Notes on Stereoscopic 3D

I been following this technology closely for more than a year now and I was convinced that this technology is going to be a game changer when I first heard that Avatar is going to be on 3D. A lot has been happening since Avatar came out and I think one of the crucial outcome was incursion of stereoscopic 3D into main stream broadcast media.

Singapore, as a highly techno friendly country, will be the first among the nations to do a nationwide 3D trial on the broadcast possibly on coming August. I think as for the HD wave it would be interesting to see when viewers will fully adopt this technology to broadcaster's standards. On the other side Samsung is widely promoting it's line of 3D capable TVs and aims to sell more than 2 million 3-D TVs this year and Panasonic has already came up with their affordable 3D productions gears for broadcasters. With all these vibes there is strong urge in the industry to produce more stereoscopic content for this new market that is ranging from music videos to military simulations.

Apart from all these general happenings it was very intriguing to dig deep into the technology itself and to see how it has transformed in the past few years. Stereoscopy is relatively a very old technology and people are being lured with this illusion since 1800s. I think most popular technology which we are all familiar with is Anaglyph Image where two images (left and right) are made up two colors (red and cyan) and superimposed to create illusion of stereoscopy when watched with same color coded glasses. Fortunately we have already come a long way from Anaglyph Images which caused motion sickness to us most of times.

According to Wikipedia, there are two technology for viewing stereoscopy images, mainly active and passive glasses. Active glasses technology needs an expensive wireless electronic glasses which is synced with the display screen and passive glasses uses polarizing filters on the projectors to project two images superimposed on to the screen. So for obvious reasons such as cost and practicality, Active glasses technology is moving more towards broadcast and PC gaming markets and passive glasses towards cinemas.

In cinemas, the most widely used technologies are by RealD and Dolby 3D. Both of them use slightingly different technology that falls under passive glasses technology. According to Wikipedia, The RealD Cinema system uses an electronically driven circular polarizer, mounted in front of the projector and alternating between left- and right- handedness, in sync with the left or right image being displayed by the (digital) movie projector.

Dolby 3D uses Infitec which stands for interference filter technology that splits the color spectrum into six narrow bands which then are divided into 2 in three primary color channels. This technology is a much superior form of Anaglyph technology.

There is also IMAX3D which use polarization technology similar to that of RealD.

As for a standardization, at the moment RealD is the clear winner in the race with the huge success of Avatar. According to Zdnet.com, the company has net loss of 16.3 million from 23.4 million revenue in the year 2008 and for the year end of 2009, the company lost 20.3 million from 95.9 million revenue. Here is an image comparing both Anaglyph and polarizertechnology.

On the other side, broadcast and PC Industry are widely embracing Active glasses or Liquid Shutter Glass technology. Like I mentioned before in this technique liquid crystals are triggered in synchronization with the refresh rate of the screen allowing the glasses to alternately darken over one eye, and then the other. Screens also display different perspective for each eye using a technique called Alternate frame sequencing.

Nvidia is in forefront of this technology along with Samsung in PC gaming market while Samsung plans to dominate broadcast market and others like Panasonic and Sony are joining the trend. All of them uses the same technique ofalternative frame sequencing or time sequencing as mentioned above. It is important note that most of today's screens or monitor's support maximum of 80 hertz refresh rate but in order to support this high speed syncing with the active shutter glasses the screen should have a minimum refresh rate of 120 hertz.

Following is a Panasonic promotional video showing previous technology and advantages of current technology

Panasonic has also offers full 3D solutions from production to delivery, take a look at below video below and here is the link to their full production flow chart.

There are also other technologies in which you don't have to wear any glasses. These technologies comes under the category of Autostereoscopy. Uptil now most of these technologies are expensive and screen based so it may not ne easily adoptable for cinemas or main stream broadcast. One such technique is Pixel barrier where two images (left and right) are interlaced into the screen simultaneously.

Another similar technology is Alioscopy, where you have pixel barrier or filter to make the coded sub pixels a stereoscopic 3D experience. The real beauty of this technology is that it has 8 different perspectives so viewer could enjoy the true 3D experience from different angles. I have personally experienced this technology and found it truly an amazing experiencing but at the same time rendering 8 different views in full HD resolution would be extremely time consuming process.

