This was a stereoscopic 3D motion-controlled (moco) time-lapse test for an upcoming project. Ideally, it should be viewed in S3D.

View it in 3D at YouTube 3D: youtu.be/0quUxvXtHPw
You can select from various anaglyph (colored glasses) and stereo modes.

NVIDIA has chosen "Deus Ex Homine" as "Best 3D Video of 2011": 3dvisionlive.com/content/best-3d-video-2011

If you have NVIDIA 3D Vision, you can also view at NVIDIA's 3D Vision Live, which offers a higher quality stream than YouTube: 3dvisionlive.com/3d_video/deus-ex-homine-san-francisco-3d-moco-time-lapse

"Deus Ex Homine" comes from Latin meaning "god built by humans." That "god" might be the tools - our machines and technologies, the city - our caves of concrete and steel, and the networks - the highways and waterways that are the lifeblood of our cities. With our technology, we conquered and reshaped the natural world. As we have overrun our planet's surface, more and more of us live in the fantastically complex artificial biomes that are our cities. Modern societies and economies depend on these constructs. Bridges and servers connect us, cars and planes move us, farms and restaurants feed us, and cargo ships and oil tankers make it all possible. The "Makers" among us forge machines - electromechanical gods - that reshape and govern humanity. Automobiles. Typewriters. Computers. The Robot Maker creates machines in our image, striving to infuse them with intelligence, emotion, and sentience. Perhaps some day they will surpass us. They already have in many ways. Perhaps we will re-engineer ourselves, integrating man and machine. Deus ex homine (deus?).

Brad Kremer and Stewart Mayer of camBLOCK flew out for three days of shooting at the end of March. It rained the entire time they were in town so we were confined to interiors, which turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise since those shots turned out to be some of the more impressive ones in 3D. After the weather cleared, I shot for an additional nine days around San Francisco with assistance from Simon Christen, Noah Hawthorne, Christopher Fuzi, Robert Mooring, Josh Golz, and Paul Leeming.

Canon 5D Mark II's were used in both parallel and beamsplitter configurations for true, native stereo capture at 5.6K resolution RAW. The camBLOCK and Dynamic Perception were used for motion control. There were some major technical hurdles with both capture and post, but once we saw the results in 3D, it was well worth it.

Special thanks to Jeremy Mayer, Cisco Systems, Gather Restaurant, San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, The Millennium Tower, The Port of Oakland, and the San Francisco Film Commission for giving us access to some great locations and subjects on short notice.

Edited by Peter Chang
Color correction and grading by Brad Kremer
Produced by Peter Chang and Christopher Frey
Music by Michael McCann "Icarus" from Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Peter Chang
peter@cinefugue.com
cinefugue.com
twitter.com/cinefugue

Brad Kremer
brad@bradkremerfilms.com
bradkremerfilms.com
twitter.com/bradkremerfilms

Stewart Mayer
camblock.com
twitter.com/cam_BLOCK

Jeremy Mayer - Typewriter Sculptor
jeremymayer.com
twitter.com/JeremyMayer

Jeremy Mayer on Bust V (Grandfather): "The initial inspiration for the piece was that I wanted to create a self-portrait in my old age, so it's based on me, my dad, and my grandfather. I wanted to say something about aging, transition (particularly transition into new technology), and the place of the personal mechanical machine in modern society, all without making the piece look too 'robotic'. A lot of the sculpture I've done over the years has been ideal human figures: youthful, athletic, and kind of sexy. With this one I wanted to create a face that was more aged and worn, the face of a person who was tired, maybe a little forlorn and weary, but proud and dignified even after a life lived with a lot of difficulty and pain. With all of the news about the closing of the world's last manual typewriter assembly line, Godrej in India, and all of the buzz about typewriters in popular culture, I sense a great deal of nervousness in general about the advance of technology and what that means for people who are unwilling or unable to move on to the next step. I feel like this piece speaks of that worry in many ways."