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.

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