FILM

The revival of 3D has revolutionised cinema-going habits. West Country-based Phil Streather, producer of the ground-breaking ‘Carmen 3D’, takes Robin Askew into a different dimension.

Who'd have guessed that the country's leading expert on 3D film-making lives right on our doorstep? Phil Streather, producer of 'Carmen 3D', read social sciences at Bath University in the early 80s, moved to Bristol to teach super 8 film-making (remember that?) at the Watershed and enjoy the city's party scene, and now resides in Frome. In between, as founder and CEO of Principal Large Format (PLF), he produced one of the best IMAX 3D films, 'Bugs!', narrated by Judi Dench, which won the prestigious Panda Award for Best Large Format Film at Bristol's Wildscreen film festival. He also produced 3D film elements for the touring version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical 'Starlight Express' and the hugely successful London Eye 4D Experience. At the last count, the latter had been, erm, experienced by more than six million people.

3D is certainly enjoying a boom time at the moment (Phil reels off the figures: "There are 23,500 screens out there. A fifth of all box office comes from 3D. 'Avatar' got between 70% and 90% of its box office from 3D…"), but who'd have guessed back in the early 90s that an ostensibly failed technology had such a future? It seems a happy accident took him into the third dimension. "The cinema attempt at a 3D revival finished in the mid-80s, after 'Amityville Horror 3' and a whole bunch of horrible movies, so 3D went laterally into IMAX and theme parks and attractions. I was in the IMAX business and it just got to the point where if you were going to do a film in that format it made sense to do it as a 3D movie."

The call from the president of 3D technology giant RealD (you'll see their logo on most cinema 3D specs) came after an early collaboration with the Royal Opera House had proven unsatisfactory. "There are two particular artefacts that are a result of putting cameras in the wrong place," Phil explains. "One is that people look smaller than they are in life, so you have this miniaturisation effect. Secondly, if you're shooting from too far away and zoom in, you end up compressing 3D depth and people look like cardboard cut-outs."

Teaming up with director Julian Napier, who'd worked on the London Eye Film, Phil produced a radical plan for filming Bizet's opera that would involve having a Steadicam on stage with the performers and a crane reaching across the orchestra pit. Two full performances were to be shot in front of paying audiences, who got in at a substantially reduced rate. Wouldn't it have been easier to shoot without an audience? "Well, yes and no. It wouldn't really help us because you have a three-hour slot. There's a complete integrated factory at the Royal Opera House. They do 42 shows a year, so every day there's something rehearsing and something else on in the evening. So there would have been no real point doing it without an audience. And we wanted an audience because we wanted the applause. So we had pretty much three-quarters of the Opera House full. We just had these empty seats behind the cranes."

The other obvious concern was for the performers, who could be forgiven for feeling intimidated by such an intrusive film-making process. "What we did with them is that in the week and a half before the show we had a number of days where we introduced the performers to the cameras in the rehearsal room. The cranes were never really going to get in their way, so first we brought a Steadicam in. In fact, at first we had the Steadicam guy come in and walk around with a little hand-held camcorder. That was just to get them used to the presence of another person sharing their space. Then we gradually built that up. So at the end of the week, he had a Steadicam with a big 2D camera on it and a cardboard housing which made it look as though it was a 3D camera. By the time we got onto the stage, they'd already had five days of getting used to someone walking around with a camera of some description."

That sounds bizarrely like techniques used by wildlife film-makers to get nervous critters used to the presence of a camera operator. "Your words not mine," he laughs. "Don’t quote me as saying that! But that is a fair observation. It's habituation, really. We literally got to the point where they said, 'We are not aware of the presence of the camera.'"

Of course, as Phil readily acknowledges, not everybody likes 3D. Objections range from the dimness of the image under those glasses to the glasses themselves, as well as filmmakers' habit of chucking stuff at the audience so they feel as though they're getting their 3D premium's worth. "I disagree with that to an extent," he says of the gimmick accusation. "Having watched pretty much all of them, I actually think the early CGI ones were going completely the other way. 'Up', I thought, was so unobtrusive that it might as well have been 2D. One that I did see where I thought the use of the gimmick was very retro was 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'. That was relentless eye-poking with books, and rulers and hummingbirds and fish.

"The genres that are doing a lot of poking out are the ones where you would expect it, such as horror. 'My Bloody Valentine', 'The Final Destination' and 'Saw 3D' are three horror genre movies where I would be wanting my money back if I didn't have guts in my face - because otherwise what's the point?"

'CARMEN 3D' OPENED ON FRI 5 MAR. FOR REVIEW CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Robin Askew 2011 

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