So yesterday evening George Lucas announced the post-production firm that will be handling the conversion of his Star Wars series of films to 3D. But if the name Prime Focus doesn’t ring a few bells than perhaps their work will. But those bells it rings may just be warning bells.
Prime Focus is the production house behind the post-production 2D-to-3D conversions of last year’s Clash Of The Titans.
I’ll let that sink in for a moment.
Clash Of The Titans. The most critically and audience-reviled 3D conversion job in the short history of the current 3D boom is on the resume of the company that will be handling the conversion of Star Wars to 3D. Now to be fair, the company only had 10 weeks to complete the entire job. But still, it was some pretty dodgy work. Prime Focus had more time to do conversions on the Wes Craven film My Soul To Take and The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, and while the results for those were a bit better, they still aren’t anything to write home about.
But despite this track record, Lucas has chosen them after what he describes, “an exhaustive testing process.” And let it not be said that Lucas and his Industrial Light and Magic effects company don’t know their business when it comes to visual effects.Lucas himself gave the company the thumbs up last night when he stated, “It was incredibly important to me that we have the technology, the resources and the time to do this right. I’m very happy with the results I’ve been seeing on Episode I.”
We have almost a year until the 3D conversion of Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace hits theaters. Hopefully this will be enough time for Prime Focus to deliver the results that Lucas seems to be promising. It still doesn’t answer the question why, outside of a it being another money grab, we actually need to see the Star Wars movies in 3D though.
