Broadcast
The
BBC has commissioned a unique device to capture 3D footage of small
creatures in the wild for natural history series Hidden Kingdom.
The
‘straightscope’ is a snorkel-type system with a wide-angle lens
that attaches to the front of a camera to obtain extreme close-ups.
It
is being built by optical specialist Peter Parks, who devised an
original version for 2003 3D Imax fi lm Bugs!, subsequently winning a
lifetime achievement Academy Award for his technological contribution
to film-making.
“To
depict the point of view of creatures the size of an ant, we needed a
system that has a much smaller front end than a mirror rig,” said
series producer and 3D director Mark Brownlow.
“The
snorkel can ‘kiss’ the subject to make it look huge but the
background remains in focus.”
Onsight
is supplying a range of additional equipment including Freestyle
rigs, Red Epics, twin Iconix mini-cams on a jib and a pair of Nikon
D800 D-SLRs on a Hurricane rig for timelapse sequences.
The
production is using a pair of Phantom Miro cameras fi lming at 1,000
frames a second for high-speed photography of chipmunks in North
American forests.
“It
reveals extraordinary, Matrixlike detail of the chipmunks fighting
each other,” said Brownlow. “I don’t believe this has been seen
before and it’s an experience that is not the same viewed in 2D. I
want to push the throttle on the 3D and make it almost interactive.”
The
3 x 60-minute 2D series and 50-minute 3D single tracks groups of
small animals including scorpions, beetles and marmosets in
environments such as the Sonoran desert and Rio’s favelas.
BBC
Worldwide is underwriting the BBC Natural History Unit and RTL
co-production, which is scheduled for completion by November 2013.
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