3D Dreams: A Tale of a Science Communication Adventure with the Welsh Animation Industry, which didn’t happen

I’ve posted a personal story on my Particle Gadgeteering blog, “3D Dreams: A Tale of a Science Communication Adventure with the Welsh Animation Industry, which didn’t happen”. This might interest anyone curious about animation production. This is also a sort-of prequel to my involvement with Fimfiction as it got me into animations and thinking about ways to mix fiction and science.

If we had been able to pull this off it would have been awesome, but unfortunately getting £100,000 for the project turned out to be a bit too difficult.

This is a story of how I nearly got to make an animated film. At one level it is a tale, familiar to any academic, of a highly promising project which, in the end, didn’t get funded. Looking back on it, it is also a tale of youthful ambition, of seeing how high we could fly on the thermal currents of optimism, soaring over clouds, revelling in the glorious CGI views of our imagination, before the reality of a grant panel decision brought us back to the ground...

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[Walabio]

I would love to see the movie, if it would exist. ¡I love 3D! ¡Bad 3D hurts good 3!:

Let me tell you the tail of 2 Avatars:

James Cameron made Avatar. I saw the movie in 3D. It was like being on on the moon Pandora* of the Planet Polyphemus orbiting Alpha Centauri A. I liked the emersion of being on Pandora so much, that I arrived an hour early so that I could get the FrontRowCenter and watched it 5 more times and saw the special edition in 3D too when it came out! If I could, ¡I would crawl into the screen!

The great cartoon Avatar lead to an extremely awful movie. To add insult to injury, the producers gave it a horrendous conversion to 3D. This is how audiences responded:

¡Kill it (the movie) with fire!

Bad 3D hurts good 3D. After watching bad 3D, audiences never want to watch 3D again.

Then we have audiences complaining about eye-strain because they take off their glasses before watching 3D:

Drooling Moron:
“The 3D movie gave me an headache.”

Intelligent Person:
“I notice that you wear glasses. ¿Did you leave on your glasses and pull over the 3D-Glasses as you are supposed to do?”

Drooling Moron:
“No. I removed my glasses before putting on the 3D-Glasses.”

Intelligent Person:
“That is why you have an headache. You have eye-strain from trying to focus on the screen without your glasses. You should have kept on your glasses and pulled the 3D-Glasses over your glasses.”

* I prefer to class something as a planet based on intrinsic properties. If it is round, it is a planet. If a planet is in orbit around another planet with the barycenter in the more massive planet, the less massive planet is also a moon. If 2 planets orbit each other with the barycenter between them, they are a double-planet system.

[Pineta]

4617670
It may be tempting when making a CGI animation to think - having made the model, we just need to render it for a left and right camera, and we have a 3D version at minimal extra cost! - It's not that simple. A good 3D movie needs a lot of editing, as things which work in 2D may give the viewer a headache in 3D. To get a quality product you need experienced professionals, which is what pushes up the cost.

Historically there was also a 'chicken and egg' problem with 3D that serious film makers didn't do it as it was just a gimmick, but the reason it was dominated by low quality gimmicks is because no serious film makers would use it. Fortunately we have now moved beyond that stage.

[Walabio]

4618155

> “Historically there was also a 'chicken and egg' problem with 3D that serious film makers didn't do it as it was just a gimmick, but the reason it was dominated by low quality gimmicks is because no serious film makers would use it. Fortunately we have now moved beyond that stage.”

¡Then after we moved on from from that point with Avatar in 2009, the bad conversions like the other Avatar —— ⸘how can one make such a bad movie from such a good cartoon‽ —— made viewers whose 1st experience of 3D being those awful conversions refusing to watch 3D ever again!