German facility Pictorion Das Werk has performed all the post for director Wim Wenders forthcoming stereo 3D feature film Pina, about the late choreographer Pina Bausch, writes Adrian Pennington.
The production shot several 60 minute single stereo takes during four hour live dance performances at Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal theatre. It was shot on Sony HDC-1500’s mounted on two 3D rigs devised by French stereographer Alain Derobe who also acted as stereographer on the project. The 3D supervisor is François Garnier. Garnier and Derobe developed the Universal Mirror Rig which is now marketed by P+S Technik.
Recording was made to both to HDCAM-SR and Codex digital recorders.
“We used JPEG files for review and took OMFI files from the Codex to perform the edit in Avid before conforming from the HDCAM SR tapes,” explains Das Werk’s lead 3D artist Stefan Albertz. “Recording to dual media also acted as an insurance policy in case we missed capture on either format.”
Das Werk was brought on board for pre-production R&D on the project when it began over two years ago. It also deployed with Iridas SpeedGrade on set.
“Wim was shooting the complete performance of four hours, each night over a period of several weeks, in stereo so we had to cope with terabytes of amounts of data,” says Albertz.
Wenders intended Pina to be the first dance film shot in 3D though it has since been superceded by Step Up 3D and Streetdance 3D among others. It is due for release in February 2011.
On the film’s website he states: “The two-dimensional cinema screen is just not capable of capturing Pina Bausch’s work, either emotionally or aesthetically. When I watched her dance for the first time.. I was able to understand human movement, gestures and feelings in a whole new way…. 3D gives us the possibility of taking the audience directly onto the stage, into the middle of the event.”
Production was halted in June this year following Bausch’s sudden death from cancer, aged 68.
