'Captain America' Director Defends 3-D Conversions

More blah blah about 3-D conversions and - gee, what a surprise - the positive spin comes from a guy making a movie that will be upconverted to fake 3-D. As if your confidence wasn't already shaken, that guy making the upconverted movie is Joe Johnston, who amazingly kept his job directing Captain America: The First Avenger even though A) There are many better candidates, and B) He directed The Wolf Man. This all comes on the recent news that The Avengers will be shot in 3-D. That's much better, but I mean that only in the sense that it's not being converted. Paramount is playing the same game everyone else is, hoping for a ton of money just because the tickets are 30% more expensive. How to Train Your Dragon made something like two-thirds of its money in 3-D sales, so it's easy to understand the salivating on the corporate side. The big thing is to make a better damn movie. Then, if you've got money out the wazoo to market it, odds are people will show up. Nobody disinterested in Avengers is suddenly making an opening weekend appointment because it requires glasses. On to Cap: Johnson tells Earth's Mightiest that "Conversion has gotten a bad rap because of pictures that have done it badly. If you shoot the movie and decide at the 11th hour to convert it to 3-D, you don't have the necessary information to process what we call the 'left eye'." "We're shooting a whole separate pass on every setup to record the information necessary to convert to 3-D in a seamless and undetectable way. When conversion is done right, you can't tell the difference between it and full 3-D," Johnston adds. Hey, that's great. So does that mean the second half of the movie, which is rumored to be more about the Invaders than the title character in another of Marvel's attempt to make everyone a star, will actually be better as a result? Or will it just look like you're right there? My point is audiences will not care about garbage in 3-D. They'll care if a good movie is a good movie, so Joe Johnston and anybody else can go on and on about native 3-D or conversions, but strapping it to a bad movie only makes it a bad movie in 3-D.

Comments

[Jay]

As the old saying goes, "You can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter."

Cynical? Me? No!

[jason]

I agree, he is a horrible director and was probably the only one available on such short notice. The more he talks about HIS vision of the movie (the way he wants the origin to be told, the way he wants captain america to look, the characters he believes should be in the movie...), the worse it starts to sound.

[J.Bradley]

Well, he's just talking about conversions specifically. If they're working on the processes and developing them and always improving on them, then eventually yeah, they'll get a better product. that's ideally what you do in any business with any new product or process. But ultimately, like James Cameron said in that post from a few days ago, you don't need 3D to sell the movie, it's like saying the movie's in color.

[Psyko Tek]

I thought whedon had a hand in this

this could be their biggest character if they play him right
the comics latelly cap is not a ditto head
but a man standing for america as it should be (including the civil war thingy)
I haven't caught up since his return

and that probably won't sell

they can't sell the invaders maybe fury an the howling commandos

are they the invaders in this script?

comic geek going off