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A small, independent, low-budget music video production in 3D: words that seem to be at odds with each other. East London-based hip hop act Pure Slime approached London directors Ashley Dagg-Heston and Bruno Sardinha of Ruffhouse Productions in January 2008 with a mission to produce an explosive music video for their latest release Watch How We Blow Ruffhouse found DP Robert McGowan, who quickly suggested doing the video in 3D – the first in music video history as far as they could thought – as Ruffhouse had a clear vision of the artists propelling themselves into the living room from a ticking bomb. I was approached to pull off spectacular 3D on HDV on a budget, which called for a little bit of inventiveness on my part.

Being a 3D film buff, I was quick to point out that this was not going to be the first 3D music video in history. Although the first British hip hop music video in 3D, Watch How We Blow was preceded by 1953’s famous 3D musical Kiss Me Kate, 1998’s infamous Psycho Circus by Kiss, 2005’s 3D Duran Duran video of I Don’t Want Your Love, and most recently, in February 2008, Missy Elliott’s Ching-A-Ling.

Beaten in terms of release date, it was thus a case of beating these previous releases for 3D quality and effectiveness. In fact, I’d suggest Ching-A-Ling could easily be called Hit-and-Missy 3D, and I’ll explain why shortly. For the cinematographic use of 3D and even the 3D effect itself, I believe the Hackney boys have got the LA hip hop superstar well beat. Where Missy spent $400,000 with ease, Ruffhouse had to work with something closer to $4000! But with 3D, budget isn’t everything – understanding its potential is.

A 3D HD shoot means twice the cameras, twice the compositing and a bit of work in getting the 3D material aligned. There is always some deviation between two cameras, unless a very precisely aligned – and usually very expensive – camera rig is used. So that sort of 3D post correction is unavoidable. Where big budget shoots opt for beamsplitting mirror rigs to control the interaxial value to human eye-distance and below, the rent of such 3D rigs can quickly become prohibitive in terms of budget spend. With Ruffhouse’s level of budget it’s either a two-day shoot and three-day post or one day with a 3D mirror rig and no studio.

Both the Watch How We Blow and Ching-A-Ling videos are intended to be seen mainly online and occasionally on TV. This means the main delivery format is relatively small in size and will have quite a bit of compression to contend with. But the high budget LA production of Missy Elliott uses 3D interaxial camera values that are suitable for a movie theater, which results in a very shallow and hardly 3D volumetric end result in the actual release format. Not only do I believe ‘think big’ approach to be a mistake, the fact that performers in the video are wearing red and blue clothes means that the 3D presentation format of the video was completely overlooked. They may have had polarized projection and big frame sequential LCD screens in the Walt Disney studios where this was shot, but the main release format is anaglyph 3D, which relies on red and blue color values to filter the 3D to the correct eyes. So seeing Ching-A-Ling in its actual release format is a big disappointment, and to my mind an unpleasant experience. The production of Watch How We Blow was determined not to make the same mistakes by delivering 3D in the way it is supposed to be experienced. The brief I received was that the 3D imagery had to be larger than life, in your face, and mainly exploding off the screen into your living room. That means extreme use of 3D, with interaxial values that most stereographers would never dare touch, being that close to the subject matter with the 3D cameras. The budgetary constraint of having to shoot without a mirror rig thus became a great strength, as the side-by-side Panasonic HVX200s produced the exact interaxial I knew would create an extremely volumetric 3D image. And I am very pleased with the end result.

As a part of the two-day shooting schedule was a green screen set-up, there was the opportunity to count on recentration in post, making the 3D fuseable by eye and brain. After this frame distance change, the stereoscopic depth can be pushed even further with a composited 3D background. Part of the video features 3D background material shot with twin-Sony A1s, shooting at 1080i. Although the video will be presented in SD on TV and mainly through the web in sub-SD sizes, the HD format of the source material means much more manoeuvrability when it comes to 3D recentration, scaling and cropping. These are production parts intrinsic to 3D stereoscopic video and it can be very frustrating when there is not enough resolution to work with in post.

The music video starts as CCTV footage of a lab where a ticking bomb is about to produce the explosive act of Pure Slime. Because this footage is in black and white, the 3D footage will actually tie in well in the black and white anaglyph format, where no attempt is made to reproduce colors naturally, but only red and cyan are used as colors. As they are opposite colors on the color wheel, this means the end result in indeed black and white. Any possible mistakes of red and blue clothes in an anaglyph video are certainly very much avoided in this way, and when one chooses to present a video in anaglyph 3D, which means ending up with difficult to distinguish colors through the red and blue glasses, why try very hard to have colors anyway? Leave that to the 2D version! Speaking of color, a typical situation arose on the day of the green screen shoot, when the artists turned up with green shirts and hankies – the Pure Slime posse colors. Some quick switching over of shirts and sweaters solved that problem, but the boys were obviously not very happy about this. As green screen shooting imposes color limitations on the subject matter, 3D shooting for (color) anaglyph has its added on do’s and don’ts. An unavoidable part of any 3D technique is that it imposes limitations, and every 3D technique has different quirks. Anaglyph is particular on the colors, but in the same way polarized 3D projection doesn’t work well with high contrast and very low lighting. When you know these limitations and respect them, you can produce professional quality 3D, while using the stylistic peculiarities to your cinematographic advantage.

Some of the composited background material features rare declassified US military 3D stereoscopic stock footage of nuclear blasts and destruction from the 1940s and 50s. A rarely known fact is that not just 3D, but also Technicolor was perfected for film use by the US military to be able to shoot nuclear blasts as detailed as possible. So the 3D process comes full circle with a Hackney 3D hip hop video shoot backed by original 3D footage from the birth years of serious 3D film development. What would those generals have said had they known this would happen? A very loud: “Blast!” I suspect.

Exploding into 3D

Alexander Lentjes