3D Summit: Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sony Chris Cookson Speech, Lunch With Producers

The 3D Entertainment Summit is a great place to be in on the ground-level conversation about an industry in its infancy. The overall concern, paced by DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, is one of quality. No one of the movie players in this room at the Hilton Universal City wants to be known as the one who makes the next Clash Of The Titans.

Clash Of The Titans is the now infamous 2010 remake of the 1981 movie about a conflict between a god and a man-god, Originally created in a 2D format, Warner Bros execs rushed to do it in 3D after seeing the box-office revenue from Avatar.

Scott Hedrick moderates panel
 on 2d to 3d monetization

The result was a 3D version that was so bad it spawned complaints from, of all people, Avatar producer and director James Cameron. It was Cameron who specifically called out the movie as an example of bad 3D.

That episode in the short history of 3D has driven the conversation here at the 3D Summit. The issue, even right now, is getting a good quality 2D to 3D conversion.

One bit of information for theater operators: execs like Katzenberg are calling for brighter lighting lamp levels than what is common for screen projection at theaters.

Oh, and this blogger's video of Katzenberg will be up by Thursday. On that note, Katzenberg responded to my question about the Comic Con 2010 response over the news that Cowboys and Aliens would be made as a 2D movie. Jeff said the he was at Comic Con, but didn't hear any displeasure with their 3D products or the use of 3D.

Really? Well, yes, Comic Con goers loved the movie trailers, but there was an occasion when they took time to express their preference for 2D over 3D.

Let's play that video again from Comic Con:



A Speech Too Long

The only glitch in the 3D Summit is that the producers feel the segments run too long. That's borne of the fact that the whole show started about 10 minutes behind schedule. Ignoring that, Chris Cookson, President of Sony Pictures Technologies Sony Pictures Entertainment, gave a long, really droning on and on speech, that he admitted he knew cut through our lunch. Did he have a lot to say? Well, yes.

He says that Sony's working with "the playstation people" on a kind of 3D application, though he did not give a specific release date.

More later!