Hit & Missy 3D in Stereoscopic HipHop Video

3D HipHop Music Video for Pure Slime's Watch How We Blow

A small, independent, low-budget music video production in 3-D: words that seem to be at odds with each other. East London-based Hip Hop act Pure Slime approached London directors Ashley Dagg-Heston and Bruno Sardinha of Ruffhouse Productions in January 2008 with a mission to produce an explosive music video for their latest release ‘Watch how we Blow’. Ruffhouse found DOP Robert McGowan, who quickly suggested doing the video in 3-D – the first one in music video history as far as they could see – as Ruffhouse had a clear vision of the artists propelling themselves into the living room from a ticking bomb. 3-D Stereoscopic Consultant Alexander Lentjes of 3-D Revolution Productions was approached to pull off spectacular 3-D on HDV, on a budget, with little more than inventiveness and professionalism on his side.


3D Still of The FrenchLine, another 1950's 3D musical

Being a 3-D film buff, Alexander was quick to note that this was not going to be the first 3-D music video in history. Although the very first British Hip Hop music video in 3-D, ‘Watch how we Blow’ has been preceded by 1953’s famous 3-D musicals ‘Kiss me Kate’ and 'The French Line', 1998’s infamous ‘Psycho Circus’ by Kiss, 2005’s 3-D Duran Duran video of ‘I don’t want your love’, and most recently in February 2008 Missy Elliott’s ‘Ching-A-Ling’.

Beaten in terms of release date, it was thus a case of beating these previous releases for 3-D quality and effectiveness. The over-hyped ‘Ching-A-Ling’ is certainly not 3-D Bling-A-Ling and can easily be called Hit-and-Missy 3-D. For the cinematographic use of 3-D and even the 3-D effect itself, the Hackney boys have got the LA Hip Hop superstar well beat. Where Missy spent 200,000 Pounds with ease, Ruffhouse had to work with something closer to 2,000 Pounds. But with 3-D, budget isn’t everything – understanding its potential is.


Missy Elliott watches her video Ching-a-Ling in 3-D

A 3-D HD shoot means twice the cameras, twice the compositing and a bit of work in getting the 3-D material aligned. There is always some deviation between two cameras, unless a very precisely aligned - and usually very expensive – camera rig is used. So that sort of 3-D post correction is unavoidable. Where big budget shoots opt for beamsplitting mirror rigs to control the interaxial value to human eye-distance and below, the rent of such 3-D rigs can quickly become prohibitive in terms of budget spend. With 2,000 Pounds it’s either a whole 2 day shoot and 3 day post or 1 day with a 3-D mirror rig and no studio.


Greenscreen 3D HD Shoot

Both the ‘Ching-A-Ling’ and ‘Watch how we Blow’ videos are intended to be seen mainly online and occasionally on TV. This means the main delivery format is relatively small in size and will have quite a bit of compression to it. But the high budget LA production of Missy Elliott uses 3-D interaxial camera values that are suitable for a movie theatre, which results in a very shallow and hardly 3-D volumetric end result in the actual release format. On top of this ‘think big’ mistake, the very fact that performers in the video are wearing red and blue clothes means that the 3-D presentation format of the video was completely overlooked. They may have had polarized projection and big frame sequential LCD screens in the Walt Disney studios where this was shot, but the main release format is anaglyph 3-D, which relies on red and blue colour values to filter the 3-D to the correct eyes. So seeing ‘Ching-A-Ling’ in its actual release format is a big disappointment and even an unpleasant experience. The production of ‘Watch how we Blow’ was determined not to make the same mistakes and deliver impressive 3-D in the way it is supposed to be experienced.


The way most people will see Ching-A-Ling in 3-D: online, small, compressed

Alexander Lentjes: “The brief I got was that the 3-D imagery had to be larger than life, in your face, and mainly exploding off the screen into your living room. That means extreme use of 3-D, with interaxial values that most stereographers would never dare touch being that close to the subject matter with the 3-D cameras. The budgetary constraint of having to shoot without mirror rig thus became a great strength as the side-by-side Panasonic HVX 200’s produced the exact interaxial I knew would create an extremely volumetric 3-D image. And I am very pleased with the actual end result”

As part of the 2-day shooting schedule was a green screen shoot, there was the ability to count on recentration in post, making the 3-D fuseable by eye and brain. After this frame distance change, the stereoscopic depth can be pushed even further with a composited 3-D background. Part of the video features 3-D background material shot with twin-Sony A1’s, shot at 1080i - as with the Panasonic material. Although the video will be presented in SD on TV and mainly through the web in sub-SD sizes, the HD format of the source material means much more manoeuvrability when it comes to 3-D recentration, scaling and cropping. These are production parts intrinsic to 3-D stereoscopic video and it can be very frustrating when there is not enough resolution to work with in post.


