3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

Chapter 10: 3-D at Home

Amateur Stereo In the early 1940s, an ophthalmologist from Glendale, California, Orrie E. Ghrist, assembled a pair of 16mm movie cameras to photograph his own three-dimensional motion pictures. Ghrist had previously assembled a pair of 8mm cameras and projectors in 1936 for 3-D shooting, and he wrote that the 8mm assembly had been described in Movie Makers Magazine “about a year or two after they were built.”1 In a document with “Explanatory Notes on a Camera and Projector Assembly Used for Taking and Viewing 16mm. Motion Pictures,” Ghrist described the fundamental principles necessary for 3-D photography: 1. Synchronizing, Squaring and Parrelling [sic] Cameras. 2. Synchronizing, Squaring and Parrelling Projectors with Ability to vary or compensate them. 3. Projecting through Polaroid Filters on to a screen Which holds Polarized light (not a beaded screen). 4. Viewing with Polaroid lenses. Ghrist was advanced in his thinking because he noted that “These Synchronized Cameras were built not only for regular use but also for experimenting with varying widths between the cameras.” A decade before the 1950s boom of 3-D movies, Ghrist’s use of variable interaxial for stereo cinematography indicates a sophisticated approach to the use of 3-D. In an August 1942 issue of American Cinematographer, Phil Tannura, ASC, wrote, “Suggesting that amateurs try making third-dimensional 3-D at Home 10 The November 1977 cover of Super 8 Filmaker magazine featured Lenny Lipton with his dual Nizo 561 camera rig on the cover. 3-D at Home 127 movies when professionals haven’t done it yet on any really commercial scale seems fantastic, doesn’t it? But it really isn’t.” Tannura added, “Quite a few amateurs have already made successful stereo-movies in both 16mm, and 8mm., and in Kodachrome as well as black-and-white.”2 Though most of the amateurs that Tannura had found achieved “adequate results mounting their cameras on a base which held them rigidily [sic] in fixed position,” a two-camera assembly by J. Kinney Moore divided “the camera-base lengthwise along the center-line, and hinged it at the front end.” This construction permitted swinging the left-hand camera outward to more easily reload the right-hand camera and, more importantly , permitted the cameras to be toed in, or converged, “so that both are centered on the same object, to minimize objectionable parallax effects.”3 Tannura described Orrie Ghrist’s construction of two Model 20 Eastman 8mm cameras and the use of the large winding gears on the motors of the cameras to synchronize them. Tannura included a photo of Ghrist’s dual 8mm projectors interlocked for stereoscopic projection. A decade later, after the launch of the 1950s 3-D boom in Hollywood, Tannura would revisit the subject of amateur stereo filmmaking once again in the pages of American Cinematographer. With a seminal three-part series of articles in the pages of Super 8 Filmaker magazine in 1977, Lenny Lipton described “How to Make Your Own 3-D Movies.” In undertaking dual Super 8 3-D filmmaking, Lipton “vowed that I would call it quits if I could not produce stereoscopic images that were as good as the best images one can see through a stereoscope.”4 Lipton described a system that used two electronically interlocked Nizo 561 cameras or Minolta XL-400 cameras along with two mechanically interlocked Eumig sound projectors. In the article, Lipton announced that the Super8 Sound company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had decided to offer his complete 3-D filmmaking system. “This is the first time that a stereoscopic motion picture system offering full creative controls has been made available to the small format filmmaker,” wrote Lipton. Lipton produced a stereoscopic short in this dual Super 8 system, a half-hour 3-D film called Uncle Bill and the Dredge Dwellers, which was screened for audiences at film festivals in Toronto, Venezuela, and several cities in the United States. The Stereo-Realist Camera In 1947, the David White Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, introduced the Stereo-Realist camera designed by Seton Rochwite. The Stereo-Realist 128 3-D Revolution camera was designed for shooting slide transparency stereo pairs of film, which were mounted in a unified mount for viewing in a Realist hand viewer that had internal illumination. In 1950 the TDC Stereo Vivid projector, built by the Three Dimension Company of Chicago, was introduced to the market, making it possible for stereo slides...