Matte painting for the background for IMMORTALS built from photos on the drive from Las Vegas to LA. My wife was driving and I shot up through the windshield. All manipulated to classical layout. Animated using depth map displacement, which were also used for stereo3D images.
The original version of this shot was not working. As global stereo pipeline specialist, they asked me to spearhead a full rebuild outside the VFX. Luckily this is what I knew how to do — I started with the background and had to integrate with the other teams and guide the work.
I traveled from LA to Tippett Studios, then to a facility in Montreal to supervise this. The original stereo eye distance (inter-occult) was HUGE and nearly impossible to look at comfortably. I used vector displacement between the stereo3D cameras to create two interim eye positions with a LOT of paint fixes (in stereo) and had Tippett team reduce their interocular to match. I did this on my laptop with After Effects, and tools from ReVisionFX.
The final scene was composited in Nuke by Sylvain Théroux using the brand new stereo views pipeline (one comp thread with two outputs) that The Foundry had learned from the Avatar team — who originated the method in Shake.
Sylvain has a breakdown of his process, and stereo3D anaglyph versions of the final on his site.
sylvaintheroux.com/dow.html
We called it the Sistine Chapel shot. 14 years ago.
The movie was released on Nov 11, 2011. My hotel room in Montreal was number 1111 — I think that was on purpose. The cast of Mirror Mirror was at the hotel at the time, a diverse group of actors with vastly different proportions. Made for an interesting stay.