With all these happenings it is so obvious that a good part of futur entertainment is going to be on 3D. I feel it is crucial to note that even though Stereoscopic 3D is not a new technology but only until Avatar that James Cameron showed us that this technology could be effectively used as a visual language rather than just a gimmick to attract audience.

Unfortunately in case of the films, a lot of production houses are looking at it as marketing tool to attract audience rather than taking it as a story telling medium and I think in broadcast media, stereoscopy is pushed in order to resurrect the penetration of HD into the main stream market considering only two broadcasters worldwide are fully HD now. According to Bill Schultz, co-CEO of Moonsoop Entertainment, L.A., "We have been doing HD for six or seven years, and there are still broadcasters who do not ask for an HD delivery,". So if Stereoscopic 3D becomes successful at least it will make sure that everybody goes HD.

I could be completely wrong here but personally, I don't feel like looking at stereoscopy as a future but instead I would like to see it as matured form of story telling medium because lot of people associate it with black & white to color or silence to sound transition in films. But from what I have seen and experienced, I think this technology has it's limitations compared to conventional 2D films and there are times where 2D might win over 3D films. For example, fast cuts of shots with different scale and depth might work pretty well with the conventional 2D film. But I think doing that sort of cuts in stereoscopic film in which the perception of deptsh changes very quickly between scenes may not be pleasing to your brain no matter how good the edit looks.

Since doing a Stereoscopic film would be technically superior I think a good example to relate what I meant would be, painting with water color and oil paint. You could pain beautiful paintings with both mediums but oil painting add whole new demension as well as technical limiations compared to water color. So it just the choice of the filmmaker that would call for Stereoscopy.

Micheal Bay is one of the director is who has been outspoken about his opinion on 3D as well as 2D to Stereoscopic 3D conversion. Micheal Bay says “The way I shoot is too aggressive for 3D cameras. It’s a time consuming thing,” said Bay. “Who knows… It might be a fad. I’m kinda old school. I’m old school because I like to shoot on film. I like anamorphic lenses, and that is old school.” I agree with him on the above statement and I think it relates to my previous example as well.

For the past few weeks I been testing stereoscopy at my workplace, so I will try to post more on this subject relating to workflow, aesthetic and story tellings aspects as I discover them.

Ed Catmull on rendering successful business

I stumbled upon this great talk by president of Pixar, Ed Catmull on maintaining successful creative environment. As an artist, personally I feel creating and sustaining a creative environment on workplace is the most crucial part of any art production. Art is all about expressing our emotions or ideas in such way that the audience feel and embrace it with their own collective experience. So if artists are working in an environment where they are intimidated by the managerial forces then it is merely impossible for them express their emotions or ideas.

I found issues raised by Catmull very intriguing and it made me dig more deep into more articles on Pixar's business model.

Later, I came across couple of other good articles and a great video interview of Catmull on The Economist. All of the articles I came across discussed the same issues he addressed in the first talk which is derived from his own tremendous experience in the computer graphics and animation industry.

One of the main point raised by Catmull was that lot of companies confuse the organisational structure with the communication structure which will hinder the creativity of the team. According to him flow of information between all the departments irrespective of structural management is must to facilitate a creativity. This is in very much contrast to the general idea of management where you report only to your manager or supervisor. But according to Catmull, the efficient way to manage people is to trust them and make them responsible for the work they do instead of getting permission from manager for each task.

He gives a good example on above issue in Harvard Business Review as follows, "Within Pixar, members of any department can approach anyone in another department to solve problems, without having to go through 'proper' channels. Managers understand they don't always have to be the first o know about something going on in their realm, and that it's okay to walk into a meeting and be surprised."

The above management philosophy goes together with the peer culture in Pixar which relays lot on trust and honesty. Since everyone have a shared responsibility and trust then it is easy to recover from a failure and Catmull stress that good management is not about preventing the errors but it is about recovering from the failures.

In order to facilitate communication, trust, high morale and spirit practically into work environment of Pixar, they have formulated Pixar University which trains employees at any level on general fine arts education. The classes are mainly on pushing unconventional thinking, creating peer culture and teamwork among the all levels of the company. According to Pixar University Dean Randy Nelson, "If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace."

It is very important to note that at Pixar they put more importance on people and workplace than the ideas they create. As Catmull says in the talk, if a good idea is given to a bad team they won't come up with anything but at the same time if the team was good then they would have either fixed it and or would have come up with a idea that works.

