'Toy' Stories in 3-D - Buzz Lightyear finds a dimension

IMAGINE taking a Nintendo 64 game and getting it to play on a Wii. That technological task gives an idea of what the staff at Pixar Animation Studios faced in converting 1995’s “Toy Story,” Disney’s first entirely computer-animated feature, and its 1999 sequel into 3-D.

The double feature of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2,” which was released on Friday, not only offers another generation of children the chance to see both films in theaters. It also, conveniently, helps prime the promotional pump for next summer’s “Toy Story 3.” For Pixar and its owner, the Walt Disney Company (another new development since the originals appeared), 3-D innovation means the films can be seen as they should have been all along.

“I’ve always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early ’80s,” said John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and the director of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2.” “Within the computer, we’ve created truly three-dimensional environments. We’ve only looked at them with one camera. Therefore it’s a two-dimensional view of that three-dimensional world.”

The production process for a 3-D movie requires the use of two cameras, positioned next to each other, shooting action at the same time to mimic each of the viewer’s eyes. A live-action film not originally shot with two cameras cannot be made into a 3-D film, but in the more malleable world of computer animation, the second camera view can be added. The process involves a bit of virtual time travel.

“We have every scene in ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Toy Story 2’ saved, and so we have this bit of action that is frozen in time, “ Mr. Lasseter said. “If we bring that up in our system, we’re going back in time into that moment.”

Without changing any of the film’s action, Pixar’s 3-D specialists, or stereographers, returned to each frame of the film and virtually placed a second camera next to the original, creating left-eye and right-eye views of the scene. Then all of the scenes were re-rendered in the computer with this additional perspective.

The process of taking the original files from the first two movies and getting them to a place where they could be enhanced was one that Mr. Lasseter called “digital archaeology.” “We had to have some very, very smart people at Pixar go back in and write some software and figure out a way to make it so that those files would render on our current computers,” he said.

It took four months to resurrect the old data and get it in working order. Then, adding 3-D to each of the films took six months per film. (Pixar and Disney declined to talk about the project’s cost.)

One person charged with that task was Bob Whitehill, the lead stereographer. And his role was not just technical; emotional impact also informed some of the changes. “When I would look at the films as a whole, I would search for story reasons to use 3-D in different ways,” he said. “In ‘Toy Story,’ for instance, when the toys were alone in their world, I wanted it to feel consistent to a safer world. And when they went out to the human world, that’s when I really blew out the 3-D to make it feel dangerous and deep and overwhelming.”

The distance Mr. Whitehill would position the second camera from the first would determine the degree of 3-D and which of three types: “in front of screen” (when an object seems to be in the theater with the audience), “at screen” (when the image looks 2-D) and “behind screen” (when the screen seems to be a window with objects in the distance).

But in creating various levels of 3-D, both Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Whitehill were concerned about not overdoing the effects. “We work very hard in all of the Pixar films to not make anything in the imagery that causes people to think of something other than the story,” Mr. Lasseter said.

New York Times. Oct 1, 2009.