American Cinematographer - August 2008 - (Page 62) An Eye-Popping Adventure Right: One wrong step leads to a sudden freefall. Below: Filming the action onstage. world, creating the sensation that the surrounding setting is enormous; a large interaxial distance can create a sense of “giant vision,” as if the viewer is looking at a tiny world. The Journey team found that the optimal interaxial distances ranged from about .75" at the narrowest to about 3" at the widest. Chris Townsend, the film’s visualeffects supervisor, recalls that at one point, the team shot the three principal actors climbing down a cliff wall and set the interaxial distance to about 4". “When the shot came up in dailies, we all laughed because it looked as though they were sixinch animatronic things. They looked tiny because the interocular distance was so wide.” Schuman adds, “Another important consideration in determining the IO is the size of the theater screen and the viewer’s distance from it; the illusion of depth is less effective when viewed on smaller screens or at greater distance. Because the viewer’s IO isn’t variable, we set the interaxial for an intended screen width of 30-40 feet.” Convergence is the physical placement of the two images onscreen relative to one another, and it controls whether objects appear to be in front of or behind the movie screen. Interaxial distance is baked into the image, but convergence is a setting that can be adjusted in post by sliding the images to the left or right, relative to each other. Pace maintains that convergence does not need to be nailed perfectly during production: “Never do another take for convergence.” The Journey team ultimately used three Pace rigs. Initially, the workhorse was the latest iteration of the Reality Camera System, now called the Pace/Cameron Fusion Side-by-Side. In this rig, the two HDC-F950s sat next to each other; having them side-by-side limited how narrow the interaxial distance could be and thus how close the rig 62 August 2008
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