Guillermo del Toro has had a run of somewhat tough luck recently. Leaving The Hobbit, the shut-down of the Lovecraftian At the Mountains of Madness, and now the forced 3D conversion of Pacific Rim, the poor guy just keeps having production difficulties. Recently, del Toro opened up about the Pacific Rim conversion and why it might not be such a bad thing after all.
According to First Showing, del Toro’s biggest problem with shooting in or converting to 3D had to do with the change in perspective:
“To force the 3D effects for robots and monsters that are supposed to be big you are making their [perspective] miniaturized, making them human scale.”
Most recently, however, del Toro explains that he’s actually coming around to the conversion idea:
“What happened was, in the weeks and months following Comic-Con, what I asked from the studio was to agree to four points that I wanted to do. The more the ILM shots arrived, the more I realized that there were only a few shots that would miniaturize. I asked the studio, number one, that we would not hyper-stereo-lize the thing. That we would not force 3D on the beauty shots. That we would keep the giant dimensions. They agreed.”
Of course, what we’re all really worried about is that Pacific Rim not turn into Clash of the Titans, which ended up looking like a grayscale pop-up book, mostly due to a rushed conversion job. Guillermo del Toro addresses that concern as well:
“Normally a conversion takes a few weeks. I asked to start it immediately so we could take the full 40 weeks to do the conversion. As an example, Titanic took about 50 weeks to convert. The final thing that I asked that they agreed to, which was amazing, was that I asked them to give me an extra budget, which is considerable, to actually have ILM composite the shots that are CG native 3D. We’re not giving elements. ILM is giving the composite in 3D from the get-go. That’s a huge, huge element. Now I’m going to be involved in supervising it. What can I tell you? I changed my mind.”
So all of the ILM effects will be created in 3D, rather than being post-converted. What’s more, we’ve got del Toro supervising the whole thing and taking his time with it. All of which is great news for a film that has been hotly anticipated, at least by Guillermo del Toro fans.
I admit that I’m still a little skeptical about the whole post-conversion thing. I’ve yet to see a post-converted film that looked appropriate in terms of color and perspective. Most of them are simply not worth the premium pricing to see in 3D. I trust del Toro, but I’m still far more likely to go see Pacific Rim in 2D first.
Pacific Rim hits theatres in several dimensions on July 12, 2013.
