I recently helped shoot a 3D cinema commercial for the Wimbledon Tennis Finals which will be shown in Cinemas and on TV in 3D. There were two 3D rigs used, an Element Technica rig with a pair of Phantom HD Gold’s, shooting at 1000 fps as well as one of my Genus Hurricane Rigs equipped with a pair of Sony PMW-F3’s with zeiss ultra primes recording onto a Nano3D as well as to the video village. The F3’s were used at both 1080P 25fps and 720P 50fps. We had a wide variety of Chapman grip (no relation) equipment including ride on dolly’s and sliders. The commercial was shot at a tennis club in Kent, dressed up with fake scoreboards, green backdrops and umpires in original wimbledon uniforms to make it look like Wimbledon over two days.

The weather was fantastic and the shoot went very well. The Zeiss Ultra primes worked very well on the 3D rig with each lens pair being very well matched and needing only minimal re-alignment each time we changed focal length. The F3’s were set up with no added detail correction and using cinegamma 1, S-Log not being available at the time of the shoot. My main role was as second unit camera operator/stereographer to shoot some of the main tennis player  3D shots at 25 and 50 fps as well as 3D blue screen effects shots including flying dirt and grass as well as various spinning tennis ball shots. For the 1000 fps shots with the Phantom HD Gold’s we used pairs of 18Kw lamps to light the players, and this on a bright sunny day!! In order to keep a similar look for the F3 shots we took full advantage of the cameras built in ND filters to keep the foregrounds bright with the background dark.

For some of the blue screen tennis ball shots we used some older Arri PL mount macro lenses. Below you’ll find a 2D version of the commercial. If I come across a 3D version I’ll post it here.