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The Creatures That Jumped Off the Screen
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WHEN Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon signed up as directors of “Monsters vs. Aliens,” the latest computer-generated spectacle from DreamWorks Animation, they were jittery about all the usual things: telling a good story, rounding up the celebrity vocal talent, surviving a four-year production process without suffering a nervous breakdown.
Then Jeffrey Katzenberg hurled a curveball at them. After work on the movie was well under way, Mr. Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation’s chief executive, informed the pair that they would also need to deliver the movie in 3-D.
“We were totally taken aback,” Mr. Vernon said, sitting in a conference room at DreamWorks headquarters here. “I didn’t sign up to do something garish.”
Lisa Stewart, a producer of the film, was equally rattled, recalling how 3-D effects of the past could make people feel woozy. “I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, great, I’m going to have a headache for the next two and a half years,’ ” she said.
The DreamWorks team associated 3-D with “Captain EO,” the 1980s-era Disneyland attraction, long since closed, that starred Michael Jackson as a space explorer. Stuffed with 3-D gimmicks that extended from the screen into the audience — lasers, smoke, flying fuzzy aliens — that film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola with George Lucas as executive producer, defined cinematic cheese for a generation of Hollywood creative types.
But Mr. Katzenberg had an artistic justification for using 3-D in “Monsters vs. Aliens,” which barrels into theaters on Friday. The story, about monsters who unite to save Earth from alien destruction, was designed as a homage to the “creature features” of the 1950s and ’60s. And Mr. Letterman and Mr. Vernon were already turning to 3-D movies like “Creature From the Black Lagoon” for inspiration.
Mr. Katzenberg has staked the company’s future on the format; starting with “Monsters vs. Aliens” every movie it makes will be done in 3-D. Because of advances in digital technology, he told the directors that 3-D was no longer just a gimmick for reaching out and tickling (or scaring) the audience from time to time. Rather, building a film from the ground up in 3-D — as opposed to making a two-dimensional version and adding effects later, the way most old releases did it — could result in a dazzling new visual language.
Fans of the new technology say it’s the modern-day equivalent of adding sound or color to a motion picture. The eye naturally sees in 3-D, so adding depth to the images on screen delivers a more immersive and realistic experience.
And the nauseated feeling is a thing of the past: new projection equipment and improved glasses have eliminated the headaches and dizziness. (In an interview Mr. Katzenberg recalled bluntly assuring the filmmakers that this was true. “I’m pretty sure that no business can succeed in which it makes the customer hurl,” he said he told them.)
Mr. Katzenberg, of course, also saw a business opportunity. Tickets for 3-D screenings can be sold for a premium. It would also be harder to pirate DreamWorks movies: sneaking a camcorder into a theater — which is the way most bootleg DVDs are born — wouldn’t work at a 3-D screening. And 3-D was a way of standing out in a marketplace increasingly cluttered with computer-animated movies, as “Coraline” recently demonstrated with surprisingly strong box-office returns.
So the “Monsters vs. Aliens” squad headed out to learn about 3-D. The story they were attempting to adopt focuses on Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), a small-town simpleton who gets hit by a meteor at her wedding and grows to be 49 feet 11 inches tall. A hard-boiled monster wrangler, General W. R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland), hauls the newly named Ginormica away to a secret monster prison, where she meets the gang, which includes Dr. Cockroach, a brilliant scientist with a roach head (Hugh Laurie); the fish-ape hybrid Missing Link (Will Arnett); and Bicarbonate Ostylezene Benzoate, or B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a turquoise blob formed when scientists tried to combine a genetically altered tomato with a ranch-flavored dessert topping.
Although Mr. Katzenberg had pitched 3-D as a grown-up creative form, the artists, directors and producers working on the project discovered that they were very much walking on Bambi legs. “It was like they were doing their job in English before and we suddenly wanted them to work in Russian,” Mr. Katzenberg said.
Mr. Letterman and Mr. Vernon started by asking for a tutorial from John Bruno, the Oscar-winning visual effects designer (“The Abyss”) who collaborated with James Cameron in 1996 to make “T2 3-D: Battle Across Time,” a theme park attraction for Universal Studios Hollywood.
“That calmed us down a lot,” said Mr. Vernon, whose other directing credits include “Shrek 2.” “John told us that we already knew how to think in 3-D by trying to show depth and movement in a two-dimensional medium.”
Ms. Stewart studied “Beowulf,” the 2007 Robert Zemeckis picture that uses three-dimensional storytelling. She said the lingering camera shots in that film taught her that a 3-D movie could not cut as quickly from image to image for reasons of eye strain. “It’s so visually rich that you need to account for people wanting to stare at the screen and move their eyes around the frame,” she said.
The animators also learned that corner-cutting tricks, like leaving out detail in the far background of scenes, didn’t work so well in 3-D. They compensated by experimenting with focus and lighting but ultimately needed to devote much more time (and thus money) to background details like trees and distant buildings. “We had to put more of something back there because suddenly it was very prominent,” Ms. Stewart said.
The computer science involved was not that exceptional, Mr. Katzenberg said: “It’s just a matter of putting a few more resources in.” DreamWorks developed proprietary computer programs to help its artists work in the medium, boosting production costs by about $15 million per film.
Mr. Katzenberg had wanted to release the movie on at least 5,000 3-D screens. But because fewer movie theaters than expected have completed the expensive projector upgrades the format requires, “Monsters vs. Aliens” will roll out on about 2,000 3-D screens in North America (out of a total of 7,000). That’s still enough to cover the added production expenses, Mr. Katzenberg said.
The finished movie feels very much like a DreamWorks product, with the studio’s sophomoric sense of humor — an underwear pull here, a breast joke there — especially pronounced. The 3-D is somewhat startling at first, which Ms. Stewart said was intentional. The movie quickly moves from a scene in outer space — despite the title, there is really only one alien, Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson) — to the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge. “We wanted to blow people’s minds into deep space right from the start,” she said.
Although Mr. Katzenberg had promised that 3-D would not be used as a gimmick, DreamWorks ultimately couldn’t help itself. When the film was nearly finished, Mr. Katzenberg asked the creative team to add some more 3-D “pow,” according to Mr. Vernon.
