Chaseblog

After a light lunch in the sunshine on a nereby terrace enjoying the festival buzz, I entered the huge Bonlieu cinema in a very good mood. I had just received the message  that the projectionist would turn up the volume for Chase just a tiny little bit. I often regretted not to have asked,  so this time I wouldn’t fall into that trap. The best is always better to check with a test yourself but that couldn’t be fit in the tight festival schedule. And a tiny bit is a tiny bit, after all.

I sat rather close to the giant screen, which was not ideal, but I had to step on stage after the film to present myself. It suddenly hit me that something was missing. The cinema was already filled more than half, but I didn’t have any 3d glasses! Did the festival decide to show Chase in 2d, maybe because the jury was there and they thought it wouldn’t be fare to the other competitors after all? I couldn’t think of another explanation, a thought that depressed me immediately because it was seeing the film in 3d on this big screen I had been anticipating so much. Just to be sure I asked one of the festival volunteers. To my surprise she reacted as stung by a bee. I was right, where were the 3D glasses?

Serge Blomberg, creative director of the festival, was warned and came on stage to explain what went wrong: they had totally forgotten  the glasses. Big bags containing 1000 glasses were distributed, adding to the pleasant chaos of  hundreds of paper airplanes flying around, a custom accompanying screenings at Annecy. Totally relieved I sat back, after a 15 minutes delay the show could finally go on.

Chase was the fourth animation in this program and when it started it was immediately obvious I had made a wrong decision by asking to turn up the volume. I suppose the ‘tiny’ in ‘a tiny little bit louder’ was lost in translation. Too soft is bad, too loud is worse, it distracts from the image and becomes a burden.
I could hit myself for being so stupid to ask to raise the volume without having done a test. But that wasn’t all. The 3D looked weird. No matter how hard I tried, my brain couldn’t match the 2 images that I saw into one nice stereoscopic picture. This was a totally new experience to me.
Being a novice in stereoscopy, I considered I must have made a huge mistake. The screen must have been too big and my DCP was only tested on moderate screen sizes so far. Nicolas, my producer, had been dubious about not working with a professional 3D company. It seemed he was right after all.
The last film of the program was in 3D as well. It looked perfect. Very disappointed I left the cinema, realizing that beside 1000 people, the jury had seen all this as well.  I came across Ron Diamond (American animation film producer) who was in the audience and asked for his professional opinion but he said he hadn’t noticed anything wrong and loved to talk to me about the film later. I thought that was peculiar and made me think I might have invented the problem myself after all.

Not knowing what to do with all this I went to the 18:00 screening to check once more. After all, it could still have been my eyes, or being too close to the screen or a problem with my glasses. I sat on a different spot this time. Nicolas and his ADM staff were at the 18:00 screening as well. The sound was OK now because I had asked to put the volume at it’s normal level. But the image was still completely wrong, causing headaches and very hard to focus on and almost no depth at all. It was better to shut one eye and look in 2D!

Afterwards, I felt awful. After 5 years of work,  this wasn’t at all funny. I wanted to go home.

The most important screenings of Chase with 2.000 spectators in total at the most famous short film animation temple of the world were over. With other smaller screenings still to come, I checked the program and saw that within 30 minutes a screening was due in another cinema. Compared to the Bonlieu this was a small cinema but to me it still was huge with over 400 seats.
Thanks to the help of the service desk after explaining why I absolutely had to enter the cinema, I got a ticket at the very last moment. I jumped on my rented bike and arrived out of breath, anticipating a final dissapointment.
But to my surprise and utter joy, it was perfect! There had been nothing wrong with my eyes, neither so it seemed, with the material I provided. The picture was sharp as a knife with beautiful depth, as I had always meant it to be. But what the hell did go wrong at the Bonlieu?

To be continued…