The young women snarl and sneer and do battle like street fighters, if stylized ones in blue lipstick and black leggings. Behind them is a special-effects green screen for overlaying movie backgrounds, riffing off 1970s kung fu, The Matrix and a version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
In front of the action, the cameraman dons strange, Blade Runner-like glasses. And at one point, a technician covered head to toe in green holds a metal rod in front of the camera. Once he’s digitally removed from the picture, the rod will become a projectile hurtling toward the audience.
The fighters are in fact models wearing clothes made by Toronto-based designer Nada Shepherd, and the film shoot is just one example of the growing use of 3-D among lower-budget productions, particularly in creative hubs such as Toronto and Montreal. No longer the purview of just IMAX and Hollywood blockbusters, 3-D is exploding and hurling toward audiences from all levels of film and video making like never before.
Shepherd had been looking for a new way to show off her designs and grab people’s attention. For months, she had been batting around ideas for a fashion video with Toronto director Grant Padley. Then she saw Avatar.
“I’ve never had a project go to fourth gear so ridiculously quickly. Once we had a 3-D cinematographer, we had a concept within days,” Padley says. The video for Nada Designs is billed as the first 3-D fashion presentation of its kind and will be shown prior to Toronto’s Fashion Week at the end of March. At first, the idea was to keep the film hush-hush to heighten anticipation, but now they’re talking about it because of another fashion 3-D film due next week: U.K. fashion powerhouse Burberry will be shooting its runway show in 3-D and screening it to fashion insiders in various fashion centres from Paris to Tokyo.
Colour is best used when it is designed properly, and that’s even truer of 3-D. If you have a very pedestrian treatment of 3-D, it’s like a [garden-variety] treatment of colour. — Sean MacLeod Phillips
Driving 3-D’s spread is new and cheaper Hollywood-grade 3-D technology, such as the $21,000 (U.S.) stereoscopic camera from Panasonic. And with this accessibility, the prediction is that it’s only a matter of time before someone makes the Citizen Kane of 3-D, creating an entirely new 3-D cinematic language far surpassing director James Cameron’s alien landscapes in Avatar.
No one is happier than Tim Dashwood. The Toronto-based specialist in 3-D and the cinematographer for the Nada Designs video, says, “We’ve been speaking to people for about a year and half now, bringing them into the office and talking to them about 3-D and saying that 3-D is the future. No one really got back to us until Avatar started winning the weekends [at the box office, where it has now made $670-million]. By that second weekend, everyone started calling. The floodgates opened.”
Dashwood says he has since signed a deal with a Canadian director – he couldn’t specify who due to a confidentiality agreement – to shoot a 3-D feature film with a budget of only around $1-million, tiny by 3-D standards. Avatar reportedly cost roughly $230-million (U.S.) to shoot. It’s also a tiny fraction of the $170-million budget for Robert Zemeckis’s 2004 animated film The Polar Express, also released in 3-D. However, short IMAX documentaries and concert films are typically made for under $10-million, although some estimates pegged 2008’s U2 3D as having cost around $15-million.
Toronto-based cinematographer Tim Dashwood says it took the Avatar phenomenon to ignite interest in 3-D.
“The perception is that you can’t do a [feature-length] 3-D movie for less than $10-million. With our technology … we’re proving otherwise,” Dashwood says, adding that he can shoot in 3-D for as little as 12 to 15 per cent added to the total budget.
The 3-D community still has that old Creature From The Black Lagoon gumption. Dashwood and other cinematographers often custom-make 3-D camera rigs for shoots, for example. Dashwood is also selling 3-D editing software he’s developed for $389 (U.S.), far less than the cost of a professional editing suite. The software is a plug-in for Final Cut, the popular editing software that helped transform indie filmmaking by giving home computers the capabilities of a professional editing suite. Dashwood’s plug-in allows users to adjust disparities between the two streams of footage that combine to create a 3-D effect. Film editors can now perform the complicated synchronizing of left-eye and right-eye images on a laptop.
