Despite Avatar’s Best Picture and Best Director loss to the Hurt Locker on Sunday, 3-D movies will dominate the future, according to Phil “Captain 3-D” McNally who lectured at the Cornell Cinema yesterday about the great technical strides made in stereoscopic cinematography. “Cinematographers and directors have literally spent their careers cheating their ability to look at the three dimensional world and imagine it flat,” McNally said. “Whenever something appears that changes what everyone has been striving towards for the last hundred years, it’s going to create problems just by its disruptive nature.” The future is now: Phil McNally, stereoscopic supervisor of DreamWorks Animation, explains 3-D technology to an audience in Willard Straight Hall yesterday. - By: Yi-Ke Peng McNally, who has officially changed his middle name to Captain 3-D, created his first computer animated 3-D movie Pump Action in 2000 and has since worked at Industrial Light and Magic and now at DreamWorks. His filmography includes Men in Black II, War of the Worlds, Kung Fu Panda, Monsters and Aliens, and the upcoming movies How to Train your Dragon and Shrek Forever After, among others. Three dimensional images can present information more quickly and more interestingly, says McNally, so that directors can focus on telling stories, creating drama and portraying character emotions without wasting time and shots necessary to create the setting. “If a picture is worth a thousand words and a film has a thousands of pictures, you can really have a huge potential in 3-D movies where each picture has so much more information,” Kelton Minor ’12 said. “The moment you get that buzz of opportunity where they see that what they are trying to get in 2-D is actually amplified in a good way in 3-D, then that’s the door opening for the next stage, which is hopefully the innovation,” McNally said. The lack of cohesion between the depth-of-field in the images, edge framing, motion parallax problems and other technical considerations have caused problems in the past by causing eyestrain and headaches over the course of a lengthy 3-D movie. These problems, often solved by careful trial-and-error adjustments in the distance between cameras, need to be teased out to portray a clear and believable setting that is ting that is understood by the audience. James Cameron, according to McNally, used a simple and strategic method to film Avatar and prevent optical confusion. By always locating the focus of the scene midrange, on the screen itself, in every shot, the periphery in front and behind the screen became the surroundings, the characters were thus enveloped in the jungle of Pandora. “If you look at [images] in 2-D and then in 3-D, you can see how much more you can pick out,” said Prof. Don Greenberg, who runs the Program on Computer Graphics and invited McNally to speak. “The movie industry is going to be small compared to the 3-D gaming industry and the 3-D gaming industry is going to be small relative to the 3-D television industry which will be coming through the internet in the next two to three years.” “Being able to see how the field is innovating in a lecture, especially such a visually stimulating lecture, you can really get your hands on it,” Kelton Minor, a student present at the lecture, said. “It can be really complicated. At the start [McNally] did a decent job explaining it, but the complexity was certainly there.” Minor is studying optics and visual perception. The event, attended by nearly 150 people, included clips of McNally’s work on a custom-built 3-D screen by Cornell Cinema and a projector setup on loan from Optoma Projectors which a few students have been retrofitting for 3-D projection, according to Matthew Low, grad and member of the Program on Computer Graphics. According to Greenberg, Cornell has a rich history in computer graphics and cinema. Six former Cornellians have gone on to win Oscars in Scientific or Technical Achievements and many now work at Pixar.