Still from Watch how we Blow in Stereoscopic 3-D

The music video starts as CCTV footage of a lab where a ticking bomb is about to produce the explosive act of Pure Slime. Because this footage is in Black&White, the 3-D footage will actually tie in well in the Black&White anaglyph format, where no attempt is made to reproduce colours naturally, but only red and cyan are used as colours. As they are opposite colours on the colour wheel, this means the end result in indeed Black&White. Any possible mistakes of red and blue clothes in an anaglyph video are certainly very much avoided in this way and when one chooses to present a video in anaglyph 3-D, which means ending up with difficult to distinguish colours through the red&blue glasses, why try very hard to have colours anyway? Leave that to the 2-D version!

Speaking of colour, a typical situation arose on the day of the Green Screen shoot, when the artists turned up with green shirts and hankies – the Pure Slime posse colours. Some quick switching over of shirts and sweaters solved that problem, but the boys were obviously not very happy about this. As green screen shooting imposes colour limitations on the subject matter, 3-D shooting for (colour) anaglyph has its added on do’s and don’ts. An unavoidable part of any 3-D technique is that it imposes limitations and every 3-D technique has different quirks. Anaglyph is particular on the colours, but in the same way polarized 3-D projection doesn’t work well with high contrast and very low lighting. When you know these limitations and respect them, you can produce professional quality 3-D, while using the stylistic peculiarities to your cinematographic advantage.

Some of the composited background material features rare declassified US military 3-D stereoscopic stock footage of Nuclear Blasts and destruction from the 1940’s and 50’s. A rarely known fact is that not just 3-D, but Technicolor was perfected for film use by the US military to be able to shoot Nuclear Blasts as detailed as possible. So the 3-D process comes full circle with a Hackney 3-D Hip Hop video shoot backed by original 3-D footage from the birth years of serious 3-D film development. What would those generals have said had they known this would happen? A very loud: “Blast!”


“Watch how we Blow”

By
Pure Slime
www.myspace.com/94057249

Featuring
Rawz Artillery
Dread Marachi

Produced by
Ruffhouse Productions
www.rhousefilm.com

Directed by
Ashley Dagg-Heston
Bruno Sardinha

DOP & Camera OP
Robert McGowan
www.mediaedit.co.uk

Stereoscopic 3-D Consultant
Alexander Lentjes
www.the3drevolution.com

Shot on
2x Panasonic HVX 200 P2 (HDV)
2x Sony A1 (HDV)

Top Twenty list of the Best 3-D Effects in Film

Wanting more

OK, there are quite a few more great objects that have come at ya in 3-D film history, so here’s number 11-20 of the list. Or you could call it a second top 10 list, whatever sounds better.

The Top Twenty List - numbers 11-20
Of items coming out of the screen in 3-D films
As composed by Alexander Lentjes of 3-D Revolution Productions

11. Wasps - Pirates (1999)

Dancin' like a butterfly, stingin' like a wasp

Pirates Is a 4-D show, so the chair buzzes as the wasps come close to the face. that kind of a connection makes story sense. The telescope of the opening sequence is a better 3-D effect, but the bees are very original indeed. It is difficult to find objects small enough to come out of the screen and still integrate with the story, at that small a size.

Apologies for this image not being in 3-D; it is almost impossible to get 3-D plates of 4-D attractions. If you know of a 3-D version, do let us know!

12. Borg medical probe - Star Trek: The Experience – Borg Invasion 4-D (2004)

Resistance to the 3-D effects is futile

On this list because the 4-D use of the chair is one of the most original employed, other than the bird poo simulation by water sprinklers in Pirates, that is. As the Borg implant approaches the viewer in 3-D, something in the 4-D chair pokes one in the back. This is a true surprise and pretty darn freaky. It magnifies the primal reaction to volumetric imagery, which has the viewer on his toes already. Extending it to real-world touch, in a way that perfectly integrates with the story.

Apologies for this image not being in 3-D; it is almost impossible to get 3-D plates of 4-D attractions. If you know of a 3-D version, do let us know!

13. Rebecca Morbidus - The Incredible Invasion of the 20,000 Giant Robots from Outer Space (2000)

I come in pieces

Yes, we made this short and we’re voting on our own work here, but it’s one of the three stop-motion releases in 3-D in film history and the first one to include CGI as well. That deserves a good mention, doesn’t it? The girl coming out of the UFO and out of the screen is Rebecca Morbidus, and this is the first time we see her. So it's the most dramatic entrace possible for a protagonist of the story. Because she is a stop-motion model - and the audience knows this - it is possible to have her come out of the screen and be as small as she is. It's an acknowledgement of the format and the medium, even referencing Ray Harryhausen style stop-motion. It’s very meta-cinematographic 3-D that way.

