The Secrets Behind The Hobbit's 3D Wizardry

Peter Jackson has always loved the magic of moviemaking. After watching the 1933 classic King Kong at age 9, he started shooting stop-motion films with his family's Super 8 camera. Three years later, he carved up an old fur coat that belonged to his mother and used it to create a model of the great ape. In his early 20s, the budding director was baking latex molds in his mother's oven to produce the prosthetic hands and heads for Bad Taste, the homemade horror flick that earned him a trip to Cannes in 1987. But the eclectic cast of characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy truly put his powers of invention to the test.

To make the wizard Gandalf appear a few feet taller than his onscreen colleagues, Jackson employed a number of tried-and-true cinematic tricks. In one scene, he used a custom-designed wooden cart to position Elijah Wood (Frodo) far to the right and a few feet behind Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf) and recorded the action at an angle that made it look as if the two actors were seated side by side. In the Hobbit trilogy, Jackson's latest tribute to the mythic Middle-earth world created by author J.R.R. Tolkien, such sleight of hand was not possible. "Once you shoot in 3D, it completely blows your cover," he says. "Your forced-perspective tricks are naked to the audience. With 3D glasses on, they can see exactly how far away the characters are."

This left the director with only one alternative: To conjure a community peopled with hobbits and dwarves, he would have to resort to the cumbersome process of filming man and halfling separately and uniting them digitally in postproduction. Jackson had occasionally used that technique in TheLord of the Rings, but The Hobbit was filled with dialogue?often two or three script pages in succession?between Gandalf and his pint-size pals. "It's very difficult for them to have a conversation that feels natural," says Jackson, citing his early attempts to unite the wizard with hobbits. "We would have Ian do half the conversation and then Elijah would have to fill in the hole Ian had left him. It was a stilted way of doing it."

So before filming began on The Hobbit, Jackson asked his team to come up with a better approach?one that would allow him to direct every scene in real time. The answer arrived in the form of an innovative motion-control system. Instead of shooting the actors one at a time, the director placed them on two different sets?50 feet apart?and recorded them with different cameras. The live, or master, rig was outfitted with encoders that measured the pan and tilt of the camera, the motion of the boom that held it aloft, and the speed and movement of the dolly beneath the whole setup. This data was crunched, scaled, and instantly relayed to a slave-rig camera on a green-screen set, allowing it to move on three axes in perfect harmony with the first.

In this way, Jackson could place the slave camera much closer to Gandalf and?with the magic of software?remove the green background and merge the images from the two sets so it appears as if the wizard towers above the dwarves. One challenge was to create a green-screen set that precisely mirrored the live set?archway, walls, chandelier, etc. If Gandalf rested his hand on a green-screen table, it could not appear to float above the top of the table on the live set. To precisely position everything, the crew invented a device called the Pinger. Think of it as a laser-beam protractor: It measures distances and angles, allowing the crew to pinpoint the critical contact spots common to both sets.

Once those spots were aligned, the live-set and slave-set cameras worked together to generate the proper perspective. The system included a monitor that supplied Jackson with a live composite of the two shots so he could watch the scene unfold. The actors on both sets used green tennis balls to locate their sightlines and hidden earpieces to follow the dialogue.

In the system's trial run, Gandalf pays a visit to Bilbo's Bag End home with a company of dwarves clustered around him. In the course of the shot, he has to duck below an archway, bump his head on a chandelier, greet each character by name, lay the dining room table with forks and knives, and accept a cup of wine from a cohort.

The live set was built to human scale. The table, the plates, the drinking cups were all of normal size since they would be filmed next to average-size actors. The items on the green-screen set were scaled down by 25 percent. In Gandalf's hand, the wine cup looks tiny. But because the slave camera was placed closer to him, the cup and the hand both appear much larger on film. In fact, when the two images were combined, the cup looks exactly like those in the hands of the dwarves.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/3d/the-secrets-behind-the-hobbits-3d-wizardry-14851524?src=rss

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