American Cinematographer - April 2011 - 12

Short Takes
A wood nymph’s morning routine is depicted in the 3-D ad campaign “Faeries,” shot by Christopher Soos, CSC.

Shooting “Faeries” in 3-D By Iain Stasukevich

Even after 20 years of experience as a commercial cinematographer, Christopher Soos, CSC admits that he still has a few things to learn. While shooting three television and theatrical spots for the French company Bouygues Telecom, Soos and director Baker Smith took an on-the-job crash course in stereoscopic filmmaking. The spots, co-produced by Harvest Films and Wanda Productions, illustrate the fantasies of Bouygues employees. “This is how heroic I felt when I helped my customer with her lost cell phone,” says one employee, after we see a gallant rescue diver fish a waterlogged damsel from the ocean. In another spot, an irate grizzly throws a tantrum, conveying an employee’s anger after the company’s virility is called into question. Both “Rescue” and “Bear” were shot and directed by Soos and Smith in 2-D on 35mm film. The third spot, “Faeries,” was a 3-D production and thus required a very different approach. “Faeries” whimsically suggests that the morning routine of a wood nymph resembles that of the average worker: wake up, shower, dress, eat breakfast with your dog and then head to work — only “work” is flitting about the forest sprinkling faerie dust on everything. Smith asked French 3-D company Binocle to handle the stereoscopics and “had them talk to me like I was a second grader,” he recalls. “I’m not a cameraman, and I will always look to the cinematographer for those skills, but I still want to understand what’s happening.” Next, he approached Paris visual-effects company Buf, whose artists translated his storyboards into a detailed CGI animatic, complete with specific lenses and camera moves and a scale model of the set.
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Another thing that set “Faeries” apart from the other two spots was that it was scheduled to play before major theatrical 3-D releases. With this in mind, Soos approached the commercial as though it were a feature, spending almost a week of intense camera prep at Binocle and Panavision Paris with 1st AC Alex Leglise and 2nd AC Raphael Douge. “In a theatrical environment, your 3-D specs become exponentially more important in terms of alignment, sharpness, composition and depth-of-field,” Soos notes. Stereoscopic technician Jean-Marie Boulet assisted Soos’ team with selecting identical pairs of Primo prime lenses, a task that proved more difficult than simply matching focal lengths. “If we wanted two Cooke 12mm lenses, we needed to choose between maybe five or six to find two that were almost perfectly the same,” Boulet explains. Binocle’s Brigger line of motion-controlled 3-D rigs is capable of handling zoom lenses, “which might seem like it’s easier because you don’t have to change the lenses, but you still have to meet exactly the same focal lengths, and with zooms, a perfect match is even more difficult.” Soos shot “Faeries” with two Panavision Genesis cameras using Binocle’s Brigger III rig in the over-under mirrored configuration. “[The Genesis] is a wonderful camera for 3-D — very stable and very heavy,” says Boulet. “Because we are working pixel to pixel, we don’t want the camera to be loose.” Boulet’s stereoscopic department doubled the size of Soos’ camera department, and although they were two separate teams, they strove to operate as a single unit. As the convergence puller, Boulet assisted Leglise with changing the lenses by removing the fragile and expensive mirror from the 3-D rig so the 1st AC could access the camera. Once the lenses were replaced, Boulet reinstalled the mirror and recalibrated the two cameras. Over at the monitoring station, 3-D vision director Alexander Sill checked an anaglyphic

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Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Harvest Films.

American Cinematographer - April 2011

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