AVATAR

LL & JC

On December 16^th I watched Jim Cameron’s Avatar in the Mk2 cinema on the banks of the Seine at Porte de Bercy in the middle of the Bibliothèque Nationale complex.  A couple of hours before, Bernard Benoliel and Laurent Mannoni of the Cinémathèque Française, had picked me up at Charles de Gaulle Airport and we decided to see Avatar which opened in France two days before it’s opening here.  I was invited by the Cinémathèque to give a talk during their 3D film series of screenings. When I sat down to watch Avatar in the Mk2 theater, I must have had three hours of sleep in the previous 24 hours. I was beginning to go into a jet lag fugue, and watching Avatar under these conditions was like watching a dream world in a trance.  

Christmas in Beverly Hills

Would that it snowed,

and sleigh bells rang out,

and all men were greeted

with love and good cheer,

and the lost and homeless

were treated like kin.

Christmas in Beverly Hills,

so near yet so far;

Christmas in Beverly Hills,

or some distant star.

MY LIFE AT POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY

When I lived in Queens between the ages of 15 and 18, attending Flushing High School, I lived on a street called Kisenna Boulevard.  Today the co-op apartments on the street are inhabited by Chinese people.  When I went back to Flushing a couple of years ago to settle my mother’s affairs, I discovered that the neighborhood was a more interesting place with Chinese restaurants and shops, and now Main Street was teeming with people, like downtown Shanghai, I imagined.  When I was a boy I lived in what was primarily a Jewish neighborhood and  I spent a lot of time visiting my school mate Michael Miller’s apartment, also in the co-op. Michael’s father and mother were well-educated lefties and their home was filled with books and magazines.  What attracted me most was the pile of Popular Photography magazines, which I devoured.  I knew only a little bit about photography, but I had started taking pictures when I was 12. I became a surrogate member of the Miller family and hung out there many hours – and a good part of the time I spent reading those old copies of Popular Photography which, by hook or crook, taught me a lot about technical photography.  Little did I know that someday I would be an editor at Popular Photography.

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 2

Silver screens, if they are well made and installed, can have minimal hot-spotting, but they still have what I call shading.  I make a distinction between hot-spotting and shading.  Although they may come about from the same reflective characteristics of the screen, shading has to do with an asymmetrical change in brightness across the screen and is typically dependent upon where you are sitting.  Shading happens quite noticeably when sitting in the worst seat in the house, say in the front row way on the extreme left or the right. In fact, the worst seats in the house for viewing a 2-D movie on a matte screen become even worse when viewing a polarized light stereoscopic movie on a silver screen from a bad seat. 

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 1

Ah the silver screen: searchlights scanning the Hollywood sky, glamorous premiers, gorgeous actresses….  The silver screen is a term that has denoted the glamour and excitement of Hollywood since Chaplin twirled his cane. While to some it is the most visible sign of hope for the cinema for others it is a dreaded surface upon which to project those old standby 2D movies.  But there’s so much more to it than glamour – there’s dreadful science.  It’s a technology that ought to command the industry’s keenest minds, because, after all, that’s where a hundred and fifty million bucks wind up as a vibrating veneer of a hundred billion photons reflected into the eyes of tens of millions of photon consumers. That’s one big point in favor of the film industry – they have not dehumanized the customer to the point where he or she is called a consumer.  The customers are still the audience, people with feelings rather than human maws born to consume piles of chazarai made in China. 

SIDE-BY-SIDE FOREVER

Lately there has been a lot of interest in two formats for stereoscopic multiplexing:  The above-and-below, resurrected by Technicolor for theatrical projection using film, and the side-by-side for multiplexing left and right images for television.  Here’s some background from a personal perspective. 

OVER-AND-UNDER AND OUT

In the early 1980s, when I founded StereoGraphics Corporation, the first bit of revenue income we had came from a venture with Chris Condon of StereoVision International.  Chris was a pioneer in the projection of stereoscopic movies using a single 35mm projector.  He founded the company Century Precision Optics, which is now a part of Schneider; but he moved on from there, sold it, and created StereoVision International because he had a big hit with the ‘70s movie The Stewardesses.  The success of that film set him to work on perfecting a single film approach to stereoscopic projection and photographic techniques.  He settled on the above-and-below (also called over and under or over/under) format based on two two-perforation high subframes with the Scope 2.4:1 aspect ratio occupying the area of the academy aperture. 

LIVE-ACTION STEREOSCOPIC FEATURES

 

As reported in Daily Variety Jeffrey Katzenberg was recently heard decrying the lack of live-action stereoscopic features.  He exhorted the industry to correct this situation.  He was also quoted as musing about his motivation for going beyond the mandate of his own particular self interest, animation, by taking on the live-action cause.  But if there were more live action stereoscopic features in the theaters it will also be good for people who make feature-length animated films, like Katezenberg. 

THE DIGITAL RELIGION

The announcement by Technicolor of a film-based 3D system, which would cost exhibitors comparatively little money to install, was provocative to say the least.

Email to a Producer

 This is opinionated but backed by reason. This is not at all like the debate on health care reform. It’s better to shoot parallel because you will not incur asymmetrical trapezoid distortion which shows up most often in wide angle in close shots. The zero parallax plane can then be set in post by horizontally shifting the left and right images. The downside of that approach is that you will have to crop image area to maintain the aspect ratio.

When shooting your IMAX films parallel was just fine without having to laterally shift because IMAX uses a different compositional theory — different from that used for the usual theatrical cinema. IMAX strives for a so-called immersive effect and the background points are set to be at a fixed 2.5 inches — at least for many IMAX films. Shooting with toe-in will create the geometrical distortion I alluded to but it can be fixed in post with a Pablo — for example. Most stereo rigs do not allow for shooting parallel to control the desired zero parallax setting. They depend on toe-in. Parallel going lens axes can only have a zero parallax control if the sensors or lenses are horizontally shifted at the time of photogrpahy.

The overriding aesthetic concern has to do with what I call stereo timing — the analogue of color timing. There is no way to set the zero parallax plane with complete confidence during cienamtogrpahy because it is impossible to understand how the shots will finally go together at the time of photography. Therefore, no matter what method used, tweaking in post is necessary to get the right stereo timing — or proper image flow and look.