Archive for October, 2011
Introducing Lumitone
0October 23, 2011
*This is a 3D video. Please select your required 3D format and a higher resolution on the video control bar once playing. If you do not have an NVidia 3D display or some classic red/cyan 3D glasses you can watch the 2D version by selecting ‘Turn 3D off’ on the YouTube control bar. If you are using a portable device you will need to watch the 2D version of Lumitone below.
The second chapter of the Music Box Chronicles is an explosion of light and colour. Lumitone is the story of a lonely music box who dances to electric dreams and sings with spectral audacity.
Written, Animated and Directed by Aaron Bradbury
Music: Minuit Jacuzzi (DatA Remix) by TEPR
Lumitone is a follow on from Twinklebox, a short film about the mechanics and music of time. The Music Box Chronicles is a collection of films exploring image and sound.
Visit the project page at http://www.luniere.com/projects/lumitone/
Read more about the ideas and production process behind Lumitone in the production blog here. To view Lumitone in a wide variety of other 3D formats, please visit 3DF33D.
Lumitone in 2 Dimensions
Colour Stereoscopy On The Hoof
0October 16, 2011
in Featured, Stereoscopy
Okay, watching stereoscopic footage on your portable devices and mobile phones hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet. Several solutions exist, but they generally require specially encoded footage and the available footage can be limited, especially when compared to the amount of 3d videos now available on YouTube.
One solution, which I have been testing out recently is 3deeCentral‘s 3DeeSlide.
3DeeCentral is a depository of 3D videos and image collections from different genres such as music videos, documentaries, animation and extreme sports. They also have a variety of indie and pro-labelled S3D content available. Their plan is to provide a 3D service to several new devices, such as Android and Internet-enabled 3D TVs, but they currently support desktop computers, iPhone and iPod Touch. The 3DeeSlide is basically a plastic case and lenticular screen that fits onto your iPhone, which can then be used to watch specifically encoded S3D videos that you can download from the 3DeeCentral store. They have several free titles as well as some pay for content. I recommend checking out Pump Action by Phil ‘Captain 3D’ McNally.
The hardware itself is pretty cheap (£10 for 3G and 3GS, £20 for iPhone 4 and 4S) , especially when compared to other, more high-tech portable 3D solutions such as the Carl Zeiss Cinemizer, which costs over £400. However, the viewing experience isn’t great. The slide can take some time to align correctly and even when you have it just right it is hard to stay in the ‘sweet spot’ to see the 3D effect properly. The lenticular can cause odd refractive speckles around high contrast areas and looks generally quite jagged, but it *is* in full colour (not anaglyph), and you don’t have to wear glasses. So even though the image quality isn’t great, it’s still a very impressive piece of kit. I’ve enjoyed watching several of the free videos that are available on the 3DeeCentral Store. I haven’t paid for any yet, and to be honest none of the pay-for content really looks that impressive and they’re way over priced. Nevertheless, if the right kind of films become available, I wouldn’t mind paying.
The problem with the incredible 3D streaming service that YouTube offers is that it doesn’t work on mobile devices. Rather than displaying the anaglyph versions, or just the full width 2D version, when playing 3D encoded footage on your mobile device, you see the original side-by-side, horizontally scaled version. This is frustrating as more and more people are using smart phones to view video content, and the viewing experience is significantly reduced by seeing stereoscopic footage in this way. If you can easily free view stereograms using the parallel method then you won’t need any technology to see the 3D image but most people find this technique very difficult to do.
However, I have discovered an alternative method to viewing the vast array of stereoscopic content on YouTube using a smart phone. It’s cheap, uber cool, and has been around for over a hundred years.
Using an antique stereoscope it is easy to turn your smart phone into a stereoscopic display. The stereoscope pictured above cost me £8 from Ebay and folds up neatly in my pocket, which means I can watch any of the thousands of stereoscopic videos on YouTube whilst riding my bike or buying a scone.
The main issue with this is that YouTube videos are in the horizontally scaled format, so everything appears squashed and has reduced depth. The resolution is also an issue. When you’re looking at the iPhone 3GS very close like this, it’s easy to see the pixels, the image and perceived depth is much better on higher resolution displays such as the Google Nexus S and the iPhone 4S. The main benefits to this solution is that it is in full colour, there is a huge selection of videos to choose from, you can easily upload your own videos, people are always impressed with the juxtaposition of century separated technology, it’s very easy to view and is very cheap.
S3D Streaming Services
2October 13, 2011
in Lumitone
A work in progress still. Almost done.
I’ve started looking around on the Internet for different 3D services to decide on the best streaming method of stereoscopic videos. Currently YouTube is the best option, NVidia’s 3D Vision Live looks interesting as well as 3DeeCentral. I might also just make the over/under video downloadable and point people in the direction of Stereoscopic Player, but that seems a bit too big a deal for most people to bother. Streaming is definitely the future, but it’s not currently the best experience.
Post Effects
0October 12, 2011
in Lumitone
This is a 2 frame comparison of the kind of effects that I’m going with.
The amount of effects on this project is far less than Twinklebox for several reasons. Firstly, this project has had more colour considerations during the production process, so most of the colour preparation is already there. I want the colours to remain vibrant, so the less crunching and shifting that is done here, the better. The stereoscopic considerations also feed into this process as some effects will affect the stereoscopic outcome. Depth of field can flatten the stereoscopic effect slightly but also adds to the perceived depth as a different cue, so it can still be used to great effect, allthough due to the dynamic nature of the camera in this project it felt a little jarring after several tests so I’m probably not going to be using any. A little vignette-blur helps with the negative parrallax cropping at the edges of the frame. This is something I would have applied anyway to give it a slight vintage lens look. Chromatic Abberation wouldn’t be a problem if everybody was watching on active displays, but when viewing on YouTube as an optimised anaglyph, this will cause some issues as it’s basically shifting the reds and blues in a similar way to the anaglyph effect. The compounding of these two shifts can be awkward to converge. Any 2D effects are just that, 2D, so they wont appear to be volumetric if that is the usual illusion when applied to 2D footage. Most 2D effects, such as glows or blurs are okay to use, but Trapcode Shine for instance will appear as a flat plane, even if it has been offset to push it into positive or negative space, it will still appear as a flat plane. There are some glows at work here to give a more naturalistic film blooming effect and tie the particles into the scene properly.
The Fool and The Painted Saints
0October 9, 2011
in The Fool
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a chap called Garrett D. Tiedemann who wanted to use my short film ‘The Fool Looks at the Finger that Points to the Sky‘ for a collection of music videos for a band called ‘Painted Saints‘ from Minneapolis. I thought it sounded like an interesting idea, and after a few discussions and editing iterations here’s the final version of the music video he made. It’s interesting how chopping the original video up in this way he has been able to produce something that *feels* quite different. It has a hopelessness to it, like the little guy is in limbo or some eternal inescapable memory that keeps looping back around on itself. Anyway… here’s the original:
