Archive for the ‘Distribution’ Category

Hurry. Read his book You are not a gadget. It was released last week and i bought it in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and read it on my flight back to Sweden. It deals with the problems of web 2.0 and the loss of individuality to anonymity. And how the scheme of web 2.0 will screw the content producers… To me Lanier is one of the most brilliant minds out there. He’s always got a completely refreshing view on the Status Quo. And what I respect most about him – apart from being a true virtual reality pioneer – is the way he always thakes the human perspective on technology. The computer is absolutely nothing without the artist. A contrary belief from most singular minded technologists of Google late. The book is a powerful piece of mind work out for the independent film producer.

I’m preparing to start launching a series of videotutorials on stereoscopic 3D production in the next weeks. These will also be the first tutorials on this site. As some of you know I’m currently in production on my next film “Ghostface” (“Den Som Knackar” in it’s original swedish working title). This will be the first effort to make a stereoscopic movie for the big screen and VOD.

I chose to shoot the film in stereoscopic because I wanted to experiment with the experience and the techniques involved if you really want to tell your story with that third dimension added. All of the major distributors is – as far as I can tell – only in it for the extra bucks they can charge the audience for 3D. Very few films are actually using stereoscopic technology to actually help telling the story in a different way from 2D. I was really surprised as to how a quality brand studio like Pixar could actually put out a film like “Up!” in stereoscopic when they did it so completely wrong. “Up!” is a poor example of the power of stereoscopic visual storytelling.

My little ghost story “Ghostface” is on the other side of the spectra. It’s not trying to be big. It’s not trying to please everyone – not even the genre buffs. It’s a little story of six people and a ghost in a house. It’s shot in HDV and it’s shot stereoscopic. And we shot the whole film in three days last summer. But it was SUPER-important to me that the stereoscopic technology would bring something to the table – and it did. It brings a dimension to the film that would never have been there in a 2D telling of the story. It creates a pacing and a style of cutting. It dictates rules for the music and the sound effects. I love it because it puts the eyes of the audience in the center again. The camera becomes an important actor. And most importantly – it puts both of the audiences eyes in the center of events. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a camera on set ever.

This is my stereoscopic setup. It’s two Canon HV40′s and a design for adjusting the parallax that I did. How this works will be included in the coming video tutorials.