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 brain deals with the two different images. About three years later, a director I worked with for theme park movies managed to get 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 could fit our needs and 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 convergences and see immediate results in movement as we could fly around 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 het position in 3D space against the set and counterplayers (CGI). The images were recorded clean as final compositing would be done in post. A separate SGI computer recorded all camera moves. 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.

Because of my early 3D experiences (compared tio the actual S3D development) I am asked in conferences and workshop about 3D for numerous years now. These have a stimulating effect in that explaining about 3D to others and answering the many questions stimulates ones own thinking and research. The conferences also gave me the opportunity to meet 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. Throurough knowledge of how the human brain perceives and deals with stereo has become instumental in the decisions I make while working on movies. For example the ruleset of what works or not is quite different whether you are talking to the foveal stereo perception of the viewer or to his peripheral stereo perception or both.

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 offended by a piece while others feel fine with it. It also has as consequence that if you test your material by looking at it 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 all limitations of all groups. It makes the list opf "don'ts" a bit longer. I feel evaluation is best done by measuring and evaluating disparities on a monitor on set (most often without glasses) as projecting for a large group is not really a practical solution during production either. I sometimes 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 did or showed" is quite interesting indeed :-).

Since having become aware of these perceptual particularity a few years ago, my evaluation of stereoscopic setups has become far more considerate and precise.