Kommer Kleijn SBC

I have become professionally intersested in 3D cinematography since seeing my first 3D movie in a theme park. This must have been around 1995. Since then I started studying stereography and the ways the human visual system deals with the two different images. About three years later, a director I worked with for theme park movies, and equally interested managed to get us our first S3D assignment: An interactive theme park movie combining live action, CGI and virtual reality. We started looking for a camera but could not find anything that would fit our needs and so we wound up designing and building a 3D camera from scratch in collaboration with the virtual reality company on the show. The virtual reality company was also instrumental in helping us with learning 3D setups as they had a real-time rendering system in S3D coupled to a Barco projector and shutter glasses. This allowed us to try many settings of interaxials and convergence and see immediate results, also in movement as we could fly around with the virtual camera with joy-sticks in a choice of virtual sets. This gained us a base of stereo experience allowing us to pull of the first project succesfully :-). During our shoot, a stereoscopic virtual studio was set up, which allowed us to check the position of our live actress against the virtual set. With coders on the camera head we could see a real time provisional composit and check the position of the actress in 3D space against the set and against her CGI counterplayers. The images were recorded clean as final compositing was done in post. A separate SGI computer recorded all camera move metadata. Pictures of this shooting are here.

Following this first experience I was contacted soon after because other productions also bumped on the lack of 3D cameras and 3D knowledge and found me through my web site. I then shot several 3D projects, with a wide palette of equipment, and a wide palette of destinations as well. I learned about the parameters and how they can be very different depending the screen it must be seen on, and also the circumstances it will be seen in (Theme park, Giant Screen, Cinema Theatre, TV).

Because of my early 3D experiences in comparison to the later S3D boom, I was regularly asked to speak in conferences and teach workshops about 3D for numerous years. These have a stimulating effect in that explaining about 3D to others and answering the many questions also stimulates ones own thinking and research. The conferences also gave me the opportunity to meet vision scientists who study human visual perception and exchange views with them. This often has been very enriching for both parties. I learned enourmously from their findings and they were also often interested to have some feedback "from the field" from me about their findings. Throrough knowledge of how the human visual system perceives and deals with stereo has become instrumental in the decisions I make while working on movies. For example the ruleset of what works well or not, is quite different whether you are mainly talking to the foveal stereo perception of the viewer or to his peripheral stereo perception.

Another suprising aspect of S3D is that it is not perceived the same way by all persons. Viewers actually can be arranged into groups, and there are things that can work for a group and not for others, and the different groups require different parameters to obtain comfortable viewing. This makes that some persons can be discomforted or even offended by a piece while others feel fine with that same piece. It also has the consequence that if you test your material by looking at it yourself or with only a few persons you may not have a person of each group present and you risk making material that is hard to look at for some, and without becoming aware of that. To provide comfortable viewing for all viewers you need to take into account the limitations of all groups. This makes the list of "don'ts" a bit longer than one might think at first. I feel evaluation is best done by measuring and evaluating disparities on a measuring monitor on set, most often without 3D glasses, as projecting for a large group is not really a practical solution during production. I also use conferences and workshops to test and evaluate these groupings. Asking an audience "can you please raise your hand if you were incomforted by what I just showed" is quite interesting indeed :-).

Since having become aware of these perceptual particularities, my evaluation of stereoscopic setups has become far more considerate and precise. My goal being to make 3DS material for cinema and TV that contributing to the storytelling and also is pleasurable to look at for all viewers, and not only for a percentage of them. :-)

My view on the future of S3D

Another real challenge is to achieve for the 3D to really take part in the storytelling. This goes beyond the tasks of the stereographer / 3D cinematographer only, as such involves both directing and scriptwriting as well, and also other departments such as set design. I have been lucky to participate for most of the S3D work I did in "full 3D projects" in tat they were written and directed for 3D only. Many 3D projects on the market aren't actually written for 3D but were written for 2D and then shot with a 3D camera with hardly any adaptation. That does not make it an actual 3D piece in my view, but then is more like a 2D piece, shot with a 3D camera. If a 3D piece is distributed in a 2D version as well, this often gives away that it may not actually be a 3D piece, because when 3D is actually used in storytelling, then a 2D version obviously can't work as well. When a director I worked with was asked why she refused her film to be seen in 2D, she sometimes answered: "Yes. And I refuse Black and White screenings too, as well as I refuse showings without sound". Hopefully this will make it clear. For her, the 3D was an integral part of the storytelling and part of her work. Indeed, also during shooting, no 2D version was considered.

For another piece, a separate 2D and 3D version were written, separately shot, by separate crews. It had different camera positions, different editing, and even different acting. Almost different everything. Then a piece can have both a 2D and 3D version indeed, that both work well. But when a 2D version is marketed while being the same piece as the 3D version but just without the 3D, then depending on whether the piece was written and produced as 2D or 3D, either the 2D version will not work well, or the 3D version will have only very little interest. Some movies were a compromise. But then both versions may have been compromised...

It is my view that the demise of 3D in cinema and TV after the 3D vague of 2007-2010 has two main reasons: One being an abundance of uninteresting 3D content, and the other being the lack of light with 3D projection in cinema theatres. And the ackward and expensive active 3D glasses marketed with 3DTV.

The 3D "boom" created a fast growing demand for 3D content while there was little to no experience among the major film makers. This resulted in 3D productions that did not satisfy technical parameters, causing (sometimes serious!) discomfort for viewers while in fact, such can be avoided. But also almost all content, with only few exceptions, weren't actually 3D movies in that they did not use the 3D in the storytelling. As such these were closer to "2D movies shot with a 3D camera" then they were to a 3D movie. 3D then becomes a gimmick, and not a storytelling tool. This may have happened with the very first color movies as well. But as color projection did not require a tedious equipment addition and management (like 3D glasses), nor did it remove 2 stops of light, color continued and filmmakers learned to use it in their storytelling. 3D never made it long enough yet, for that to happen.

There is a solution on the horizon though: In the future, movie theatres probably will become equipped with direct view LED screens. These screens have sufficient light output to show 3D movies without the dim picture compromise. I hope that this will allow 3D movies to be shown more often in 3D, and so, in the long term, make 3D become an integral part of cinematography (like color did), and conduct film makers to fully integrate 3D in their creative process, and use it as a storytelling tool.

For 3DTV a solution was found but appeared too late to become main stream. Televisions with polarised screens have been sold (I still own one) that work with passive glasses that are lightweight and cheap. In fact these are the same as the ones we received in cinemas using passive glasses. But on the TV they work better in that in the evening (using the power the TV has for daylight operation) we can enjoy 3D without a dim image. We also can have plenty of these glasses around as they are cheap, and they do not require any maintenance like charging, changing batteries or care to switch them of after use.

So I think that technical solutions exist. Hopefully one day content creators will become experts and accustomed to actually using it efficiently in storytelling. And if you think I can be of service with my expertise, then please give me a shout :-)