Mike Ballew
Second Unit
There were some people in the Netherlands very interested in stereoscopic cinema after World War II. They built several stereoscopic rigs, including one very elegant dual-16mm unit that you can check out on YouTube:
Some of these folks also built a single-strip 3-D system that takes a fairly big design risk in order to gain some strong advantages. The six-perf, over-and-under system you see illustrated below put two full-sized, wide ratio frames on one band of 35 millimeter movie film. It offered a continuously variable interaxial distance from 7 millimeters all the way up to 200 millimeters, and (unless I miss my guess) it did so with about as little light loss as one could expect from any over-and-under system. The trade-off? Like Bill Bukowski’s Optimax III (used to film Magnificent Bodyguard and Comin’ At Ya!, among others), this version of Veri Vision had vertical parallax. According to one account, that amounted to a vertical displacement of 14.5 millimeters between the left and right lenses.
Vertical parallax is a real bugbear in most stereo photography, and the most staid stereo photographers would have a stroke if you said you were going to build a system that specifically allows it. But my contention has always been that, so long as very special care is taken in staging scenes, vertical parallax can be “gettable awayable withable.” I hope someday we all get a chance to see footage shot with this machine, as I think it would be very interesting, and possibly very lovely.
My extra special thanks to Bob Furmanek, who sent along some links to some literature I had not seen before, some of which included the photograph you see here. This photo (minus my explanatory notes and arrows, of course) has been reproduced a thousand times elsewhere, but very tiny and with blurred-out detail, such that I could never until now work out exactly what was going on with the optics. But now that I’ve seen it, I think this variant of Veri Vision was the work of a mad genius.
Some of these folks also built a single-strip 3-D system that takes a fairly big design risk in order to gain some strong advantages. The six-perf, over-and-under system you see illustrated below put two full-sized, wide ratio frames on one band of 35 millimeter movie film. It offered a continuously variable interaxial distance from 7 millimeters all the way up to 200 millimeters, and (unless I miss my guess) it did so with about as little light loss as one could expect from any over-and-under system. The trade-off? Like Bill Bukowski’s Optimax III (used to film Magnificent Bodyguard and Comin’ At Ya!, among others), this version of Veri Vision had vertical parallax. According to one account, that amounted to a vertical displacement of 14.5 millimeters between the left and right lenses.
Vertical parallax is a real bugbear in most stereo photography, and the most staid stereo photographers would have a stroke if you said you were going to build a system that specifically allows it. But my contention has always been that, so long as very special care is taken in staging scenes, vertical parallax can be “gettable awayable withable.” I hope someday we all get a chance to see footage shot with this machine, as I think it would be very interesting, and possibly very lovely.
My extra special thanks to Bob Furmanek, who sent along some links to some literature I had not seen before, some of which included the photograph you see here. This photo (minus my explanatory notes and arrows, of course) has been reproduced a thousand times elsewhere, but very tiny and with blurred-out detail, such that I could never until now work out exactly what was going on with the optics. But now that I’ve seen it, I think this variant of Veri Vision was the work of a mad genius.
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