A Monsterous Time in LA

This week I'm in Los Angeles attending a press event. I can't tell you the details of the event until Monday. What I can tell you at present is that I'm staying at the beautiful Beverly Wilshire Hotel.


The hotel is at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive and was featured in the movie "Pretty Woman."

On Thursday evening, I had the rare opportunity to visit DreamWorks Studios, where I got to meet with several of the people behind the studio's new animated feature "Monsters vs. Aliens."



"Monsters vs. Aliens" required more than 40 million computing hours to make - more than eight times as many as the original "Shrek" and nearly double what it took to create "Kung Fu Panda."



I got to see the film last night in 3D in a phenomenal theater on the DreamWorks lot. The film opened today on 7,000 screens in North America. But only 2,000 of those screens are equipped with the nearly $100,000 in equipment needed to show the film in 3D ($75,000 to convert to digital projection plus $25,000 more for the RealD system used by approximately 90% of the 3D-capable theaters in the U.S.).

Starting with this film, DreamWorks will make all of its movies natively in 3D. Technology from HP powered the tremendous computing power needed to render the movie. "Monsters vs. Aliens" required nearly 100 terabytes of disk storage and would have taken more than 1,000 years to render on a single workstation.



I thoroughly enjoyed the film, although in terms of movies, it was not in the same class as several of the Pixar features, such as "Wall-E", "Finding Nemo", or "The Incredibles". "Monsters vs. Aliens" came across more as a collection of scenes with some good jokes. Still very entertaining, but not one of those films destined to end up on a must-see list. Except for the 3D. If you're going to see this movie, definitely seek out one of those 2,000 theaters showing it in 3D.