Last Thursday, we were invited to a special event which was hosted by Dreamworks. The speaker, Jeffery Katzenberg, who is CEO of DreamWorks, was giving a presentation of select 3D footage from the animated film, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (It will be released this March).

He started by saying that “3D film is the evolution of cinema, following sound film and color film.” A 3D film makes the audience feel a three-dimensional effect significantly with 3D glasses, based on the principle of using two different images. Actually, this technology isn’t completely brand-new, we feel somewhat familiar with it. Most people have experienced watching a 3D movie wearing glasses with blue and red color lenses.

But what makes this 3D movie special is, while the traditional way of making 3D movies is to develop 2D first then convert it into 3D, this 3D movie is developed on the base of 3D technology at the very beginning. In order to support this new technology, DreamWorks had to collaborate with Intel which has a well known reputation for making graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices.

Even though we didn’t finish the whole movie, the scenes from MONSTERS VS.ALIENS were very exciting. Various sizes of monster characters made a dramatic landscape and maximized a three-dimensional effect. And since the background of that movie is San Francisco downtown, where we were at that time, we enjoyed it even more.

According to Jeffery, it seems like 3D films are going to be the big shift in the near future. Popular movie directors, such as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and Peter Jackson are focusing on developing this kind of film currently. But the important thing is that 3D technology cannot make a bad movie good but can make a good movie special, as Jeffery emphasized.