Archive for November, 2009

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.

I’d just like to kick off this web site with a few words.

The development of low cost – low budget cameras and shooting gear has an interesting story. Back in the days of celluloid. Way back. Before Lucas, Spielberg and the Blockbuster – the DP*s used to struggle with a set of limitations that today is the aesthetic rules for everything we perceive as a “movie”.

• Limited film stock that had way too much grain and was way to bad at handling low light exposure. The dimmer the light – the worse the grain got.
• To compensate for the horrible grain situation the DP’s (or Cameramen as they used to call them back when the movie industry was a girl free zone) had to use a reasonably balanced mix between large negative and not getting fired for excessive film stock use. They chose 35mm.
• When you try to escape the horrible grain situation (after all this was Hollywood – the home of the Glamorama – not some east German art gig) by widening the physical plane your recording images at you get a shallow focus situation. This was OK when it was time to shoot the female lead super tight close up – but for general shots it was in many cases a disaster. To try to manage this situation the sets of olden Hollywood was so flooded in electrical light and lenses where built to specification in the strangest German laboratories. The first often resulting in actual blindness of movie technicians and stars.

This brings me to the current development of real movie making. Hollywood as you now know from suffering through all these brainless CG-fests in the last years is not the home of real movie making anymore. It’s the home of bankers and lawyers and agents and huge bank accounts and disastrous loaning situations. The real movie makers today are the people like you and me. We’re picking up where the old guys lost their jobs to hordes of underpaid computer nerds. And the technological development of today is in sync with the way the used to make films. That’s the excitement of it all.

• Today we are struggling with the grain situation again. But this time it’s not emulsion on celluloid – it’s compression artifacts from using experimental codecs like .mp4 and .m2t and so on.
• As a result of the self-unemployed situation – the nature of today’s real filmmaker – we seek the gear that will give us Bang enough to still pay our bills and un-cumbersome enough to not have to quit our day jobs looking for funding so we can hire huge crews to drag gear around. It used to be you got fired by the producer. Now you’re already fired – but since your a real filmmaker, you don’t care.
• To compensate for the fact that we are using sub standard signals (the stock of our days) we can at least try to fool Joe Public by giving our content that look of “cinema” by either using 35mm adapters or by shooting using DSLR’s. Because that shallow focus situation is not only the way we perceive some thing as a “movie”. It actually IS a “movie” in terms of language and if we use the technology in the right way. The language of films invented a hundred years ago is based around what a say 50mm lens does at a certain distance from an actor. It creates a frame. And several frames i n sequence creates a movie. Those frames and how they behave and what they say to us is the language of cinema.

History repeats itself. The last fifteen years have been an incredibly exciting time to be a filmmaker. A real one that is. And it’s only getting better. Enjoy.