3-D Stop-Motion: Well-Deserved Promotion

As I previously mentioned, Monday was a fairly stressful day for me. However, in the midst of chaos, I treated myself to two hours of bliss. The Nightmare Before Christmas is, I confess, one of my all-time beloved movies (as is, frankly, anything Tim Burton has directed). Check out the film’s Wikipedia entry and you’ll learn about its various impressive technical attributes, which begin (but don’t end) with the fact that the film incorporated tedious stop-motion photography using scale-model puppets and sets. No 3-D rendering in this flick, folks!

The soundtrack lyrics are outstanding (justifying the Grammy nomination they received). Lock, Shock and Barrel are my favourite characters, I suppose, with the two-faced Mayor a close second (love the political commentary here!). And the movie delivers a useful lesson in the value of focusing your energy and attention on fully being who you are, versus striving (and inevitably, eventually, failing) at redefining yourself as someone you fundamentally aren’t. But I digress…

Last year, Disney Studios re-released the movie in 3-D for the Halloween season. Long-time print and online readers know that 3-D cinema (along with the digital projection that fuels it in the modern era) is an application I’ve closely followed for some time. I’ve both been attracted by the cool technology that drives the trend and by the belief that 3-D is the movie theater industry’s best (and perhaps only) shot at remaining relevant in the modern era of low-cost, high-quality home theater setups. I was actually in Los Angeles the day the 3-D renovation of The Nightmare Before Christmas was released to theaters, but since I was flying out to Nepal that evening (and needed to spend the day at a SMPTE conference), I didn’t have time to catch a showing before leaving the country for a month.

This year, I vowed not to repeat the omission. I’ve left a message with the theater for specifics (which, if I find them out, I’ll communicate to you via an addendum to this writeup); for now I’ll estimate that I was 1.5 screen heights away from, and directly in front of, the screen (whose height I don’t want to take a stab at guessing at). The polarized glasses I received (and therefore the projection system the theater was using) were labeled as coming from Real D (click on the link for past writeups from me that describe Real D’s system in detail, both absolutely and relative to competitors such as In-Three).

The overall presentation was quite similar to what I’d earlier experienced with Chicken Little. In general, and in contrast to more elaborate setups such as IMAX’s The Polar Express, the 3-D effect wasn’t seamless; instead, echoing what I wrote before:

Perhaps the best way to describe what I experienced was that I saw a series of 2D images. There might be a tree, with Chicken Little behind it and a building behind him, for example. Each of these objects had a relative depth perception versus the others, but none of them had depth in and of itself. Chicken Little pretty much looked like a 2D cutout, except in rare exceptions. Neat, mind you. Attention-grabbing and -keeping, even. But not realistic.

In some scenes, however, it seemed that greater time, attention and budget had been placed on the 3-D conversion, and the result was much more compelling. And happily, I didn’t experience any of the ‘ghosting’ effects I saw last time; the 3-D presentation was stable no matter how I tilted my head relative to the screen.

Speaking of 3-D conversion, that’s perhaps the most compelling part of this story. Unlike with the 3-D rendered The Polar Express, as I mentioned earlier, The Nightmare Before Christmas employed traditional physical models. This meant that 3-D re-rendering for respective right- and left-eye views wasn’t a straightforward task. Instead, as this excellent writeup explains in detail (see here for more), Industrial Light and Magic collaborated with In-Three to frame-by-frame digitize and then transform the film. As a result, your left eye is seeing the original film, whereas your right eye is viewing the perspective-corrected digital adaptation.

I’m pretty sure that the 3-D remake of The Nightmare Before Christmas is in theaters for at least another day or two, so if you can free up a few hours in your schedule, I highly recommend it. Otherwise, there’s always next year…

Followup: The next step in the movie theater industry’s evolution towards 3-D? Beowulf (as I mentioned back in April).