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Vince Pace: One of the priorities because we were servicing the group between 10 and 13 years old was that I wanted the parents to enjoy it too. I wanted the parents to sit there and go ‘Wow, this is fun!’.

Phil Streather: It had as many gimmicks as you’d want. It had a couple of Gibson ends in your face, it had the pick, it had a couple of microphone stands. How many more do you want? One of the other things that I was thinking through the second time I saw it was: ‘Well, half of this is in 2-D! It’s all grainy and probably shot in HD or HDCAM rather than SR” and then I thought ‘Oh, just a minute! This is actually working because it’s the show that’s the magic’ and then I’m seeing a sort of ‘behind the scenes’ grainy then when I then come back to the 3-D I’m going ‘Wow, this is cool!’ I think this is actually a very interesting way of doing it because you are completely switching them off the 3-D, so they completely recover. It’s not just like a little bit of 3-D where you’re still having to work. You’re giving people’s eyes a complete rest and then you come back to it. I must confess I like that.

Vince Pace: It showed we could go in different areas. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one way or another. If you really analyse the 3-D, we built at moments, we also try and relax at moments so we’re letting her come down, if you will, so we can build her back up. I wanted a great deal of separation between the moments in 3-D and the moments I wanted to just let the roller coaster come down a little bit.

Phil Streather: How much of the 3-D do you bake-in in production and were you overseeing the edit in terms of ‘z-space’. I noticed that first of her Miley Cyrus songs was about the most aggressive 3-D in the whole movie. So you obviously wanted to make her transition from cinema person to real person. However, that was the biggest negative parallax of the whole show.

Vince Pace: We had to make that statement. We had to say ‘Here she comes. This is a superstar. She is singing, you know, she’s there for you’ and what better way to give her to you than that. It was interesting to say ‘How far do you go?’ As to how I shot it, I really wanted the stage to be the point of interest and let her transition to the foreground. That is how we mapped it out. So track her on when she’s down on the stage, leave it on the stage when she comes towards you. When I got in the post, I took it everywhere I wanted to go. I literally just looked at everything.

I don’t think with the post tools available now you can’t bake anything except for interocular. You don’t want to take into interocular lightly. But it’s not perfect by any means. I would have loved to have more cameras to be honest with you. We had a long lensing camera which did pay off for us.

Phil Streather: Were there two techno cranes?

Vince Pace: Three. That’s one of the beauties of working with Disney! You had a ‘track Techno’ 50 footer, which can just be anywhere you want it to be. A Techno 30 footer so that could put the camera right on her. Then we had another 15ft techno at the back dancing around. That was for our concert, the real concert where we got the meat of the footage. The next day, we turned it around on the crowd. Because here we are impacting the crowd a little bit, so we are in the crowd but on the next night, we reversed all the seven cameras. There’s some great shots of the techno right behind the drummer. The bulk of the frontage footage was done on one night.

PS: How many camera positions did that mean you had over the two nights?

VP: I think only two or three overlapped, so that meant 11 camera positions and seven stereo rigs. Rodney (Taylor, one of the DPs for the concert) was great. In the mix, some of those shots when she just comes down or she does that nice little turn – that was Rodney entirely.

PS: Because he’s a sports photographer and a wildlife photographer, he treats her as a combination of wildlife and sport. This is an animal here! Rodney was saying something interesting last night when I spoke to him which was when he first pitched up, there was a big emphasis on ‘How can we get a 3-D moment here? How can we make sure that something comes in here?’ Rodney said ‘Hey! Hey! Forget about it. It’s a concert movie. Let’s just film this as an amazing concert movie and the 3-D will look after itself.’

VP: It’s a 3D moment by its very nature. We don’t have to make it anything. We don’t have to script the 3-D moment. The concert by its very nature, the way it was laid out with the big boxes dropping up and down, with the peninsula there, the whole thing. Unfortunately, it just meant that the project suffered from the fact that some people wanted to just make a solely 3-D ‘in your face’ and there is something to be said about that. But if you were to just shoot the concert in 3-D it had everything that it needed. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t want a steadicam on the stage, a proximity that’s good for 3-D and all that stuff... but nobody had to ‘force the hand’ and if you look at some of the moves, they would say ‘never do that in 3-D’.

PS: Whip-pans! I was wondering on a strobing level, are your cameras 30p rather than 24-25?

VP: 24.

VP: 24p. Why didn’t it strobe?

VP: Because you have to make the pan quick enough so you’re not judging it. In my opinion, when people say you need to slow down 3-D; you need to make it faster! You either got to be fast or give it time.

