The challenge had the special kick of an adventure for Rodriguez. “Filmmaking is already a visual medium, but doing it in three dimensions only makes it that much more exciting,” says Rodriguez. “I think making a 2D movie is going to feel a little too easy after this, because 3D is about envisioning a whole world, full of color and depth. You have to approach everything in a new way when you’re not just looking at a flat image in front of you. I had to rethink the way I would shoot and light, the production design, even the way actors move and talk, in order to make it all work in three dimensions – and this made the emphasis on the visual elements stronger throughout the film.”
He adds: “The hardest part was probably for the actors who had to act out all this incredible action entirely in front of a green screen. They had no walls, no sets, not even props to help them – since everything had to look like it was set in a video game, even the props themselves needed to be computer generated. If they were lucky I might be able to give them a thumbnail sketch but a lot of it was just done out of sheer imagination. I wanted the moviemaking process on this to be as free as it had been on my earlier movies that had no effects. Knowing a lot about effects, and what was possible, we were able to really fly free everyday. I improvised a lot with the actors. The actors could try out different ideas spontaneously as we were shooting – and they did their part by coming up with all kinds of fun concepts on the spot.”
Shooting in 3D further spurred Rodriguez to consider all kinds of visual elements in greater detail – especially the use of color and perspective. Early 3D effects from the 1950s appeared in black and white. Polychromatic 3D images are still a new frontier, and require extreme care in color-correction. Rodriguez used real-time color correction that allowed him to correct each frame’s colors to his eye’s satisfaction instantly. But one thing Rodriguez had to get used to was the idea that the use of his absolute favorite design color – primary red – had to be limited (no red light gets through the blue lens of the anaglyphic glasses). “To me red is a color that just pops out and I really like to use a lot of it, but when you’re wearing anaglyphic glasses, you can’t see true red, so I had to start thinking differently. I learned to like purples,” he notes. “Eventually, I discovered so much about how different shapes and colors would appear in 3D that I realized I was going to have to design a lot of the costumes myself, it was not only a lot faster for me than having to explain it all to someone else, it was also probably the most fun job on the set.”
Indeed, because all of SPY KIDS 3D’s wild inventions, cyber-space vehicles and espionage gadgets were designed inside computers, the costumes for SPY KID 3D became one of the few physical design elements for Rodriguez to concentrate on (Rodriguez also wrote the film’s orchestral score). From the athletic, articulated, ultra-colorful power suits that Juni, Carmen and Grandpa Cortez wear to Salma Hayek’s efficiently stylish silver labcoat, Rodriguez was intimately involved in the entire costume process. The piéce de resistance was The Toymaker’s trademark outfit: a mix of velvet, gold lame and snakeskin that reflects the villain’s many outrageous personalities all in one outfit. “You realize how important a costume becomes in a movie like this, because it’s the one thing the actor has to latch on to for his or her character. Because everything thing else is green screen! A lot of times the actors had to be shot separately, even if the final shot would be a group shot, they acted alone.”
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