American Cinematographer - September 1998 - 117

THEi3SatJyC£jm™
Operator

Ted Popov

MIT Braves

Digital Frontier

by Eric Rudolph
Thanks

researchers

to

the

at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
Media Lab, inaccessible and
locations will

soon

created

celluloid

on

be

impractical
digitally re¬
from

still

photographs, allowing filmmakers to
realistically drop actors into interiors
too daunting to be occupied by a
production crew. (For information on
other efforts within the digital imaging

photo overlapped the other to
degree," details Bove. "Using
computers programmed to understand
perspective vanishing points, we built a
some

3-D model of the

rooms

in that house

and

Conceiving Ada.)
"Integration of observations" is

integrated actors shot on a threesided bluescreen cyclorama with five
video cameras. In post, we could
synthesize any viewpoint in the room
and drop the actors into that view."
Though the process generated
convincing results, shadows cast by the
actors were somewhat problematic. "If

the term used at MIT to describe how

we'd

various views of the

appropriate shadows, it would have
looked much better, but at that point we
were just trying to demonstrate proof of
the principal."
Overall, the potential benefits of
location imaging to creative filmmaking
are quite significant. "There are a lot of
environments and objects in the world
that CAD people are now laboriously
'authoring' which they will soon be able
to simply record with cameras," Bove
notes. "The problem with synthetic
sites is that they are awfully hard to
author. As an example, the house
interior in the film Toy Story took a
great deal of time and effort to create. If
they'd been able to simply walk around

frontier,

see

merged into

Production Slate article

same scene can

on

be

3-D digital model of the
actual scene. Imagine a back projection
in which the background plate could be
viewed from any angle or perspective
imaginable, and into which the camera
could enter and perform a move such as
a 360-degree spin around a character.
The technology now used to
create 3-D models of computer-aided
design (CAD) environments (such as
onscreen "walking tours" of synthetic
home designs, where objects can be
moved, lighting changed and any course
through, or angle of, the environment
viewed) will give filmmakers the option
to keep the film crew home and send a
still photographer to record a distant or
cramped location.
Dr. V. Michael Bove Jr. (principal
a

research scientist and head of the

object-based imaging group at the
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MIT
Media Lab) and his students have
already fashioned a 3-D model of a
house from still photographs and fused
actors into the scenes in

NTSC video

resolution. "About three years ago we
sent a still

photographer to a house
with the only instructions being to cover
the interior thoroughly and make sure

liability

each

a

had

time

house with still

to

matte

cameras

and

in

use

sazinglySmoo

the

bodycam@hoimaii.com
Pager/Voicemail: 626-456-5299

Arri 435ES

*

tfflST
ARRIFLEX

MOVIECAM

stills to model the house in 3-D, they
could have spent more time, effort and

80NY
IKE6AMI

money on the characters."
He also suggests that

live-action
profit from the process
because the 3-D modeling could free up
time and money that would otherwise
be spent on traveling to and working in
far-away and difficult locations.
Another

working to solve is

a

Call
our

or

Download

Rental

7111

Catalog

Biscayne Blvd.

Miami, FL 33138

important implication

for filmmakers that MIT and others

Compact 35mm

CINEMA

the

films will

Moviecam

are

procedure which
objects (such as

Phone:
Fax:

(305) 754-7368
(305) 751-2329

www.cinemaeast.com

would allow actors and

Super 16 High Speed

*

Oconnor

115
American Cinematographer - September 1998

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 1998
