James Stewart, a director and founder of Geneva Films, a Toronto-based company specializing in 3-D commercial productions, is in the first wave of people with a great deal of experience filming in 3-D, wrote the Toronto Star Sept. 18:

Stewart is in the first wave of people with a great deal of experience filming in 3-D and is very busy shooting concerts, commercials and more. At an industry panel on 3-D at TIFF, he implored independent filmmakers, especially of documentaries, to pitch content-hungry networks like Discovery. However, his biggest concern with 3-D is keeping the quality up.

“My biggest concern is the production of very bad 3-D and it will be coming . . . whenever a film comes out and it doesn't look great, it's not good for the whole industry.” he says. “People who don't know how to produce it properly are going to start shooting 3-D. The indie film world is going to start shooting 3-D, but they need to understand how to produce proper 3-D so it doesn't hurt people's eyes.”

Ali Kazimi echoes that thought. A filmmaker and film professor in York University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, he is part of a Toronto-based group called 3D FLIC, which teams filmmakers and vision scientists to study the technology and its effects. 3-D requires a new visual grammar that filmmakers are learning and still working out. He says the organization’s work has shown that human brains process a 3-D image completely differently than 2-D.

“With 3-D you actually have the responsibility of the comfort and, to a degree, the well-being of your audience as well,” he says. “To shoot 3-D really requires a fundamental understanding of stereoscopic depth perception, and how the human brain works mechanically and optically. If you don’t have that then you’ll get bad 3-D,” causing many problems such as eye strain, nausea and headaches.

One good reason to want it to succeed is that Toronto is poised to be an important centre for 3-D production. The Ontario Media Development Corp. is funding 3D FLIC and local businesses like Brash 3-D Studios, the 3-D Camera Company and Spatial View (whose a glasses-free 3-D approach has already yielded an iPhone product and an iPad prototype) are doing well and hoping to cash in as 3-D acceptance continues to grow.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, with files courtesy of YFile– York University’s daily e-bulletin.