Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of Dreamworks, opened up the ShoWest event in Las Vegas with a presentation on Dreamworks Animations’ move toward releasing all its movies in 3D – it’s the future you know.
Kicking off the visual demonstration of his masterplan, Katzenberg showed the assembled crowd a clip from Dreamworks’ next animation Kung Fu Panda. Although it won’t be released as a 3D movie, they took one scene from the film and re-tooled it in 3D as a demonstration. This one scene, when our Panda hero (voiced by Jack Black) escapes captivity, was re-worked from inception in 3D. It was very impressive, really putting you in amongst the action.
Next up was a showcase for Dreamworks’ first fully 3D film Monsters Vs Aliens. The film is a pastiche of ‘50s sci-fi with a group of freaks, including Reese Witherspoon as a giantess and Seth Rogen as a blob (read about the full cast here), unleashed from Area 52 (geddit?) to save the world from alien invasion.
Katzenberg showed a finished clip where an alien probe first makes contact with the US – “Ironically, showing no actual aliens or monsters,” said Katzenberg. The President of the United States (voiced by Stephen Colbert in a piece of genius casting) walks up a long staircase to make peaceful contact, playing the famous Close Encounters theme on a yamaha keyboard. (A DX7, for fact fans). No response, so he tries again with a funk tune. Nadda. Then it all goes wrong and he asks his general to “do something violent”. Despite the lack of creatures, it’s a terrific clip – very funny, and the 3D sucks you right in.
After the presentation, we chatted with Katzenberg about further plans for 3D.
“This will change everything we know about the movie business,” he told us. “It is the most impressive thing I’ve seen in the cinema in my lifetime…Within one to two years everybody will own their own 3D glasses, a bit like owning your own tennis racket if you play tennis. They will become fashionable.”
We’re not sure we can see people wandering the streets in the kind of bug-eyed specs you wear at the IMAX, but it certainly seems to be that big movies are looking to 3D to offer a viewing experience that can only be enjoyed in cinemas – both to push the medium creatively and to offer a real challenge to the increasingly massive screens, superb picture and sound and lack of teenagers on mobile phones that home cinema can provide.
“Unless something like this happens for movie theatres they’re going to be facing a big challenge,” insists Katzenberg. “But the impulse to do this is purely creative – not a response to migration from the cinema… To succeed you always have to move forward, always be looking over horizons and around corners. If you don’t innovate you become irrelevant.”
So committed to breaking barriers is Katzenberg that he doesn’t even know how they’re going to make their next 3D project How To Train Your Dragon, an adaptation of a children’s book about a Viking child who must capture a dragon. “The filmmakers want for that movie dragons flying through rain and snow, interacting with one another, to be able to dive into the ocean, come out, drip water – it’s all impossible,” he laughs. “But we’ll make what they imagine possible.”
Tony Horkins