3D « I Design Your Eyes

3D: The Final Frontier?

Posted by Leslie Morgan in I Design Your Eyes on August 24, 2010

“I make 3D movies for NASA.” It isn’t every day someone says that to you. Last week I had the opportunity to speak to Michael Starobin. Starobin is the Founder and Creative Director of 1AU Global Media who works for NASA and makes 3D movies for them. I was connected to Starobin through the EP of Commercials at Zoic Studios, Erik Press. Press and Starobin have known each other for a lifetime. The two have been friends for thirty-nine years, knowing each other since pre-school. The two took different paths, yet both ended up working in a creative field. When Press told me Starobin has been working on 3D movies for NASA, I wanted to share a different perspective on 3D for the I Design Your Eyes community.

Based in Washington D.C. Starobin has seen his fair share of production, but more on the industrial and corporate side. When Starobin was in Los Angeles two weeks ago, he was excited to get a tour of the Zoic Studios’ facilities. “It was a thrill to come out to the nerve center and get to see what Zoic is doing.” Starobin considers himself a film geek, and he loves being creative. However, he does feel there are differences when you work outside of Los Angeles and for a government agency like NASA. “There is a different philosophy and attitude because we don’t have the Los Angeles infrastructure with infinite crew and technical support. There are a smaller number of people to draw on and production cycles tend to be slower. There is an independent way of thinking of high end post-production and production. It isn’t just indie filmmaking by running out with a camera and you try to make your movie. You can think about it on a really high level for short pieces and interstitials.”

Starobin is the Senior Producer at NASA and is in charge of high profile special projects including Congressional events, exotic platforms, which could be 3D and spherical projection. In fact, a good portion of the work Starobin has been doing is for the 3D sphere. The sphere is a screen that hangs in space; four projectors illuminate it, shining in from the corners of the room at 90 degrees. The sphere’s technology is technically called Science On a Sphere, which was invented by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), NOAA. Starobin began working with NOAA in late 2005 and expanded on the uses of the original technology, “When I got a hold of it they (NOAA) were essentially doing round PowerPoint presentations. They were showing pictures of spherical objects like planets. If it wasn’t round they couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t move, cut or do anything with filmmaking. My assignment was to write a speech and use it as a round slideshow.”

After his first assignment, Starobin essentially took it upon himself to find ways to film for a round sphere object. “If you have a ball hanging in space that is six feet in diameter, where do you put your camera? There is no left or right end of the frame and how do you dolly in or zoom out, all of the basic things you know about filmmaking falls apart and so you have to start over like a blank sheet of paper.” NOAA has largely distributed these screens around the country. “These round screens are really cool. They aren’t for everything. I wouldn’t want to tell the next season of Desperate Housewives on one, but I do think you could do more than planets. You don’t have to show just spheres. It’s like on a regular movie screen you don’t have to show just rectangles.” Starobin just produced a film about renewable energy that played in Copenhagen and screened on the sphere, “You could also treat it as an elegant information device. If you were to place a sphere in LAX in one of the main terminals you could essentially have news go around the screen, but as people are walking by they could get a sense of news events in a different format that is conducive to a circulating crowd. You can simply make it a beautiful piece of art too. It’s an interesting element for a large stadium to place corporate signage.”

Everything Starobin does for NASA is free and in public domain. “You can download things from various web sites or if it’s theatrical, it’s free to the public.” Starobin has made four films that were for the spherical projection that have played all over the world in about forty five theaters and a variety of different languages. “Our first film, Footprints, was named best invention of the year in Time Magazine.” Currently, Starobin is focusing on low cost, high quality 3D solutions for NASA. “NASA has done some work in 3D in partnership with movie studios, specifically Warner Brothers with Hubble 3D and a number of IMAX films.”

Starobin was an anthropology and medical ethics major and was a science reporter for many years, but always had a very keen interest in the arts. “I had the science interest and the arts interest and then an opportunity came up and I was able to build a position and it’s grown. I think, possibly like Zoic, it grows because you discover there is a new idea and you do the research and suddenly you enter a bold new area.”

As for the 3D space, Starobin began doing a great deal of research internally with his colleague Victoria Weeks, Chief Technologist and Senior Editor at NASA. Weeks and her husband made a small seven minute, 3D film to showcase the importance of the 3D technology. For Starobin, he thinks the interest in 3D didn’t really spark until Avatar was released and became a worldwide hit. “I wrote a paper for NASA saying 3D is coming, a year and a half before Avatar came out saying we need to start doing research internally. Then Avatar hit and they said let’s give them some seed money… NASA is interested, but they are a government agency. They don’t make money and they don’t have shareholders so they are nervous to get in. At a federal agency there aren’t commercial budgets.”

Even though Satrobin believes in the opportunities of 3D, he has some hesitancy about it. For one Starobin hopes that people don’t forget about story when utilizing the 3D technology. Like with fictional narrative films, the non fiction films of NASA also rely heavily on story. “By being immersive, 3D says, ‘come be in this world.’ I think there is excellent non fiction 3D out there. I am interested in it and doing it, but we just don’t want the technology leading the story.”

Does Starobin have an interest in taking more of a Hollywood approach? “Yes I have interest. To be honest, it would help facilitate story telling. One of the things that Vicky, myself and our colleagues at NASA appreciate, is how we are freed a little bit from the extraordinary clock pressures that I think Hollywood can impose on creatives. On the other hand, we don’t have the budgets. It’s a trade. We would love to continue to build our relationships to the west coast community without giving up some eastern aesthetics if you will. In an era of high speed Internet and inexpensive plane travel, that’s a very exciting proposition. I think it is possible to benefit from the best of both worlds. I do insist on creative meetings that we get together face to face if we can. The ability to talk via phone or Internet is not the same; I think evolution has trained you over two million years to read people’s faces, bodies and tone of voice. Isn’t it incredible when people are actually together? So we try getting together in person as often as we can, though we all have a SKYPE account.”

So does Starobin know what is coming next? The short answer is no. There will always be something new when it comes to technology. “Now in the digital era of storytelling there is no new next big thing. The skies are pretty much the limit. Now it’s about invention and storytelling. Do what you want, choose whatever color brush you want. That to me is exciting.”

So I Design Your Eyes readers what do you think? Is 3D the future of all filmmaking? Do you have ideas of what the next big idea in filmmaking is? Would love if you shared your thoughts in the comment section below.