So it is very much crucial to put together teams of people to function well because because if they work well together then the ideas they created would sell anyway. The significance of people working together is so much important for Pixar because a movie was never about an idea but it was all about collective ideas from people working effectively in different disciplines and levels. So it makes perfect sense why they put so much money and effort into making the creative space for their artists.

Finally it is interesting to note that great art always comes from unstable environment and like Catmull points out in the above talk that good teams are inherently unstable. So much of what I discussed above goes to the fact that it is essential to have working environment which not only creates great ideas but keep people together and I hope people get that right and not just they get notion of it.

'The prhase is important in the community but it just doesn't have any effect on the behavior"

Ed Catmull

Matte Painting Breakdown

I been out of this blog for months now, I been busy On and Off these days anyway I feel good that I had completed this personal work. Though I am not very proud of the results but I am very happy that it really helped to get back in touch with my matte painting skills after a long break.

So here goes a short break down of the whole process.

Inspiration and references.

Basically I was inspired by the above shot in Star Trek to start with this matte painting. So I started looking for inspiration in similar matte paintings done by other artists and collected few good reference images to start with my concept.

clean plate

As you can see this image gave me a lot of open space for my concept and it already had some incredible mood and atmospheric perspective to start with.

reference pictures

Above were the most of the reference images I have used early in the process. There might be other images I have used apart from these ones but for now these are the main ones I could relate to in my library.

concept photo collage, version 1

In the above image you can see I have used basic solid shapes and few images to build up the basic composition. I have used the airplane engine exhaust and bullet shell images mainly to get the shape of the main structure.

version 2

After getting the basic composition and direction. I tried to establish the scale and added more structures overall. The sky was basically composite of clouds from different photographs.

version 3

At this stage I continued to add more structures such as cranes, poles and pipes . Most importantly I tried to crush the blacks to match the distance. Getting the atmospheric perspective (level of fog) was the most tricky part and I achieved it by painting blindly with high level of opacity at first and then erasing it with a low opacity large size air brush.

version 4

After getting a right sense of atmosphere I started to paint light and shadows after considering the direction of the light source. I also added more structures and removed some structures from both sides of the composition. At this stage I also started to get some really good critics from my coworkers which really guided me in the right direction.

Version 5

Getting the right combination of haze and light was really tricky part and I also felt it was a very subjective matter. At this point I also started to add more details such as building lights, hard and soft highlights and a glance of sunlight from right to create center of attention. I also adjusted the scale of elements to make it more convincing with the lighting.

version 6

(Click here to view high res image)

I was happy with the feeling I had with the previous version but I really pushed it a little bit further with help of some really good criticism from my friends and good folks at mattepainting.org

With this last version most of changes were on the lighting and foreground. I made lighting more evenly throughout the scene and the foreground was changed to match the lighting. Also I added more details such as more building lights and finally I changed the sky to match the overall lighting as well.

That's the end of this breakdown and I am really happy to share this process with you all so if you have any queries please do let me know.

Us Now, Documentary on human collaboration

Continuing from my last post, this entry is the on the same subject which is about the importance of sharing or collaborating with others. Whats more interesting about this short film is that it shows how we could use the technology which exists today to improve fundamentally everything we do in our life from socializing to government policies.


Its funny that I felt the first person (Clay Shirky) who appears on the video was Tom Hanks but I just found that he also feels same way about himself. Anyway I found his views very interesting especially the following, "As time goes on, we'll see people increasingly comfortable participating in situations where the social value is really about other people caring enough rather than someone being paid to provide that value."

Here is TED talk by Shirky himself on importance of co-operative model and btw, I am excited to attend TEDx singapore meet later today!

Secret of success is helping others, says Lucas

For sometime I really wanted to post this entry into my blog to just tag this up in my web space so that I won’t forget these really great words of wisdom from this interview. I believe this interview was done on sidelines with 33rd AFI Life Achievement Award which was presented to Lucas.

If you have watched the above video you might have noticed him saying, “getting the most praised for least body of work”. I was very moved by those words especially since I was also who was one among the people who looked only at his success but not at what methods or practice he would have had adopted to achieve it.

This interview had some really good insights into how he achieved his success and following are few quotes which I found really inspirational.

