American Cinematographer - September 2006 - 106

continues. "You also have

controlled

motion-

that's

following the
action. All this is very difficult to coordi¬
nate and execute. An alternative might
be shooting the scene with Contour and
breaking it into components on separate
sets, lighting and animating them as
you would normally, and then combining
the images and rendering them in 3-D
on a
hi-def monitor for viewing.
Because it's now a digital version of the
physical puppets, you would be able to
composite characters and elements
together using a tool like Maya for eval¬
camera

uation. In this case, Contour could be

used to

replace

camera,

because

motion-controlled
the digital infor¬
mation was captured, you would have
full freedom of motion in 3-D; you could
zoom in, pull back or fly through the air.
And if you have a character that flies,
rather than being forced to suspend the
character with

once

some

sort of

harness,

could just put it on a separate set
and position it on the ground in the posi¬
tion you want it to be in when it's flying.
you

"Also, if you wanted to reduce
the audience's

perception of the strob¬
ing effect of stop-motion animation -
or not, if that's part of your artistic
expression - you could just turn on
motion blur in your 3-D package and
instantly turn stop-motion into gomotion. So

photo-real face. Then you can focus your
what you should be worrying
about: making a great movie or video
game."
energy on

information and to view
demos, visit www.movapodcast.com.
For

think Contour could also

Kelly HiDef Depth-of-

dramatically lower the cost of stop-

Field Calculator

motion animation and afford

The Guild of British Camera

lot

creative control.

Technicians'

"In the

parlance of computer
graphics, Contour is the first technology
to successfully cross the 'Uncanny
Valley,' a perceptual zone where a CG
face looks almost photo-real, but not
quite photo-real. Such images are
disturbing to the human visual system
because our brain thinks it's seeing a
face with

some

defect. Humans don't

have that reaction to caricatures, such
as

cartoon

faces, because

know

they aren't real. But as faces approach
photo-real, either you are spot-on, or
you have something worse than a cari¬
cature. Contour will give you a spot-on

Depth-of-Field
association with
is specifically
designed for the new dedicated camera
lenses used for shooting high-definition
video for big-screen cinema. With
HiDef

Calculator (produced in
Panavision Europe)

scales for 16x9, 1.85:1

and 2.40:1
anamorphic and spherical digitalcinema projection, the Kelly HiDef
Calculator has the same formatting as
earlier Kellys but with a much finer opti¬
cal circles-of-confusion standard

4/10.OOOin.

employed for

The HiDef
lator is

Depth-of-Field Calcu¬
produced by motion-picture tech-

vision + soft light control
the

possibilities are endless

light tools
bright ideas in light control

keep even

Lighttools™ Soft Egg Crates™ in five versatile cell sizes to fit
the complete Family of Chimera lightbanks
and all standard and custom overhead frame sizes. We offer lightweight Stretch Frames
the largest lightbanks tight. All products are available from Lighttools™ for sales, rental and camera tests.
Control your

102

Light!

with

HD CCDs.

www.lighttools.com

your

use

American Cinematographer - September 2006

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2006