By Debra Kaufman, Creative COW Magazine

If you liked Jurassic Park the first time around, you’re going to love it in 3D. If there was ever a movie that cried out for a third dimension, it was this one: T-Rex towering over the teetering SUV? Raptors skittering in the kitchen? Jurassic Park’s already edge-of-your-seat scenes get even scarier in stereoscopic 3D. Conversions from 2D to 3D have gotten a bad rap due to a small handful of movies that were not done skillfully. Stereo D- which also did the conversion work for Titanic — handled Jurassic Park. President William Sherak and Vice President, Chief Creative Officer Aaron Parry talked to Creative COW about their work on Spielberg’s dinosaur blockbuster, and why 2D-to-3D conversions are booming.

In Jurassic Park, the 3D process brought to life some of the movie’s most tense moments. “When the kids are trapped in the SUV and it’s attacked by the T-Rex, you feel like you’re in the vehicle with them and that proximity of danger from the massive multi-toothed dinosaurs,” says Aaron Parry, Vice President/Chief Creative Officer of Stereo D. “That proximity ratchets up the intensity of the film tremendously. At the same time, there are amazing intimate moments Steven designed into the film that are augmented in a special unique way. Only stereo could be the final layer on that cake, to bring it fully to life.”

With the iconic dinosaur blockbuster opening up in stereoscopic 3D, the consensus is that adding a third dimension ups the thrills exponentially. “Jurassic Park really looks beautiful,” says Stereo D president William Sherak. “We are so proud of our work on it.”

Jurassic Park is not Stereo D’s first legacy title conversion. “We’ve also been very fortunate — we got to sharpen our teeth under Jim Cameron with 197,000 frames for Titanic,” he adds. “Jim just makes you better, by sheer virtue of getting through the material. By getting to work with great storytellers, it’s about how can we use our tools to help the filmmaker tell his story better.”

Stereo D is relatively new to the 3D game: the company was formed in 2009 and was acquired by Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc. in 2011. But in that short time frame, Stereo D has worked on numerous films in addition to Titanic in 3D, including The Avengers, Avatar (selected shots), Captain America and Jackass 3D. The company also provides end-to-end 3D production services on feature films, television productions and commercials. The company employs its patented proprietary VDX software and another proprietary software to streamline the workflow through Deluxe’s 10-GB pipeline.

Transforming the 127-minute Jurassic Park from 2D to 3D took between nine and ten months, says Parry, who points out that the decision to convert both movies was director driven. “The biggest concern creatively is to fulfill a director like Cameron or Spielberg’s goals for the picture,” he says. “Those goals generally have been to not negatively impact the film in any way but add another textural layer to what is already an amazing film.”

Both Cameron and Spielberg directed the conversion, as they and their teams interacted with Stereo D on a weekly basis. “For Titanic, the concept behind the process was to set the gold standard for digitally creating 3D,” he says. “Jurassic Park was the evolution of that, being able to capitalize on everything we learned with Jim on Titanic and take it into a different genre and movie, and one with so many technical [VFX] achievements.” [more…]

Source: Creative COW