Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Official: Star Wars in 3D!

The "space" I asked you to watch at the bottom of a post I made in January concerning the possibility of Star Wars being released in 3D has now been filled. As I predicted, within the past week, Lucasfilm Ltd. has officially announced that work had begin in earnest to rework all six episodes of the saga in the format.

Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace will be the first to receive the 3D conversion for a 2012 release date and presumably, the others will follow in subsequent years. Presented by Twentieth Century Fox and Lucasfilm Ltd., the cutting edge conversion will take the immersive experience of the Star Wars saga to the next thrilling level, with Industrial Light & Magic supervising the project.

"Getting good results on a stereo conversion is a matter of taking the time and getting it right," said John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor for Industrial Light & Magic. "It takes a critical and artistic eye along with an incredible attention to detail to be successful. It is not something that you can rush if you want to expect good results. For Star Wars we will take our time, applying everything we know both aesthetically and technically to bring audiences a fantastic new Star Wars experience."

It had been reported that Lucas had delayed converting the Star Wars movies into 3D until there were enough screens available to screen them but considering 3D films helped boost UK box office takings by a staggering 8% it appears the time is right now [or will be in 2 years].

The Death Star trench scenes will probably look impressive

Personally, I've not seen first hand what post-processed 3D on a native 2D movie like Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans looks like, but the word from my peers is that it's so far unimpressive. Considering however that ILM have worked flawless magic on screen for many years and the fact that the release of the first attempt is a couple of years away and won't be rushed, I'm prepared to give ILM the benefit of the doubt and assume that while I'm sure it won't look like Avatar or Resident Evil: Afterlife levels of technical achievement, it will be literally the best possible conversion of a movie from 2D that is humanly possible, and yes, that will be enough for me.

Source: Star Wars.com / BBC News

3 comments:

Declan said...

Do you remember the story of a man who had a 100 year old hammer? In it's whole life they had only replaced the handle 5 times and the head twice...

When does Lucas start digitally replacing the actors? Personally, with all the re-releases on VHS and DVD special editions he has enough of my money now :-)

Dahar Master said...

skepitcal, but a trip to see them on the big screen is always welcome, plus the little lady aparently loves Jar-Jar(even though I think because she sees my reaction to the $*&%$$£$)

Civilian Overseer said...

I'd pay to see the prequels digitally remastered with a storyline and a different director.

Admit it, so would you.