Tim Sassoon
"Someone asked me last night if there were any subjects I thought were inappropriate for 3-D," Tim Sasson reports from Paris, where he spoke to a home entertainment conference. "My answer was, 'Are there any scenes in nature that are appropriate for viewing with only one eye?'"
Sassoon's eponymous visual effects shop, Sassoon Film Design, has long specialized in two growth areas: large-format films (i.e., Imax) and stereoscopic 3-D.
That has left him ideally positioned for today's digital 3-D boom, and he was able to combine the two areas when he created the stunning 3-D effects for the "The Fly" segment in the "U2 3D" concert movie.
His company is also converting 2-D films into 3-D.
"We've been able to do a full 3-D scene analysis and a full 3-D buildout, building a matching 3-D geometry at a speed and price other people have not been able to match," he says.
His approach has impressed many in the industry, including "Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D" producer Charlotte Huggins. "I'm not a big fan of conversions," she says. "I prefer to see movies that were created and designed in 3-D." But after seeing his latest conversion, Imax doc "Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs," she says, "Man, those guys did a great job."
The 50-year-old Cal Arts Film School grad also says he'll be able to get 3-D performance-capture data from standard 2-D video -- "basically any old piece of trash," in his words -- in a way that is "more lifelike, more accurate and less noisy" than the expensive motion-capture arrays in use today.
That would break the heart of technologists who've spent so much time and effort building those arrays, but Sassoon says, "That's the point, isn't it?"
"I look at the development of 3-D as very analogous to the development of color. Color came in in the 1930s with Technicolor three-strip but wasn't used on every film; it was a special-event medium. But by the mid '60s, it became accepted as a natural part of the film experience."
By David S. Cohen, Variety
