Jason Bomstein, a stereographer at SDFX Studios (formerly Stereo D), collaborates with major filmmakers, particularly those at Marvel Studios, overseeing the transformation of blockbuster features from their 2D original format to stereoscopic 3D. Recently, he’s taken on this responsibility for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the latter of which received the AIS (Advanced Imaging Society) Award for Best 2D to 3D Conversion of 2022.
Jason Bomstein
Bomstein has honed his approach to this process over more than a decade with the company, first as an artist and subsequently working his way up to team leader — overseeing artist teams at its Toronto location — before moving into his current role of stereographer.
The work, he explains, involves a combination of technology and artistry. There’s no button to push that simply “converts” a 2D image into the kind of 3D experience audiences expect. Instead, the work is about a series of creative choices he makes in collaboration with the filmmakers and the Marvel team dedicated to the 3D versions of their films.
Good stereography respects depth suggested by the 2D scene in terms of staging and lens choice. But the part Bomstein most enjoys concerns the artistic decisions around how the added dimension enhances the audience’s experience and serves as a tool to help tell stories.
“Part of what’s great about having a company like ours doing this versus filming in 3D,” he says, “is when you film in 3D, there’s no changing it. You can’t manipulate it. And this process benefits enormously from being able to try different approaches.”
Deep Thoughts
For every project, Bomstein gets to know the 2D version of each shot in order to make key decisions about the amount of depth he and the SDFX teams (located in Los Angeles, Toronto and Pune, India) will create as they deconstruct the 2D images into a great many individual elements (a face, a hand, parts of a table, and on and on) and then reconstruct all those pieces into the two images — the left and right “eyes” — that make up the 3D version.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
The 3D effect is created by adding parallax between the left and right images – the less aligned the two are, the greater the stereoscopic effect. So as a prelude to the artists’ taking the images apart and reconstructing them, Bomstein determines depth and assigns the shot a number, which refers to the amount of pixel separation his team will create for the stereoscopic version.
“I’ll start out eyeballing a scene and assign it a 25,” he says, referring to the number of pixels offset between the left and right eyes. “Then we might get in there and actually see it and say, ‘You know what? It would be better at 35.’”
To complicate the calculations further, 35 refers to a total amount of offset, which is then distributed throughout the z-axis of the frame. “If we decide with Marvel that a particular shot, say looking down a hallway, should have a depth of 35 overall,” he explains, “we might give it 15 in the back and 20 in the front to reach that depth of 35. There are many different ways we could approach it and still have a depth of 35. We can fine-tune how the depth is distributed based on how pronounced or subtle we want the 3D effect to be.
Doctor Strange and in the Multiverse of Madness
“We look at the action, the emotional content and considerations like focal length and depth of field in considering how much depth to assign a shot,” elaborates Bomstein. “An image taken with a wide-angle lens will naturally seem to have more depth than a telephoto shot, even in 2D, and that’s a factor in approaching depth for 3D. But there are also dramatic considerations.”
Sometimes, the far background elements won’t be separated at all, which accurately represents how we see things in real life. Other times, Bomstein and his team will add parallax (separation) far beyond the degree to which it would drop off completely in real life. This can be a perfect way to enhance the 3D effect when the story calls for it.
Bomstein, who has been a stereographer for a dozen years, working primarily with Marvel for 10 of them, explains, “Just as with the color grading, Marvel has guidelines about how to determine depth in these franchises. In our case, the guidelines are about the amounts of depth we give to different types of shots, like over-the-shoulders or wide shots or close-ups. But we have leeway to adapt the guidelines when we all agree that it makes sense.”
Doctor Strange and in the Multiverse of Madness
During the process of finding the perfect separations for each part of each shot, Bomstein collaborates with any number of stakeholders in the project, particularly [Marvel Studios] stereo supervisor Emma Webb. “She used to work for this company,” Bomstein adds. “I learned a lot from her.”
Building Depth
Once the depth for each part of every shot is mapped out, Bomstein distributes the work among the hundreds of artists the company employs globally, who, using proprietary technology and old-fashioned fine-detail work, meticulously separate out every element from every shot. They work primarily with roto tools — including Boris FX Silhouette for roto and compositing tools such as Foundry Nuke — to add roto depth painting and cleanup. Then they reconstruct the elements, applying the agreed-upon amount of parallax all the way along the z-axis between the left and right eyes.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
“There are certain scenes in that movie where we stretched and exaggerated the depth to give it more of that kind of fun, 3D feeling,” Bomstein says. “You know, like going on a ride where something really comes out very close to you.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
“There’s one particularly fun one where Ant-Man and the Wasp (Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly) are at a weird cliffside restaurant, and an alien guy jumps up on the table and tries to eat her. He has a really long mouth and snout with a bunch of teeth. He leans out really far, and his mouth comes out at us really fast. We gave the close part a really pronounced separation so that it comes right up to our faces.”
Other times, the exaggerated 3D effect would go counter to the story. For a scene of the villain’s fortress in the Quantum Realm from far away, the 3D separation recedes in a natural way, falling to nothing in the distance. “We could have given everything in the frame some depth, even if something so far away wouldn’t really look 3D to a person standing where Ant-Man is. But in this case, it was more important for the Quantum Realm to feel like a massive space grounded in reality, so we didn’t exaggerate that at all.”
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
At the beginning of this feature, we find the eponymous doctor doing battle with the monster Gargantos. Gargantos heaves a bus at him, and he responds by cutting it in half. “That’s a pretty cool one,” Bomstein notes. While extreme depth could enhance the fun factor of the flying bus, he says, there is another important factor in 3D decision-making: “If we exaggerated too much, it could end up making everything actually look small — like a little diorama rather than a massive street scene.”
Bomstein takes pride in the stereoscopic versions of all the movies he works on and encourages audiences to see the 3D version whenever they can. “It adds to the experience in many different ways.”
