On the same day Sony decided to convert the Seth Rogen action-comedy The Green Hornet to 3D, Paramount has decided to do the same thing with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, except that they have no plans to move it off its July 2 release date.
According to Variety, Paramount has been working for over a year testing the 3D conversion process with Stereo D, who also worked on Avatar, and three months ago, they showed Shyamalan some converted footage and he agreed to convert the full movie to 3D.
On a recent visit to Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), ComingSoon.net/SuperHeroHype asked the movie’s visual FX supervisor Pablo Hellman (War of the Worlds) about the 3D conversion process and whether in theory, it would be possible to convert The Last Airbender, and we received an answer that applies well to the recent news:
“You can probably spend as much time as you have,” he told us. “How good it looks is proportionate to how much time that you spend either if you decide to shoot it in 3D or you decide to do it in post. I think the one thing that you have to remember is to design things (for 3D). If you have not designed it in 3D, you have to have a specific aesthetic to it, and having seen ‘Clash of the Titans,’ this movie is different in the sense that Night’s takes are really, really long. The average shot is about 500 frames, which is really long, and the camera movement, even in action scenes, there’s a lot of stuff we shot at 96 frames a second just so we can speed it up or slow it down. The camera moves really slowly around the characters. That kind of design lends itself well to 3D dimensionalizing more than an action sequence that’s all cuts; you just can’t focus on things. A lot of it has to do with design and what you do with it, too. It’s what we do with the tool that makes it either interesting or jarring and not telling the story.”
You’ll be able to read the rest of all our behind-the-scenes coverage of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender in the next few months leading up to its release on July 2.
