3D For You and Me

So we’re a few weeks removed from the jumbotron premiere of the 3D Giants spot and I wanted to take a minute (or 10) to talk about the production and thank all the people who helped make the event a success.

We started down this 3D road around the beginning of the summer. I had presented Ole Miss Marketing Director Jim Ebel with the idea of shooting an Ole Miss commercial in 3D. Jim was quick to jump on board and the premiere date of the Ole Miss / Auburn football game was set.

The biggest challenge for us technically, was to determine the best way to capture the 3D images on video. I had been playing around with 3D conversions but hadn’t done anything I thought was spectacular so the reality of doing a 3D video for 60,000 people that wouldn’t A)bug people’s eyes out, B)bore people to tears, or C)even work on the jumbotron was a real challenge.
I attended the 2010 NAB conference in April and was really excited about Panasonic’s new 3D camera the AG-3DA1 which would totally eliminate the need for bulky dual camera rigs and create awesome balanced 3D images. Unfortunately, the camera didn’t come out until just a few weeks ago so my pipe dream of simple 3D production was ended quickly.

I spent some time looking at 2D conversion techniques. Here’s a picture I converted from one of our commercials we had done the previous year. If you’ve got your 3D glasses handy check it out.

This method was okay but I knew it was going to take a lot of effort to go through each frame of video and separate the layers into 3D space. I felt we would have much more flexibility and success actually shooting in 3D. After some research, we decided to go with this simple side by side rig that would hold two of our cameras and create stereoscopic images. Here’s a still from a test shot I did with the rig at the Lyceum.

The effect wasn’t bad. The only problem was that we discovered the rig worked fine for wide shots but when you shot objects closer than 10 ft, the convergence of the two images was too much and the 3D didn’t work (not to mention it created an instant headache!) The problem with the side-by-side rig was that you couldn’t get the cameras close enough together to simulate the kind of convergence that happens with the human eyes which is the goal of 3D filming. To solve this, we shifted to a rig known as a mirrored beam-splitter rig.

This rig allowed us to position the camera lenses virtually on top of each other if necessary to obtain “balanced” stereoscopic images from the two cameras. The two cameras we went with were Canon’s 5D DSLR’s. They’re picture cameras but shoot incredible HD footage. The way the rig works is one of the cameras shoots straight out and the other is inverted above the rig shooting down onto a mirrored glass plane which reflects it out. That image is inverted so you have to flip it in post. This is the type of rig that the majority of 3D films have been shot with (before Avatar). But that doesn’t make it any easier.

As you can see from the photo, the rig was fairly bulky. Also, due to the fact that the top camera was inverted, you couldn’t see the LCD so an exterior monitor was always necessary.  Here’s a look at the rig in action at the Basketball Practice Facility on campus. Pictured are Producer Micah Ginn and our Great Key Grip Greg Grey (that’s a mouthful)

Once we zeroed in on the rig, we decided to produce the spot with Ole Miss Athletes all in their arena of play. At this point we weren’t planning on featuring all the sports. We handpicked a few of them that would show off the 3D effect the best. The concept was essientially titled “Tee-ups and Take-offs”. Fairly lame, I admit, but it was hopefully going to create something that the fans at the game would respond to and look really cool in 3D.

We started collecting the shots from the different sports and the bulkyness of the beam-splitter rig really showed it’s teeth.

I knew we were going to need to get that monster rig in some high places so with the help of Physical Plant we managed to take it up on scaffolding and bucket-trucks (which I supremely preferred) to get the shots we needed. The goal was to have every sport we highlighted pay off with a high impact shot coming right at the camera. In the picture to the left, we had Men’s Basketball player Zach Graham coming in for a dunk. Below, we had Ole Miss Cheerleaders Mary Kathryn Duke and JR Irvin striking a pose.

Due to the fact that we were shooting in each sport’s arena of play, our crew worked really hard for the 2 week shoot moving around campus to set up for these shots. We even went off campus a day or two to grab the shots for Ole Miss Golf. In this shot below, we were actually trying to get below the ball for the tee shot which with a rig as big as the beam-splitter was no easy task.

Once all of the shots had been completed I began the process of piecing together the clips. Because we had shot everything in 3D and no timely conversion process would be needed, I was really excited about the prospect of a quick and easy post production job. We were a few months out from the premiere and would have plenty of time to sit back and wait for the day. What I found, however, was the shots we got were cool but they all happened so fast that it was difficult to even tell they were in 3D. If only we could play a video that paused on ever shot so you could look at if for a few seconds it would be great, right? Unfortunately, even doing that wouldn’t make the spot more exciting. Here’s a world premiere look at the “First Version” of our 3D spot.

As you can see, it’s not terrible but we all just didn’t feel like it would be exciting enough to make the event worth it. We needed something that would be fun to watch in 2D and the fact that it was in 3D was simply icing on the cake. It was at that point that Andy Harper mentioned candidly, “why don’t we just do a 3D Giants spot?”. The previous year we had had some success with a Giants themed spot we did for Ole Miss Basketball and a few people had even mentioned to me offhand that it would be cool to see those giant players in 3D. So we took the plunge. With a little over a month and a half to go, we made the decision to shift the concept to the “Ole Miss Giants”. This of course meant an entire stretch of re-shoots. At this point I had decided to include every varsity sport at Ole Miss in the video so that meant that 14 different shooting setups would be necessary to coordinate and shoot, all while adding the new challenge of not only 3D but 3D visual effects!

