imagery audiences will see. During a screening of clips from the movie earlier this year, DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg said using the new tools was like having the entire production team suddenly begin communicating in Russian.

"It's a whole new language," Katzenberg said of the powerful new tools at filmmakers' disposal. "It's going to have to be learned and taught."

Katzenberg, a major cheerleader for 3-D moviemaking, showed several clips from Monsters vs. Aliens. Scenes produced early in the process, as filmmakers were getting their first taste of the new digital tools, used the 3-D in a more gimmicky way, Katzenberg said. As the animators grew accustomed to the new way of working, they created scenes that were more subtle and muscular.

Aiming to fool the human eye with seamless tricks of perspective, Monsters was created using a new set of tools and systems that calibrated on-screen depth perception with unprecedented precision. The advances spell the end of cardboard cutout-type characters, promises McNally, who sees 3-D storytelling as one more pit stop along the road toward a hyperintensive viewing experience.

"Stereoscopic vision has been an obvious next step for a long time but until now, analog projectors prevented 3-D from working in anything more than an experimental way," he said. "You still have to wear the glasses, but we're at a point now where the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and that only became possible because of innovations in digital cinema and the RealD projection system."

McNally figures the end game for filmmakers is pointing toward the kind of "lucid dreaming" anticipated by Star Trek's "holodeck" technology and hinted at for decades by videogame makers. McNally said he thinks the movie-going experience will increasingly resemble gaming environments in years to come.

"I think the future of cinema is probably going to come from people who play 3-D games and grow up to become filmmakers," he said.

In fact, the creators of the Resident Evil 5 videogame utilized the same cameras favored by director James Cameron as he shoots his highly anticipated Avatar. The technology allows the filmmaker to manipulate computer-generated 3-D environments in and around actors, turning a single session of motion capture work into an endlessly tweakable scene.

For years, Cameron has championed his Titanic follow-up, a futuristic sci-fi epic set for December release, as a Hollywood game-changer that blends 3-D, motion capture, live action and digitally rendered story elements with unprecedented photorealistic detail.

Rick Carter (Artificial Intelligence: AI, The Polar Express) designed the futuristic universe in which Avatar takes place, a process he calls a "huge undertaking."

"It's like creating real cities," he said. "There's infrastructure and planning and communication and vision and technical know-how. I went down to New

Zealand 13 times in 2007 getting both the virtual and physical parts of the set, and then figuring out how to meld them together. I've never encountered anything like that before, and from what I've seen, Cameron delivers a truly grand vision."

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's reverse-aging plot is widely cited as an example of how new technology can bring previously unfilmable stories to the screen.

Photo courtesy SonyTo organize such a massive project — Avatar reportedly will cost about $300 million — Cameron and his collaborators stepped outside the traditional production pipeline sequence to take a nonlinear path toward what Carter describes as "the movie-scape."

"People who do digital effects are being invited earlier into the process to construct how this movie is going to be made," Carter said. "Cinematographers who figure where a camera is, how it moves and how it might be lit are now coming up through the computer rather than through a photographic medium. Instead of looking at a performance now, editors look at the capture of the person and tabulate all of that information while trying to keep the emotion going. Everything is shifting. "

For Watchmen production designer Alex McDowell, virtual environments now play a critical role in a number of disciplines. "The big premise of immersive design, whether it's videogames or architecture or animation or film, is that in each of those areas, world-building is the core idea," he said.

McDowell is especially bullish about today's "pre-visualization" tools, which give moviemakers an early look at films in progress. In place of the static sketches, concept art and hand-drawn storyboards that traditionally provided a general sense of a film's direction before shooting began, 21st century pre-vis tools enable real-time playback of movie sequences in rough draft mode.

"By creating a 3-D virtual production space, you can work with your fellow filmmakers in a very descriptive, data-rich, virtual representation of the film before you even start making it," McDowell said. These virtual environments often become just as important as the story itself.

After he become a "pre-vis" convert while working on David Fincher's Fight Club, McDowell created the futuristic environment for Minority Report working off a two-paragraph concept summary from Steven Spielberg. Delving into the futuristic city's "interior logic," McDowell came up with the vertical-drop flying taxi that featured prominently in one of the film's most memorable sequences.

That sort of creative magic will only become more common as digital effects wizards get involved earlier in the moviemaking process.

"For me," McDowell said, "it's about creating a machine that both contains and triggers narrative. At the beginning of a film, these new tools allow us to set up a kind of test-control space where you throw ideas in and test them against the logic of the storytelling."

Citing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as a case study in technology-enabled storytelling, McDowell said: "We're all moving towards an arena where it's going to become less and less important whether you call it 'animation' or 'live action.' Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was probably 30 percent animated in the end. Watchmen is maybe 70 percent live action and 30 percent green screen. Everything is absolutely in flux right now."

No matter how deep the 21st century filmmaker's bag of tricks, digital sleight of hand won't rescue weak performances or lame dialogue. Despite elaborate green-screen backdrops painstakingly scanned into existence by hundreds of visual-effects techies, The Spirit flopped.

Real actors performed in real Vancouver soundstages, but production designer Alex McDowell says roughly 30 percent of Watchmen took place against a digitally generated backdrop.

*Photo courtesy Warner Bros.*Some concerns inevitably arise about this new way of making movies. Carter points out that a new generation of filmmakers who have "spent their entire lives in front of computer screens" might lack the real-world savvy that burnished old-school movies with a certain lived-in luster.

There's also the matter of over-planning. "There's a little bit of a fear that this sort of process takes the spontaneity out of filmmaking, but I think it actually allows more freedom," said McDowell, co-founder of the 5D Immersive Design Conference slated for October in Long Beach, California. "We can take a photograph of an actor, cut and paste it into a 3-D environment, light the environment to match the actor, adjust the colors in both, and do all of that in an hour. We can say, 'Hey lets see what it looks like if we ramp up the purple in the set and ramp down the purple in the costume,' then do it in Photoshop with a couple clicks on a mouse.

"The way we make movies now is much closer to the beginning of film, where you just had a very small group of people in a room with maximum creativity. We creative types can enter into a new partnership with the technologists and say, we know your box can do this thing, so let's push it. Let's get it to do the next level of creativity, rather than simply achieving a technological milestone — the best water or most realistic hair or whatever."

So what's it all mean for the movie fan who's laid out $10 or more for a ticket?

DreamWorks' McNally predicts an ever-escalating succession of mind-blowing spectacle.

"The way movies are heading is not necessarily toward realism, but toward sensory input," he said. "Our base level for what we were trying to achieve 10 years ago is now just like the starting point. Each time you finish one of these movies, the base line goes up another step."

Additional reporting by Lewis Wallace.

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