14. Metal T-1000 claws - Terminator 2: 3D (1996)

The future is not a happy, fluffy place

James Cameron’s early practise with 3-D and still shot with a proper 65mm twin-camera rig. As the T-1000 reaches for the viewer with his metal (CGI) claws, a basic concept of 3-D storytelling is employed: first-person camera work. You become the person being reached for by the T-1000, so basically with this shot you are John Connor and are watching through his eyes.

Apologies for this image not being in 3-D; it is almost impossible to get 3-D plates of 4-D attractions. If you know of a 3-D version, do let us know!

15. Severed arm - Jaws 3-D (1983)

3 Dimensional fish bait

The storyboard department was clearly struggling with ideas for stuff to come out of the screen in 3-D for this movie. In fact, the severed arm is only one of three proper in-your-face objects employed in the 90-minute film. It certainly beats the climatic 3-D shot of the shark itself swimming towards the camera (Jaws doesn’t actually come out of the screen in that shot). And it’s always nice to see prosthetics rather than CGI come close to the face – it’s got that realness to it that is difficult to approach with computer effects.

16. Bath bubbles - The French Line (1954)

After building that Chrysler engine in 3-D, J.R needed to scrub herself clean

J.R. in 3-D – need we say more? Well yes, actually, because Jane Russell was yesterday’s pin-up, and probably not well known any more with today’s movie going audience. She was a kind of a 1954 Jessica Alba. So besides knocking BOTH our eyes out, why is this 3-D shot in the nr. 11-20 3-D shot list?

Because it’s so incredibly rare to see a quality lead in 3-D, let alone a singing and dancing one with endless legs! The French Line and it’s focus on a 3-Dimensional J.R. is a great stereoscopic musical treat. This particular shot with the bubbles is an imaginative one, which ties in with the story and doesn’t overdo it. A very nice balance is struck, and that, too, is rare in 3-D.

17. Floating hunter robots - Terminator 2: 3D (1996)

Hunter Killer robots: it's the future

Before Avatar and even before Aliens of the Deep, James Cameron did Terminator 2: 3-D. The floating robots come out of the screen as they are searching for the Terminator and John Connor. These floating robots are in CGI, while the action behind it is all pure live-action film. They do make sense in the story and the 3-D is not out of place in this movie because it is preluded and followed by real actors on stage. I needn’t mention that the terminator also sticks his shotgun out of the screen multiple times throughout this Universal Studios 3-D theme park movie.

Apologies for this image not being in 3-D; it is almost impossible to get 3-D plates of 4-D attractions. If you know of a 3-D version, do let us know!

18. Jared-Syn’s arm - Metalstorm (1983)

Reach out and touch someone

In this hallucinogenic sequence Jared-Syn, the bad guy of the story, comes walking out of some background smoke and approaches the camera in slow-motion. He then reaches out to the camera and is thus reaching out for you, the viewer. Because being touched by him means dying (as is often the case with out-of-screen objects), it can be a scary effect. The fact that it is in slow-motion makes this shot very effective – it is truly hallucinogenic to see an actor move in 3-D in slow-motion.

The biggest beauty of this shot, though, is Jared-Syn’s costume, which is very round and volumetric. Probably the best costume design for 3-D film ever employed. This film was made for 3-D release and almost all shots are set up for impressive 3-D. Too bad the story is rubbish and the acting forgettable...

19. Hungry Giant’s head - Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus (2005)

Lunchtime - and one dream of Bratz is very close to getting fulfilled

I could be called a rubbish movie with sections in 3-D purely for extra sales of the DVD (it’s a straight-to-video release), but this one shot employs a clever trick that is really only possible in 3D CGI. The head of the giant grows physically smaller as it approaches the (virtual) 3-D camera, so that it can stick further out of the screen. The thought of Barbie being cooked up and eaten by this giant is also a most pleasurable one. Sorry, girls.

20. Spraying canister - Medium – Still Life (2005)

Fish head!

Small particles like water splashes, dirt, sparks, etc. normally don’t work well in 3-D because they move too fast and are too many to focus on. Objects coming out of the screen, so those with negative parallax, require individual attention. On top of this, objects can only come so close to the camera before they become unfusable to the eyes. This then destroys the 3-D results. The spray canister, though, still works because it’s a cloud rather than independent particles and a glass plate was used to stop the spray before the camera and before the closeness to the camera that is unfusable.

At 3-D Revolution Productions we can seriously help you to create compelling, thrilling and well thought out 3-D shots. Just contact us for more information on how we can assist you with your 3-D Film, TV or Web Production.