Lucas says, “No matter how easy it looks on the outside, it's a very, very difficult struggle. You don't see the struggle part of a person's life. You only see the success they have. But I haven't met anybody here at the Academy or anywhere else that hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever.“

Other than passion, practice, perseverance, one interesting point he pointed to be successful really caught my attention and that is helping others. According to him it also matters how much one dug his own life to understand things around him and how we all fit into the bigger picture. He says, "bigger picture" understanding -- of how we fit into the world, and how we fit into the universe. Not necessarily thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.”

He explains It is ironic that most of the people doesn’t understand this phenomena which exists all around us and we fail to look at the large picture by being a self absorbed creature which would end like a cancer cell. According to him, “If you put that notion on a larger scale, you have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever.”

Lucas reminds us that if we look at human history all the inventions and advancements we ever made is because we had worked together. As we know helping others is the basis of any society and it is obvious that as a group we are stronger than an individual but once we become possessive or selfish it is very difficult to win or succeed in anything we start out to.

According to Lucas, ‘My success was based on how much I could push everybody up. And eventually their success was the same way. And in the process they pushed me up, and I pushed them up, and we kept doing that, and we still do that.” He states that even though his friends were his competitors that doesn’t stopped him from enjoying their success as his own.

I think Lucas’s career is a best example for what he is trying to describe above because a good amount of his success was truly based on his associations he had with Coppola and Spielberg from the very beginning of his career.

It is also important to note that Lucas not only revolutionised film industry by bringing the digital realm into reality but also he along with Coppola proved that how films could be made outside the gated Hollywood studio system which existed during their era.

Following are two videos in which he talks about his two early films and how Coppola played a crucial role in both of them.

Finally as a personal note, I think lot of people today doesn't understand the importance of cooperating or helping others. It is very much apparent in the Internet forums where people would just gaze at the threads while never take any effort to contribute back. It is even more ironic when people think that by contributing to forums they are not gaining any knowledge. As for me whole reason I write blog or I am active in the forums is not just to contribute but to learn and expand my knowledge. I think the best possible way to learn is when you share.

TED talks on CG Face

Here is a talk on the technology by Paul Debevec. Do check out his website for more information on facial capture technologies.


Next is talk by Ed Ulbrich on the technology put into practice in the film Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Please do note that it took 155 people and 2 years to pull this amazing VFX and it was for a invisible VFX which most of the audience wouldn't even have noticed!

Poor film scripts which killed purpose of great VFX

I was searching a bit deeper into one of my favorite website (wired.com) checking for some random articles and I found these two articles very interesting, namely, 10 Sci-Fi Movies We’d Like to Throw Into a Black Hole and 10 Geeky Movies That Should Have Been Great, but Weren’t.

One of the thing which you can find similar in all these movies mentioned in above articles are they all had some good amount of visual effects being Sci-fi or geeky movies but still they fail to impress majority of the audience. This issue reminded me of a in-class presentation (presentation given during late 2006) I did during my degree class back in college.

I think this lists mentioned in the above two articles could be even longer including some of the recent movies but this issue is more serious than critics bashing VFX or VFX artists bashing poor scripts. After my research in college I had came to point of realization that this whole phenomena is effect of various trends and other factors which affected this dynamic industry and this is something which will continue to evolve.

As a VFX artist I love to bash at some of these high budget VFX movies which killed purpose of those great VFX shots and most importantly hard work of people behind it. So here goes my list of 5 bad movies which killed VFX (oh we all love to doing this, lol)

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!)

1.) Star Wars prequels
Seriously after watching these prequels it even downed my appreciation for the original trilogy. Tough I enjoyed those best of the best ILM eye candies after a while it was apparent that I was watching these movies just to enjoy the VFX shots not the movie as a whole.

2.) The Matrix sequels
The very first Matrix is my favorite movie both visual effects and story wise but both movies came after were fail to impress me like the way first one did. It would be better to quote from Weird's article for this one;

The Matrix is one of the best science fiction films ever made, period. The first 40 minutes of the original leaves you scratching your head, trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. During the rest of the film, the pacing, the action and the story are beautiful in their execution. The film ends with enough questions to keep the audience talking, speculating and watching again for new clues.
What we didn’t need, however, were answers. The answers are a letdown. They were full of quasi-mysticism about the nature of man and machine

The sequels also feel bloated by the special effects in a way the first film didn’t. At various points, the story just stops so we can see our protagonists fight the bad guys in various unbelievable ways. What began as a compelling story moves steadfastly into mind-numbing, summer-blockbuster territory.

