On a soundstage on the Sony Pictures lot, a group of cinematographers sit and watch one of the most important scenes many of them will be involved with this year:
A USC acting student standing in front of a black backdrop, holding a yardstick.
That’s it – no action, unless you count the casually-dressed guy at the front of the room who announces, “We’re going 3D now, folks,” and then punches a button on the control panel he’s holding.
Sure enough, the scene suddenly acquires another dimension on a nearby monitor, the yardstick seeming to pop out of the screen toward the viewers.
This, essentially, is 3D School, a three-day course offered by Sony to directors of photography who want to learn the new technology. Sony started the program in early April, turning one of its soundstages into a hands-on classroom and setting up a separate 3D center in a nearby building.
When the studio announced the classes and the International Cinematographers Guild made its members aware of them, 200 signed up in the first four days to learn a new set of skills.
“Shooting in 3D requires a real paradigm shift,” says Buzz Hays, the Executive Stereoscopic 3D Producer at Sony’s 3D Technology Center. “It’s not just a matter of taking what you do in 2D and using new equipment.”
He shrugs. “As Phil McNally at DreamWorks likes to say, we’ve spent the last hundred years trying to figure out how to convert 3D reality to 2D photography, and it’s become its own art form. But a lot of the 3D filmmaking we’ve done in the last few years has been a 3D version of that. We’re still using the mechanics of 2D storytelling, and there’s a better way.”
Instructor Dave Drzewiecki is showing that way on the Sony soundstage, which is equipped with an array of expensive 3D equipment and a pair of sets: the alley where Spider-Man kissed Mary Jane (photo above), and an apartment from the TV series “’Til Death.”
At the second of Sony’s classes, more than a dozen cinematographers and a handful of observers watch the demonstrations, follow the math behind the process (it turns out that “V=Mfc” is an important equation if you want to know where to sit in a 3D theater), and try their hand at filming.
The group is not restricted to Sony-affiliated filmmakers; in fact, says Hays, it’s drawn almost equally from all the studios. None have paid to attend, and the DPs who’ve come in from out of town are having their room and board paid by the ICG.
So what’s in it for Sony? In a way, says Chris Cookson, the studio’s president of technology, what they’re doing is similar to what Sony did many ago, when it gave classes to teach DPs how to use Sony’s new 24-frame electronic cameras.
“There was a realization that if Sony wants to promote 3D, bad 3D experiences are going to hurt Sony a lot,” Cookson says.
