My film Twelve Tales Told consists only of recent Hollywood logos, so creating a 3D version was mostly easy. The first thing was to buy Blu-rays to get the 3D material, although spending almost $300 on so-called ‘collectors editions’ of films like The Hobbit does feel quite strange. Torrents are available in 3D but they compress the left and the right pictures into one, resulting in a loss of quality. 3D Blu-rays are a great source for the 3D-found-footage-filmmaker, they contain two HD streams: one for each eye!
The only logo that proved to be difficult to loot in 3D was the one for Miramax. Although the company already made a stereoscopic film using the current logo, it was in the cut off aspect ratio of 1:1.85 and I needed the full Cinemascope version, of course. I was waiting desperately for the second part of Sin City to be released, but then had to realize it was in 1:85 too and provided a shorter version of the logo without the Brooklyn Bridge intro anyway. So what to do?
Seeing the 2D Cinemascope version of the logo over and over again I understood the camera traveling in it was not completely straight forward only: it moved slightly to the right first and then glides to the left. Having shot a stereoscopic film with only one camera before, I knew that with temporal displacement it’s possible to separate a left eye’s view and a right eye’s view out of one camera traveling, simply by showing the same film separate to each eye with a short delay. This way you can create an almost correct 3D perspective in a motion picture out of most existing tracking shots. Vertical motion or humans don’t really function with this method, but architecture, for example, works surprisingly well! But it needs to be one direction, left or right, otherwise you will need to cut away two frames on one eye’s perspective when the direction change occurs, a jump which would be noticed by our attentive viewers. Luckily there are five cuts per second in my film anyway, so I could hide that cut easily and voilà Twelve Tales Told was finished in 3D!
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Part of the Notebook's critical supplement to BAMcinématek's "3D in the 21st Century" series, running May 1 - 17, 2015. Twelve Tales Told plays on May 13 accompanying Martin Scorsese's Hugo.