3.) Daredevil
Though there mixed reactions to this movie, for me this movie was one of the first superhero movie which left me with some emptiness and this one represents trend of other superhero movies which followed the same suite like Electra, Fantastic four, Spiderman 3, Ghost Rider and most recently X- Men Origins.

4.) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Great cast, good visual effects but poor script, I think that was this movie was all about. It is interesting to note that there aren't much good Steampunk films made in Hollwywood, another one I could think of is Wild Wild West and I think both these movies didn't really exploit the depth of genre instead they just became like any other high budget Hollywood flicks.

5.) Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
This is again one of those sequels which again fail to capture our expectations. Though Schwarzenegger was present in this movie it didn't really help the poor story in any manner. This one was suppose to be direct continuation of last movie but I felt through out the movie it was drifting away from the first two movies.

I think they continued this trend for some reason even in the latest movie T4. I felt the latest movie is not as bad as T3, maybe it because the only thing I could associate T4 with first two movies is the soundtrack and everything else seems like some other new movie. Oh yeah, I liked dramatic out of world and sudden appearance of CG Schwarzenegger at the climax.

There are other movies which I didn't mention but then this list won't have an ending. I only mentioned the movies which I personally had lot of expectations and in which I enjoyed the VFX but not the movie as a whole. So I would like to stress this whole post is more of a personal reflection than a general opinion.

I think the main reasons behind these failures are audience's high expectations and their increasing maturity to high end VFX or action/dramatic sequences. I am not blaming the audience and safe guarding the filmmakers but if you look at the industry as a whole , the audience plays a major role in creating and destroying the trends in industry.

Like I stated before my expectations were very low for the fourth installment of Terminator but due to failure of T3 I felt T4 was a much better film . And on audience's maturity, this is where it gets really interesting because according to an eassy at filmcritic.com,

One of the first films that shocked audiences was The Great Train Robbery, where audiences reportedly ran from the cinema in terror when the criminal pointed his prop gun straight at the camera. A film, which was described as ‘general slaughter’ by a New York Times film critic, was James Cagney’s 1931 Public Enemy. This included eight deaths, all of them off camera, used suggestive sound effects and actors reactions to notify the audience that a death occurred. If you compare this with Bruce Willis’s 1990 Die Hard 2 in which 264 people died, all on camera and all of them very brutally and bloody, this proves that audiences are becoming difficult to shock.

I think only way out of this phenomena is when audience really appreciate visual effects for its story telling qualities instead of it's awe-inspiring effects but then I really don't know when that is going to happen because currently it is very apparent that VFX is used as a marketing tool and not to mention the high end FX race between the top VFX studios.

The industry is always going through constant evolution mainly due to technological development and then due to social and cultural changes. I remember back in my college presentation I quoted Lucas on this issue as follows,

"The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie. Those movies can't make their money back anymore."

"It's no accident that the 'small movies' outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. Is that good for the business? No—it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art! In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies."

If you compare his statement with latest movie District 9, which had an overall budget of 30 million and which boasted top notch visual effects. It is apparent that there is strong trend for low budget film making and I think in future the budgets will continue to shrink. It doesn't mean the death of high end visual effects but I think it will be the birth of very niche class of films which will use visual effects more for its story telling qualities that can be comparable to films in 70s & 80s.

I think I don't have to stress again how important story is in the process of film making and to conclude this post I would like to quote VFX producer Rick Baumgartner from his blog

On one level, visual effects deals with the problems of human perception – finding ways to take advantage of the strengths and weakness in the human visual system. Cues such as scale, perspective, depth, color, pattern, texture, intensity, shadow, parallax each of us instinctively use to place ourselves in the world. Visual effects take advantage of these cues.

On still another level are the technical problems related to the tools and materials used to develop a visual effects solution. But no matter what the eventual technical hurdles, visual effects starts with the written representation of the story -- the script -- and very quickly moves into iterative visual representations of the story.

The bottom line always is the story: depictions of real or imagined events with characters, objects and environments illustrating some aspect of the human experience