Fast disregards everything – right? – and just locks on. People get stuck in this: ‘No, no, you’ve got to watch your panning speed”. Mitch (Admundsen – Cinematographer for the concerts) blew that wide open. Mitch was like ‘Rock ‘n roll!’ and Rodney was on the same page.

It’s a matter of making it quick enough so you are not taking in the information for its value. I think that from the way this was approached, positioning of cameras was a critical factor. What we didn’t have for Hannah Montana – and I knew this going in – was 60,000 people. 60,000 for 3-D makes any concert good. You know what I’m saying? In other words, when you see those shots of U2 with bouncing people and everybody in unison and all that stuff, we didn’t really have that. We had a lot of little kids with their parents. We didn’t have the aura of say a Bono.

PS: But there seemed to be a lot more miniaturisation in the U2 film than in your film. So whether you just thought ‘Well, I’m going to zoom in and I’m not going to pull them out to get the volume. I’m going to run with a little bit more cardboard than I am with miniaturisation’.

[The cardboard cut-out effect is a result of using long lenses at the normal interocular. Objects at the same distance from the camera/viewer look like flat planes with stereo space between them]

And if there was a little bit of cardboarding then it didn’t really bother me because cardboarding is only a description of an effect. It doesn’t say it’s bad!
So in terms of you being an Executive Producer on it, was it just a complete buy-out with Disney or are you on some sort of piece?

VP: No. It was a buy-out with Disney. It was a way for them to just ask me to be with the project throughout it’s range and I’m glad I did it. I really do because I’m proud of the project. It could have gone many different ways from a 3-D perspective. To be honest with you, I appreciate the fact that they involved me to the degree that they did. I really do. They didn’t have to do that. I think Pace played the role with crewing it and teaming up the people.

PS: When you say ‘play the role’, did you choose the seven camera teams?

VP: Mitch picked the operators. We picked all of the core people to support those cameras and then it grew from there because Mitch really wanted to do it film-style. So Mitch definitely was the connection of the operators and I didn’t get into that because, to me, I want the best damn 2D guy you can find. That’s what I want.

PS: Say then on Rodney’s camera, was Rodney bearing anything in mind in 3-D or was it just like: ‘One rule, don’t let things break frame at the top and I’ll sort out the convergence. How was he operating on a tech level?

VP: We did the tests. We went to St Louis and shot. We had a chance to rehearse. St Louis was one of her first concerts in fact, that’s where she opened. So we went there and shot her opening rehearsal. You know what I really like about this situation is that you give me any good 2D guy and you give him a chance to exhibit his craft in 3-D and then look at it. He sees what doesn’t work and was does work for me: they’re not stupid people. A good 2D operator is saying: ‘If I want to frame you right now, what would go onto the print?’ You want him not to lose sight of that. You want him to go in there and do stuff and then say ‘You know what? That looks best for me for operating my camera’, because I want that talent.

That’s what we did and it worked extremely well because they got to see what they were doing and then they realised ‘Hey, that looks really cool that up angle... that looks really awesome’ – you know what I mean? Rodney just built on his own craft as opposed to someone instructing him to say ‘Rodney, you need to do it this way’.

Reed is very – ‘Camera position, camera position, camera position’. He’s always been that way. Mitch on the other hand is – ‘If you don’t feel it through your images, then you’re doing something wrong’. That’s Mitch. Very much ‘make it happen’, those whip pans he’s not afraid of. For Mitch, it doesn’t work if you’re not in sync with what’s happening.

PS: As Director of Photography, did he design the look and then talked to the Rodneys and Reeds about applying that look? He’s credited as DP on the show so how then did he work with Rodney and Reed?

VP: I think he worked in the same way with what they did for ‘Shining light on the Stones’. You just wanted a lot of isolated people that are going to go in there and rip the heart out of this thing, right?

PS: Was it choreographed? Was someone controlling them through a headset saying ‘Ok Rodney, back off now because we’re about to cut from a wide to you so get in’.

VP: They tried a little bit to time it but these guys are entertainment shooters. These were filmmakers.

PS: So basically, Rodney is there saying ‘Okay. This is what I’ve got in front of me, at any one moment this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen’.

VP: He knows that playing that crowd in front can work really well sometimes, playing it really tight, he just went with the flow. That’s why Mitch I think put a lot of faith in these guys when he said ‘You see the variety of shots. Get me some variety!’ Also, again, that contributed towards it not looking like a pre-staged storyboarded thing.

PS: There is a debate between some DPs saying that the 3-D element needs to come under the control of the camera department. On the movie Dark Country, apparently there was a bit of a dislocation between the camera department and the 3-D department. How did you work as stereographer with Mitch?

VP: I think he listened to my concerns. We discussed it all, but we never dictated. Everybody listened. I am in a little bit of agreement that whether it’s 3-D or 2D, it is a camera department. It is not 3-D v 2D. You need a good DP and somebody that can help put a hand into the 3-D process. Mitch picked DPs, not operators. You know what I mean? He wasn’t threatened by me coming in, or Rodney or Reed at all. Mitch definitely works in an environment that is ‘Let’s talk about it’.

PS: Did Mitch take one of the cameras?

VP: Absolutely. Primary camera, right at the thrust.
He was the techo crane. He started on a 15ft and I think he ended with a 50ft.
I’m a tremendously serious guy on set. I look at this as a war zone. We’re going to take that mountain. We’re going to go there and I don’t accept defeat. For instance just to give you an ideas where it paid off for me.

The day before the concert we heard the stage was coming in the next day. They were going to build it there so none of our cameras could be on the floor the day that the concert was going to happen! It was coming in overnight from Denver, it was going to land and they had the whole floor to work on. Right? And they were going to erect the stage. They would give us access at 5pm to deploy cameras with the gig starting at 7pm!

I am thinking ‘that’s best estimate of 5pm, that’s the earliest it’s going to be. So I’m thinking ‘Man, this is not the way I thought we were going to do this.We’d be there, the stage would be there, we’d have one rehearsal night and everything’. This was not rehearsal. This was the only concert we were gonna get. So, the night before, we’re there; but the stage hasn’t arrived, it’s just an empty arena – right? - and I say ‘We’re building every single system. We’re rolling every single system from each of its stage position to its location and we need to be set up and operational within an hour’. So that means whatever that cable is, whatever that strut. I don’t care what it is, we’ll figure it out then because there won’t be anything missing come the day that we’re going to do this. This show won’t be held up because of us.

That took us until 1am in the morning and I remember the execs walking through. They flew in from the Denver concert on a charter and they’re coming in there, we’re still working. It’s midnight, 12.30, and we’re still working. Everybody was beat, and I’m the only one saying ‘We’re doing this. I don’t care. Don’t tell me we can do this tomorrow. Don’t tell me we can make this happen tomorrow. We’re going to do this’.

The game day for me was the day before. And I said ‘We are not backing out of this. Don’t tell me that you’re missing a cord or someone didn’t bring your power...‘. We finished at 1.30 in the morning and sure enough, the main camera has a problem.

We don’t know what’s wrong with it. It’s jammed, it’s not working. The controls will not operate, they get stuck. I walk over there and I say: ‘Wait a second, the bolts underneath. Take them off. Just take it off the techno crane mount’. They take it off and everything works fine, right? The techno crane guy in St Louis had used washers to ‘back off’ the bolt. Here he didn’t use the washers, and the bolts went right up into our camera and pinned the camera so it could not operate. We wouldn’t have had time to fix that. That system had to be broken down and put back together.

Flavour that with the meeting right before the concert with the director. He calls us in for a meeting and he stands up and he says ‘I want to have fun at this concert. Miley is about having fun. Yes, I know you guys all got your job to do but don’t forget to have fun, that will show in the image’. I’m sitting there ‘What he is talking about fun!’. I realised then that no matter what happened, it was better to just go with the flow than to be there like ‘this is a war’. I realised that we shouldn’t be forcing Miley into a box because she’s got her own style.

I mean a ‘for instance’ when they were getting ready for the concert the choreography was terrible. It wasn’t ready. How can she not be ready to go with one hour until she’s on stage! It was my wife that said it: ‘Vince, no matter what you do, the 10 year olds will love it’.

So we can all say we crafted this fine piece of art and all of that. It’s not. We went out there, we shot a concert with seven cameras, two days, a tremendous amount of hard work – tremendous amount of hard work. Then we came back, and we went through a 12-week post period with Disney and that shined, shined, shined. You know, we didn’t force the subject matter, we didn’t polish the subject matter, the best thing about Miley is, when I walked away, I thought she was a really good girl.

PS: Well, I watched Hannah twice in a day. Three hours of 3-D in a day and I had no eye strain. I’ve found U2 quite ‘squirly’ because there is that overuse of dislocated convergence. Then there is also a lot more stuff in post where they were fiddling with it. So you’ve actually got the original constant changing of convergence and whether your picture’s coming towards you; then, if you add on to that another layer, you’ve got a sort of a double curve which isn’t in sync. So these people are getting smaller, they’re pulsing in and out on a size-wise and they’re pulsing in and out in z-space. The whole effect doesn’t make you feel nauseous or sick, I just find it a little bit like I’m on a boat.

VP: U2 could have made $30m if they had just finished it in three months. Take all those fans who couldn’t get to the concert and give them that. That’s how they could have made their $30m in one weekend.

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