July 04, 2011
Cubic Meter...The First 3D Movie in Egypt
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A year ago and during the screening of " Avatar "... A group of students in the faculty of MassCommunication english department at the University of Cairo, succeeded in making their graduation project movie to be the First 3D movie in Egypt and took first place despite great hurdles that faced them during the making of the movie .
As techegypt.com believes in the creativity and talent of the Egyptian youths, we succeeded in reaching one of Cubic Meter's movie makers and the director and the visual effects man, Youssef Mahmoud Samy or as his friends call him, Joe. We had this amazing interview with him .
Joe said that the main aim of Cubic Meter is to focus on a very dangerous problem that egypt may face in the future, which is a great lack in the water levels of the Nile river due to the political, scientific and regional problems and conflicts. knowing that dealing with this serious problem in a movie is something boring and people may not pay attention to it through the 13 minutes, which is the length of the movie, in order to break this boredom the solution was to capture the movie in 3D Technology . He adds that he heard about the technology of 3D a year prior to the release of the blockbuster "Avatar".
Joe explained to us about the "3D" movie and how they implemented this technique in Cubic Meter, he pointed out that the 3D technology is like the human eyes, each eye sees the same scene, but at a different angle and thus during shooting a 3D snapshot, we use 2 video cameras. "In Cubic Meter we used 2 (DV400) video cameras, which is characterized by high sensitivity to light, resulting in high quality image" he added.
Asking him about the main problem during the filming, He answered that the main problem lied in the large size of the cameras where it is difficult in the imaging of some scenes, where the shots are very close up, meaning that when the 2 video camers are too close to the object that is being shot, the focal length between the 2 video cameras was not adjusted ,which simulates the human eyes' focal length which is not supposed to be more than 6 cm. The solution lied in photographing or shootng the very close scenes by one camera and rebuild or composite those scenes through the use of 3D MAX software, he added that After Effects was another 3D program that was used to produce Cubic Meter.
To get his feedback about if Egyptian cinema can produce 3D movies or not, he said that it is very difficult as the U.S cinema is way ahead than its Egyptian counter part by hundred of years, he added that the movie producers know that it costs a lot of money and it will be hard to have their money back from ticket sales, so they don't like to produce this kind of movies, he also added that Cinema technology in Egypt is so poor and weak and that they use the traditional ways in producing the movie and don't make use of 3D graphics and visual effects programs well. Joe also said that there are lots of talented and creative youth in Egypt but they are so ignored from the industry and no one makes use of their talent in the right way.
Finally, we have to mention that Joe won the MBC competition "Movie in Motion" twice...Once in 2008, where he won the first place for "I am Earth" movie and in 2009, he was 1st runner up for "inertia" movie .
Updated: April 17, 2012 1:11 PM
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