![]() ![]() Simone said the key was to mirror what the human eye sees naturally. And they just played so well and so nicely to 3D that I think it really adds another layer of immersion.” The environment we had to work with was these beautiful, epic landscapes of these battlefields. “Tanks looked really nice people walking across these giant, epic fields. “To be honest, it just fell into place beautifully,” he said. While 2D to 3D conversion is Stereo D’s bread and butter, McCoy assumed that converting “They Shall Not Grow Old” would present more challenges than it did. At the beginning a single shot could take 11 months to fully restore and convert, but by the end of the three-year process the company could turnaround a shot in two months. Along the way, the Stereo D team learned which tools worked best in which situation, along with creating new ones. The restored and colorized footage was sent back to Jackson’s Park Road Post in New Zealand so that Jackson, or someone from his team, could sign off and approve an image before it could appear in the film. Every highlight goes to a nice cool blue tone.” ![]() Every shadow goes to a darker more of a gray tone. “The highs, mids, and lows are all keyed differently and the colors are combined differently, so nothing has a pure green or a pure blue. “Nothing has a single color on it in the entire image,” said McCoy. The Stereo D development team also created a piece of to help with the shading of colors, so they would appear more realistic. Jackson’s team supplied incredible reference material for the colorization process with everything from actual WWI uniforms worn by the men to photographs of the locations, some as they exist today. Every frame had to be painstakingly rotoscoped - isolating, and literally tracing, things as finite as a blade of grass – so that correct color could be applied to each element of the frame. The most painstaking work was the colorization process. “This is where our frame-by-frame painting is cleaning up conversion artifacts.” “If you’re taking one frame and stretching it across two, you’re going to have smearing and edge issues,” said Simone. While they relied on software to supply a base for the newly created frames, digital paint artist filled in gaps, making motion look more realistic, and replaced soldiers’ body parts that disappeared in motion during the frame conversion process. The Stereo D team also had to recreate parts of frames in converting the footage from 13 frames to 24 frames per second. We made is through by recreating anything we had to or basically painting.” “There’d be shots where a piece of tape was clearly taping up the negative for a couple frames on them. ![]() ![]() “The were giant holes where there would literally be frames missing, where we would have to rebuild them,” McCoy. It was to bring it forward to make it look as it did on the day. “So if it was photographed, our job wasn’t to change it. “One of the cornerstones that Peter was instilling in us and our artists was staying as true to the original material as we possibly could,” said Stereo D Producer Mark Simone. To restore the archival footage and transform it into a 24 frames-per-second, color, 3D film, Jackson turned to Stereo D, a company that specialized in converting blockbusters (Marvel and the Star Wars films) from 2D to 3D. The hope was that by restoring the footage and removing from it what made it look and feel dated, he would also remove the filter that prevents a modern viewer from relating to the soldiers up on screen. Jackson’s dream was to make the 100-year-old footage look as modern as possible. To make his groundbreaking World War I documentary, “ They Shall Not Grow Old,” director Peter Jackson received unprecedented access to the Imperial War Museum’s film archive in London. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |