Nightmare Pops Off the Screen

Friday, October 20, 2006
By: Ryan Ball

Thirteen years after it first debuted in theaters Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is back with a vengeance. And by vengeance we mean a stereoscopic 3D version crafted by those trickers and treaters at Industrial Light & Magic and produced by Disney veterran Don Hahn (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast). The perennial stop-motion holiday favorite leaps off of 168 screens across North America today.

Produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach, Monkeybone), The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the tale of Jack Skellington, a hero in Halloween Town who decides one year that he would like to play Santa Claus for a change. When the plan goes horribly wrong, Jack and love interest Sally must save Christmas by rescuing the real Santa from the clutches of the evil Oogie Boogie.

Both Burton and Selick were peripherally involved with the process of re-mastering the film in 3D. With computer-generated features such as Diney's Chicken Little, what they do is move the virtual camera over about an inch to provide the right-eye perspective and give the film depth of field. And while Nightmare employed 3D animation models, it was shot on standard 35mm film. To create the 3D effect, ILM had to build blank CG models of every character in the film. When the original film was projected onto those models, it wrapped around them like a texture map and allowed to artists to do a virtual camera shift.

Selick tells us he has always wished they had shot Nightmare in 3D in the first place because 2D never quite captured the feeling of being on those magnificent sets with those beautiful puppets. He’s currently in pre-production on his next feature, LAIKA’s stop-motion adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book Coraline. Selick plans to shoot it in 3D and is experimenting with a motion-control rig that automatically shifts the camera slightly to the right every other frame to capture the right-eye perspective.

Nightmare earned around $50 million domestically with its initial release but has grown in popularity over the years. Disney would not comment on how expensive the 3D conversion process was, but it was certainly not cheap. The fact that the studio invested so much into the revival suggests that it’s hoping the film will be something it can bring out every year like Warner Bros.’ IMAX 3-D version of The Polar Express, which has grossed more than $60 million at IMAX venues alone and will return to screens again this holiday season.

Reader Comments

• Allan Silliphant : owner : Anachrome 3D Group

  Saturday, October 21, 2006

  There seems to be a growing opinion that non-live , \"animations\" of either digital or pupput origin seem always to entertain better when presented to an audience in 3D stereo. This can be compared to the situation on the \'40s when it was obvious that the cartoon shorts had best be in Techniicolo,r even if the main liive double bill was presented in black & white. Some live shooting should also be done, but animation really needs this extra element
  to draw in the audience. a good deal better.
  Notice that the \"shift\" of the camera is only about an inch, not the 2.6 spacing of eyes .
  This is profoundly important, because it
  allows the action to appear somewhat easier to view long term, and makes the scene slightly bigger than life, rather than smaller. The other thing gained is the elimination of ghosting, particularly in the
  forground. It is much easier to transfer
  these \"one inch\" shifts to simple color
  coded stereo methodology, in almost full
  color from the growing HD video and TV
  market. Detail is extremely important for
  3D home viewing so the transition to HD
  will greatly improve the 3D effectt on home screens, that has been only so-so in regular NTSC TV sets. Viewing 3D on computers
  is even slightly better than HD, due to the purer color display. New glasses are available that sharpen the red channel by
  about 450% , and allow some minimal red to be seen by the cyan filteerd eye. It is
  something that is largely unlnown to the
  video distribution executives. They are still missing a huge part of the market by relying
  on cheesy paper glasses for DVD release
  of 3D features. They will hopefully see, the
  importance of 3D for home, as wel as theater release. This will result in more cash flow from a 3D prodject.