The Last Emperor

The Last Emperor was shot with super-wide anamorphic lenses and mostly natural light (due to no lights being allowed in the Forbidden City) and presented some challenges during the conversion. The stereo team’s approach was to avoid heavy clean-plating to preserve the integrity of the photography, introducing a subtle depth and dimension to the movie.

A further challenge of the 3D conversion was the size and scale of the scenes captured including armies of thousands, 19,000 extras were used over the course of the film and the Chinese army was drafted in to accommodate. These scenes required lots of attention to detail and heavy rotoscoping in order to allow the stereo team artists to create the necessary depth.