My next 3D film, “Old Light”, (which is still being finished as of this writing) is the story of a man’s life told through frozen moments in which the camera gently moves through the scene as he narrates… a bit of visual poetry. It uses more or an old school film trickery that involves shooting at 60fps and having everything in the scene remain still and then slowing the footage down in post, which makes it a little harder to detect subtle movements in actors. We also added in CG elements that would appear to be frozen in air.

Here are some tests we did before shooting:

This is the first 3D film I shot using a beam splitter. A friend in San Francisco custom-built a beam splitter for me. We used two Canon Rebel t2i’s with Canon L Series lenses. Finally I could get any interaxial distance I wanted. I couldn’t do much in the way of changing IA on the fly, so I would have to set it based on the closest distance in the scene or pre-calculate my expected convergence. With about half of the scenes finished, the film is getting a good response so far and it is a good fit for 3D. I’m currently in post production and have shot almost 20 scenes for it.

You can view the first part of the film here: