Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 35 I was intentionally trying to overshoot and catching him and all that sort of thing. And just mussing his hair as much as possible. Motion Capture, 3D and Assembling the Proper Rig F: I don't know if they're up to the qual- ity of full capture, but there are suits now [with which] you're getting great capture without all that expensive technology. And on Jungle Book, we used all consumer- facing tech. We used Oculus in addition to HTC HMDs. We used all the stuff, all the VR gear you can buy off the shelf. Because I was noticing that the latency on the motion capture setup, the camera, it was dropping more frames than VR was. But if you take a real camera operator who comes out of the brick-and-mortar world of filmmaking, and then you stick them in there, no matter how much you tell them to look at the Simulcam monitor, they always look at the green-screen monitor because it's not dropping frames. It's always a little rubbery. And even though the Simulcam's wonderful for framing, camera operators aren't deciding things with their prefrontal cortex. They're reacting instinctively to an image that they're looking at through the viewfinder. And so if you take that away from them, they're not really operating the way that they normally would on a set. C: Simulcam is an amazing, amazing tool. And it's evolved a lot. I operate everything myself—I'm talking about on live action— except for Steadicam. Because I just know there are people who do it better. F: You go single camera? You're always operating? C: For 3D, I think two cameras is about the max. And I almost never use the second camera. F: And what are you using, the 65… C: A Venice. It's the new high-level Sony HDR camera. They're claiming 17 stops of dynamic range, it's pretty stunning. F: How big of a chip? C: Sony did something special for us where they unmounted the sensor block, so that we can mount the sensor to the lens essen- tially. Check this out: a 29-pound system, in handheld mode, it's tethered, 11-axis mo- tion control system, built into a 29-pound camera with two HDR Venice cameras on it. DPs really torpedoed native 3D, I think. And they did it because they said, "No, we can't use that cheesy ENG Fujinon lens that weighs 2½ pounds. We've got to use the big 18-pound Zeiss lens. Or a Panavision zoom lens. And so you put two 18-pound lenses on there, you're at 36 pounds before you've included the rig or the cameras or anything else. Now, how are you going to do a hand- held shot? So we did Avatar and we won an Acad- emy Award for cinematography with two-thirds-inch sensors. And that was 10 years ago. But the point was the lenses were small. So two 3-pound lenses, that's not breaking the bank. You start putting in two 10-pound lenses or 15-pound lenses and you're screwed. So I've just been waiting for the pixel count to get high enough and the sensors to get small enough to get back down to those small lenses. F: Now you're a bit of a purist—do you ever just go single camera and then convert for a challenging shot? C: Yeah, you have to. I'll tell you where I did my greatest compromise to date on 3D: We set out to shoot the whole exhibition when I went down to the Challenger Deep in native 3D. We wound up shooting about half of it. And converting half. And it was fine. I'm still a firm believer in native 3D pho- tography. I would never convert a movie that I was making now. I converted Titanic; I converted T2. We had a year to do the conversion; it was done with loving care, and there was good volume in the faces, and it was really nicely done. But typically when you have a finished cut of a movie…two months before delivery, there's no time. It's always a rush job. F: I found also, because we were trying to figure out on Jungle Book if we should, and the first argument, of course, was it's always easier to convert [because], well, all the backgrounds are digital anyway. It's just the kid… the hardest thing to get right is a close- up of a child with hair. Placing Human Emotion Front and Center F: That's all that really matters. Anything in the background you can fake. But it's a human form—that's always been [where I] prioritize my energy. If your brain has a lot of CONTINUED ON PAGE 76 PHOTO: KEVIN SCANLON