After a round of new testing to see what the workflow would be for shooting green screen shots with the beam-splitter rig I made the unfortunate discovery that compositing the two images together on a background plate was creating a dark edge around them which just wasn’t going to fly. So after all of my gripes about the dreaded 2D conversion process and my vow to never do that ever, ever, I was forced to shoot the new spot in 2D and spend the time to convert it to 3D.

Truthfully, It wasn’t all bad. Since we were shooting all the athletes in front of the green screen I wouldn’t have to do any rotoscoping of them to pop them out from the background in 3D space. Another plus was since we were shooting in 2D, it allowed us to shoot with our new camera, the Red One Digital Cinema camera. I’ve been excited about this camera for a while now and it was great to break in the camera with a project like this. The crazy thing is that the very first shoot we did with our Red camera, we had to jerry rig it to set it on it’s side to give us a longer image to work with.

Most of the challenges we faced with this round of shooting were mainly caused by the elements. We were really lucky with the rain. We had a pretty good drought going in Northern Mississippi which was bad for the land but great for us. We needed to shoot the athletes in sunlight to help blend them into the background plates on campus so we had plenty of sunshine to help us. Our biggest problem was the wind. Everywhere we shot the wind was crazy. During the shoot with Track, the wind blew the green screen stand so hard it snapped the top off.

Once we started getting the Giants footage composited with the campus backgrounds we knew we had something that was going to be fun and exciting. I spent the better part of 2 weeks working on the 3D compositing as well as tightening the music and sound fx. I’m a huge believer in the power of sound in videos and I really wanted the stadium to rumble when those giant athletes billowed through. And trust me, it did!

The week of the premiere, we were asked to make a 30 second cut of the spot to air during the broadcast of the game. That editing might have been the hardest since we had to decide which sport shots to cut to make the time. Here’s the final cut of that spot.

So after nearly 5 months of planning, meetings, phone calls, scheduling, shoots, re-shoots, re-re-shoots, editing, compositing, mixing, and exporting, we were finally ready to showcase the 3D video to 65,000 people October 30, 2010 at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium at the University of Mississippi.

 

A big thank you goes to all the folks in Sports Media Relations including Kyle Campbell, Kim Ling, Bill Bunting, Joey Jones, Daniel Snowden, and Kristen Saibini for their incredible help in coordinating the times with the players and coaches. I also want to thank Assistant Athletic Director Jamil Northcutt for his invaluable help and support as well as all the individual coaches and players that gave us their time and energy for the shoot, and re-shoot, and in some cases (Volleyball) re-re shoot. In no particular order they are: Mike Bianco, Fuller Smith, Matt Smith, Jake Morgan, Renee Ladner, Kayla Melson, Andy Kennedy, Robi Coker, Zach Graham, Michele Drinkard, Haley Millsap, Houston Nutt, Brandon Bolden, Allen Walker, Jerrell Powe, A.J. Hawkins, Valerie Boothe, Colleen Tillson, Ernest Ross, Billy Brozovich, Matthew Mott, Rob Thompson, Taylor Cunningham, Alley Ronaldi, Billy Chadwick, Tucker Vorster, Missy Dickerson, Lindsey Perry, Joe Walker, Ben Lapane, Sofia Hellberg-Jonsen, Mark Beyers, Kristi Boxx, Connor Vogel, Joe Getzin, Whitney Craven, Gegina Thomas, Morgan Springer, Amanda Hoppert, Maddie Cleary, Mary Kathryn Duke, and JR Irvin.

I also want to thank everyone at Ole Miss Brand Marketing led by Jim Ebel for driving the marketing of this project, including Robert Jordan, Nathan Latil, Kevin Bane, Linda Peel, Tony Seaman, Peter Cleary, and Hilary Bane for their help and support. Also, a big thank you goes to Eric Summers for the incredible job he did on the Ole Miss Giants Poster (which now lives on the door to my office)

Be sure to check out the 3D website they created to view all the spots as well as the great 3D pictures that Robert Jordan and his crew produced.

Above all, I’d like to thank everyone in Media and Documentary Projects for their patience, encouragement, time, and talents. Thank you especially to Andy Harper, who talked me off a few ledges throughout the project and Micah Ginn for his creativity and willingness to share ideas to make the spot as good as it could be. Many thanks to everyone who gave up their time to crew the shoots including, Karen Tuttle who was always willing to help, Matt Minshew for his enthusiasm and work ethic, Chris Williams, Rebecca Batey, Joe York, Petra Zivic, and Greg Grey, all of whom played a vital role in the production of the spot. To all of them and everyone else on campus who came together to create this shared experience at Ole Miss for 90 seconds, I say from the bottom of my heart, thank you!

To sit in that stadium with 65,000 people all watching something that I had helped create was both humbling and exciting. I cherish the opportunity to create and share with people and I hope I am able to continue that in some form or fashion for the rest of my life. I apologize if I sound too sappy or sentimental but it was truly an incredible moment and I’m proud to have been apart of it. See you next time!