Superman Returns vs. 3D Hype

I know I could not wait for Bryan Singer’s interpretation of Superman to hit the big screen, and as expected it was an amazing success. This was largely in part due to visionary story telling, beautiful cinematography and amazing casting. These elements combined to make a memorable movie going experience with both critics and the general public giving the movie rave reviews.

 

Now, while I agree that Superman Returns was an amazing success, I do have a bone to pick with the decision to put various scenes of the movie in to the IMAX 3D format as an afterthought.   I have now seen Superman Returns two times in IMAX 3D to find that while the first time through the movie I was just dumb struck with how well done it was at the core content level, something seemed to have rubbed me the wrong way about the 3D scenes. This feeling was confirmed when I saw the movie again with Heroic Arts Comics co-founder Mike Lobsinger and he came away with the same bad taste in his mouth after seeing the movie originally in the regular 2D cinema format. 

 

The breakdown in the 3D seems to be what were being sold as the 3D movie experience before the feature even starts. First off, the bad red and blue glasses are of course gone, were now dealing with a form of stereoscope / polarized comfortable glasses for viewing the 3D content, this is a great thing. When the movie starts in IMAX you are then shown previews of movies in the IMAX 3D format. These movies largely consisted of 3D rendered features directly outputted to 3D with amazing clarity, color and motion.

 

When Superman starts and the first 3D sequence featuring a flash back to young Clark on the Kent farm begins you instantly see what you expect is not what you get.  The Superman Returns 3D footage has been all done in post production, meaning that the film was not shot using 3D cameras or with 3D viewing in mind. What that leaves the viewer with is hours of post production Photoshop like digital frame tampering to give an artists interpretation of a 3D environment but in the end detail around complex shapes such as tall grass blowing in the wind, or around the top of Luthor’s ship as it broke apart you could almost see where an artist had given up on trying to break smears of color and motion blur in to the appropriate 3D layers as our eyes would see the scene naturally. This in the end leads to some specific scenes having almost a theater stage full of props effect where depth of stage is not deep enough and the background is painted on with cardboard cutouts in the mid and foregrounds to give the audience and idea of what is supposed to be going on.

 

Don’t know what I’m speaking about in particular, here are a few areas of interest to take a look at.

 

Motion blurs cause masking and layers around corn and other objects that were motion blurred

Tall grass in scene with dog had visible masks where sections of the background where swaying with the grass and should not have been.

To add depth in the complex grass area weeds etc seemed to pop out in an odd way with stand alone plants, as if they were card board cuts outs added to just act as depth layer reference points.

 

Motion blurring and the feeling of an almost choppy frame rate effect at times seemed to be the largest issue with this section.

When Superman is in flight the artists felt the need to make him jump off the screen in some instances, this tended to leave me with a feeling of a Superman toy kind of flying around as a few of the flight shots were just him kind of hanging out over the audience with background clouds too far off to actually give reference to the depth properly.  This combined with Superman getting lit from above and below from what appeared to be magical light radiating off the heads of the people in the row in front of me, it just seemed off.

 

Most noticeable issue is with the long shot of the ship’s stern breaking off while impaled on a spear of growing crystal. When you look at the top of the ship, you can see where there is a mask around the top of the ship near the communications stack where they did not bother to mask out the detail around the smaller antenna objects. I found that really bothersome both times I saw it as it seemed like an obvious thing to fix, and in an environment that was largely computer rendered as well.

 

In this scene I completely understand what they were going for but the night shots of the background and lack of definition and layers of depth in the cityscape behind Superman as he fly’s around creates an even larger low def feel that he is like a toy on a string just kind of floating in the middle of the theater with odd non existent light sources rolling over him from time to time.

 

This all being said, Superman Returns is still an amazing achievement, and I’m sure that those young at heart will be too caught up in the awe of the film to notice most of the small issues in the 3D conversion process.  At the end of the day 3D movie conversion is still in the trail an error phase and as I said earlier, the IMAX previews for movies designed for this medium look amazing in contrast. So there is much room for shock and awe in up and coming 3D film production, as long as that is the medium it is shot in, in the first place.