How Are The Most Affordable 3D Movies Made?

With the success of James Camerons 3D flick Avatar which left Camerons earlier movie Titanic far behind in proving itself the highest grossing movie of all time, it has become a common trend among the film makers to bring out 3D movies.

However, it is a tough job to create a 3D flick as it requires a proper technical support and costs almost a fortune that every movie maker cant afford. Again, its a tiresome job that takes a lot of time and energy and therefore most directors dont feel that enthusiastic to get involved in such ventures after all, everyone cant be a James Cameron even if they aspire to be successful like him!

But as they say, where theres a will theres a way, some smart directors and film makers have got a way to get the job done and be successful without spending a fortune! And the way is to create the 3D effect in post production. Eureka, what an amazing discovery! Almost all the film makers are busy using this less expensive technology these days.

Several movies like last years Alice in Wonderland have used 3D in post production. Though technology enthusiasts like James Cameron badly criticize the conversion of 2D into 3D. Criticizing Tim Burton for using the conversion technique in Alice in Wonderland last year, he said, It doesnt make any sense to shoot in 2D and convert to 3D. Interestingly, the movie did a kind of fine and it even won the awards for Art Direction and Costume Design at the 83rd Academy Awards!

This technique also involves a lot of hard work but is more affordable than filming a movie originally in 3D. In this technique, graphic artists have to separate out the shots into different layers of depth. The number of layers varies according to the technical requirement of the film shots. So it can be as less in number as two when shots have simple blocking and again the number can go as high as eight when the shots offer more complicated compositions.

After the separation of the shots into layers of depth, topographical map covering the scene is created for tracing out all the objects in the scene carefully. Now, with the help of a computer second cameras role is played (original 3D filming requires two cameras) and another image is generated. This image is slightly offset. All the images in the layers that are positioned closer to the viewers are most offset where as the background of the objects are not offset that much. This creates an illusion that the things are appearing out of the screen.

This way the audiences get to enjoy the adventure of 3D movies and the filmmakers get to save a lot of bucks!!