Sweet stereoscopic via Threshold - Post News - Brief Article

Post, June, 2002 by Matthew Armstrong

HERSHEY, PA -- Roller coasters, stereoscopic 3D animation and all the chocolate you can eat. What more can you ask for?

Pennsylvania based Hershey's enlisted Threshold Digital Research Labs in Santa Monica to create a 12-minute 3D animated project presented in 3D high-def digital projection, which runs daily at Hershey's Chocolate World amusement park.

The musical extravaganza features Hershey's characters telling the fantastical history of Hershey's chocolate through a series of vignettes that conjure up classic film genres. Hershey characters star in a 1940s film noir short, an action-adventure sequence, a circus section and a couple of dance numbers.

The challenge for Threshold was to create classic style animation completely computer generated for stereoscopic 3D display. What I've wanted for years is a suite of tools to do traditional character style animation, which really didn't exist until about a year ago" notes George johnsen, chief technology/animation officer at Threshold. With computer animation the big thing is to make it not look like it was done on the computer." The animation was created in HD using NewTek LightWave on both Windows NT and Linux platforms running on an IBM. IBM's X-Series was used for rendering.

"LightWave has become a very capable program. It is very facile at working with stereoscopic imaging." explains Johnsen. "It has a set of tools built into it for left-eye, right-eye camera-ing. We followed that up with [Eyeon] Digital Fusion, which, as a compositor, also has a set of tools for stereoscopic imaging. We built some custom flows so we were able to work with our imagery to move it closer to or further off of the screen past the stereo window."

But newer and better tools were only part of getting the character animation to look similar to cel animation. "We organized our workflow to be like a traditional animation workflow with keyframes and pose-to-pose animating, and didn't let the computer do much. We just used a paintbrush with pixels instead of ink," says Johnsen.

Johnsen, who joined Threshold four years ago, has worked on 22 three dimensional films dating back to 1986 and says the process is becoming easier with the advent of digital cinema.

"HD projectors are able to throw enough light on the screen that you can just stack up two HD projectors and have a 100 percent digital playback machine," explains Johnsen. 'As an animation house, we can provide sequential Targa files and have that play without having to worry about outputting to film, which gives us the ability to make changes much later in the process. It also means that our color balance is really under our control, which is a freeing feeling for the artist and allows us to deal directly with the clients more, [In the past with film], if we don't nail the color of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, it's going to be very expensive, difficult and time consuming to go back and fix. Now, they can just send us another color and we can deliver it tomorrow. The digital production chain and the playback chain are becoming very well integrated." Two Christie DLP projectors with a high-gain screen are used to display the film at the park.

"It's never going to be a technology that will be at the theater on the corner because you need twice as much equipment to deliver the image," says Johnsen. "But if you can find a location where that equipment is going to be set all the time and deliver it properly, it's very impressive and involving for the audience."

In addition to the 3D elements that a ppear within inches of the viewers' eyes, the show also incorporates real elements synchronized with the film to enhance the experience. These live elements were conceived after Threshold submitted the storyboards.

In one sequence, mice scare an elephant and then run off screen, then the simulated mice scurry along the theater floor, The elephant on-screen takes a mouthful of water and spews it toward the mice and the audience gets sprayed with water. "We decided early on that we'd do in-theater effects to support two things," reports Johnsen. "One was the 'reaches' when the images come right out in front of your face and the other was when we were changing environments. We [have] large wind generators and fog machines to set the mood for what was happening in the film."