Phil McNally talks about 3-D – SID 2011
May 17, 2011, Society for Information Display, Los Angeles—Phil McNally, who calls himself “Captain 3-D” is a stereoscopic supervisor at DreamWorks Animation. He talked about his transition form 3-D as a hobby into 3-D as his career.
McNally is now a stereo supervisor at DreamWorks and finds that stories authored in 3-D are enhanced by the technology, and those that are just converted are not worth the effort to watch. The 3-D movies need screens to play on, but previews will mostly be on 2-D screens.
Stereoscopic pictures became available soon after photography started. By the middle of WWII, stereo cards were in books, and people found them to be much more realistic than 2-D images. These pictures were not gimmicks, but immersive images that put you into the situation. These differences and the sense of depth were shown on a 3-D projector so everyone could experience the immersion in the scene. The spatial details of the stereo photographs drew the viewer into the picture, even though the pictures were in black and white.
After spending 8-10 years doing freelance work mixing 3-D photos and graphics design, McNally started to get involved in 3-D computer graphics. He found his way into working on “Toy Story”, where he worked on the animation and CG rendering. He also created his own short video called ” Pump Action”, which led to work with Industrial Light and Magic, then to Disney, and finally to DreamWorks Animation where he worked on “Monsters versus Aliens”.
For the animated films, making 3-D is easy, you just have to render another eye. For live action, the details for creating stereo are very involved and require knowledge and experience in setting camera angles and vergence. The industry needs to move towards higher automation in the capture phase to make live-action 3-D films more mainstream. The hard parts of any action capture in either live or CG is to prepare and manage the transitions. The industry needs to develop better techniques to modify 3-D and needs to find functions to ease the cuts and screen positioning.
