When we arrived at the shoot, I immediately spied a gazebo which had a roof made of crisscrossed steel. I though, wow! Perfect. We could put the cameraman up there and Al could shoot from a bird's-eye perspective, down through the holes in the steel.
But Al explained that if you shot from directly overhead with a 3D camera, the actors would look like they were six inches tall.
I suggested that Al could place the camera at a certain point and then zoom in. But he quickly corrected me.
"Take the word zoom out of your vocabulary, because the human eye doesn't have zoom." That made sense. 3D works more like the human eye. When you have an object in real life, and you want to see it closer, you move your eye closer to the object. And that is what you must do with camera in a 3D shoot.
"3D is more honest." Insisted Al.
When setting up the fighters, we had to be careful how they were positioned, not only in relation to the camera, but also to each other. You also had to be aware of every object in view, see how many different planes and layers you had, and determine if they all made sense. Al used a pocket laser device to calculate distances and explained that there was a special software package for creating 3D computerized mockups of locations, in advance, to help you plan your shoots.
During the shoot, the director had to wear glasses to watch the monitor, but obviously, needed the naked eye to watch the actors. (There is a lot of juggling in 3D.) It is also a good idea to play back every single take, immediately, and watch it with the glasses. If the lighting is off or someone goes partially off screen, the whole image can go flat. And the footage would be unusable.
It seemed to me that you needed a lot more knowledge to shoot in 3D. Al Said, "To do 3D you need to first learn all of the rules, then throw the rules away."
"This is the rule in 2D as well." He explained. "And it took brave people, going out there and doing things everyone thought would fail, in order to create great new techniques."
It seemed as though every time Al yelled, "Action!" and we began hitting each other, two seconds later, he was already yelling "Cut!" At first, every time we moved or circled we were going out of frame. Al marked the ground where we needed to fight. After one more cut, he tightened up our fighting area. Eventually it got so small he asked us, "Can you guys just grapple?"
The more we filmed, the more I realized how narrow the "in frame" area was and that it was limited not only by breadth but also by depth. Once again, this was 3D--"depth TV". Getting too far away from the camera, under the camera, over the camera…left or right, we would go out of frame. But the real no-no was to be half in and half out.
The second half of the fight scene consisted of a chase across the playground and a very cool final fight on the sliding board. On the way to the sliding board, Ulysses was chasing me. He leaped up onto a row of park benches, got beside me and leaped off, giving me an elbow to the top of the head. I had wanted to shoot the leap from several angles, including from the ground and from bird's eye perspective, but it didn't work well in the world of 3D.
Next, we fought on the sliding board, which worked extremely well for 3 D because Ulysses leapt off the board on top of me, dropping both a knee and an elbow on me.
Al commented that, "We are pushing the envelope today of what has been done with 3D." This is because we were maximizing the technology, but he went on to say that the future of 3D goes way beyond action and martial arts.
