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Looking back, Dariusz Wolski, ASC chuckles at his Steadicam operator’s plight while trying to capture Johnny Depp’s performance on an isolated beach in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, for a climactic scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Because the movie was being captured in native 3-D, Steadicam operator David Luckenbach was laboring beneath a heavy stereo rig, waiting for director Rob Marshall to call “action.”“The rig was so heavy, and we were on sand,” Wolski recalls. “David could feel his feet sinking all the way to his ankles. He couldn’t lift his foot when they called ‘Action,’ so he constantly had to stomp up and down to keep his feet free. That’s an example of how exhausting this shoot was.” Marshall calls the efforts of Wolski’s team “Herculean,” noting that Pirates is “the most physical film” he has ever directed. “The story required things that are difficult to accomplish with 3-D rigs,” he observes. “Fortunately, everyone was up for the adventure.”Disney’s decision to shoot the latest installment in its Pirates franchise in 3-D makes the film a high-profile test case for the latest paradigm shift in stereoscopic cinematography: bringing it out of controlled environments and into the real world — and, in this case, to a number of rugged locations. “We felt like pioneers,” says Marshall.“We were working on beaches, in caves and on boats in places like Hawaii, Puerto Rico and London, and doing it with sensitive cameras and equipment,” continues the director. “Some of the areas were so remote, we had to bring in gear by helicopter. I give a lot of credit to Dariusz and all the experts who helped us.”Wolski was a veteran of the Pirates franchise, having shot all three of the previous pictures, The Curse of the Black Pearl (AC Aug. ’03), Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End (AC June ’07), and he had also studied digital cameras and 3-D rigs while prepping Alice in Wonderland for Tim Burton (AC April ’10). In the end, Alice was shot in 2-D and converted to 3-D in post, but Wolski’s research into the Pace/Cameron Fusion 3-D rig during that period made him comfortable using it on Pirates. Additional testing made it clear that of all the digital-capture systems available at the time, the Red One with the Mysterium-X sensor was his best option in terms of size, weight, compatibility with cine-style lenses, ability to record to solid-state media (16-gigabyte Red CF cards), and 4K resolution. “At the time, the Arri Alexa wasn’t available, and the Sony cameras we tested were too heavy,” explains Wolski. “The Red cameras with the MX chip were more manageable. They were the best option considering that we were committed to going to faraway places and shooting the way the [previous] films had been shot. The challenge became how to adopt the 3-D technology and make it flexible enough for a movie of this scale.”Wolski has a longstanding relationship with Panavision, so he wanted that company to service the production, even though he was using Red cameras and Pace rigs. He therefore asked his first assistant, Trevor Loomis, to bring Panavision and Red together on the project. Panavision ended up purchasing and providing 13 Red cameras to the main unit and six to the second unit, plus multiple sets of matching lenses. Red also provided support in partnership with camera-data supervisor Jeroen Hendriks, particularly in terms of writing custom firmware for the Red cameras that tailored them to 3-D capture. “We essentially brought Panavision, Red and Pace together, and they all helped make it happen,” says Loomis.Panavision’s lens expertise proved to be critical. Senior technical adviser Dan Sasaki sorted through more than 160 lens pairs to find the best matches, ultimately culling 76 pairs for the show. Panavision provided three sets of Zeiss Ultra Primes, two 15-40mm Angenieux Optimo zooms, two 28-76mm Optimo zooms, a set of Primo Close-Focus primes, a set of Primo (14.5-50mm) Macro Zooms, one Primo 4:1 (17.5-75mm) zoom and one Primo 11:1 (24-275mm) zoom. The first unit shot mostly with the Ultra Primes and Optimos, reserving the Primos for 2-D capture, which amounted to underwater work, extreme close-ups and some high-speed shots, according to Wolski. The second unit, led by director of photography Patrick Loungway, used Ultra Primes and Optimos on Fusion rigs alongside the first unit in Hawaii and Los Angeles, and used Primo primes and Optimos on Element Technica stereo rigs in London, says Loungway.“We had to establish limitations and tolerances for allowable focal-length disparity, concentricity of the lens mount to the sensor, and overall compatibility of lens-focus scale to matched lens sets,” Sasaki explains. “We tried several methods of finding matches initially, such as wedding a microscope to the projection bench, using the MTF [Modulation Transfer Function] to give us point-spread readings, and mapping the lenses on the projection bench at like magnifications. In the end, using the projection bench with respect to lens MTF readings gave us the most consistent results. We found that we had to find focal-length matches within .25 percent of each other, as well as maintain the overall quality of the lens image.” Wolski says the short zooms were especially useful on the 3-D rigs because of their light weight and small size. They also permitted him to shoot wide open, the style he prefers for 3-D capture. “Once we had the zoom on the camera, we couldn’t zoom during the shot because [it] wouldn’t track correctly with the two lenses, and there was no way to have them totally in sync,” says Wolski. “However, we learned that once we zoomed in, we could quickly realign [the rigs], so we ended up using the zooms more as variable primes. That saved us some time in lens changes; it took about four minutes to change them out, which is really fast for 3-D.” Another key issue involved which method to employ to set the interocular (a.k.a. interaxial) distance and convergence point between left-eye and right-eye imagery. Wolski notes that many native 3-D projects rely on mechanically setting and controlling the convergence point on set, and it’s often set to correspond to a point in focus in the main action, or what is called the “screen plane” or “stereo window.” (The convergence setting doesn‘t always have to relate to the same point as where the lenses are focused, however.) But because Red’s MX sensor can record 4.5K-resolution imagery (in its 4.5K widescreen 2.35:1 mode), Pirates visual-effects supervisor Charlie Gibson suggested that the production should not set the convergence point on set, but instead simply shoot parallel and leave the convergence work for post. By doing so, the filmmakers could preserve extra pixels around the extraction area by avoiding distortion in closer objects; such distortion can happen when images are mechanically converged in-camera. (3-D expert Rob Engle of Sony Pictures Imageworks also offered advice in prep.)“Converging in-camera was common before [this production] because of the limited resolution of the digital cameras that were available,” explains Dave Drzewiecki, who served as the stereographer for most of Pirates. (James Goldman, Wolski’s longtime second assistant, took over near the end of the show when Drzewiecki moved on to another project.)“Back then, you didn’t have those extra pixels around the images available to use for realignment later, anyway,” continues Drzewiecki. “Whenever you do an image adjustment to correct an error or to create convergence [on set], you sacrifice pixels and, therefore, resolution. But with the greater resolution of the Red MX sensor, we could take a 4K slice out of the middle of the 4.5K image in post and designate pixels around it left-to-right as realignment pixels. So shooting parallel made sense.”
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