Animated Amusements - the movie

Animated Amusements (the 2D version) was an Official Selection of the Seattle International Film Festival (North America's largest and most highly attended Film Festival) and the Tacoma Film Festival. It will have its east coast premiere at the 2013 New York International Children's Film Festival in March. The stereoscopic version of Animated Amusements had its premiere in the Stereo Theatre of the National Stereoscopic Association's Convention in Loveland, Colorado, July 2011, where it received the Artistic Achievement award. It has since been presented at the Congress of the International Stereoscopic Union in the Netherlands, at the National 3D-day of the Dutch Society at the Days of Stereoscopy in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the UK Stereoscopic Society Annual Convention, and is scheduled to be presented at the 2013 Australian National Stereo Photography Convention.

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In 2010, in addition to my still captures of nighttime carnival rides, I began shooting 3D time lapse sequences of the rides. My rig consisted of 2 Canon G9 Powershots synchronized with StereoDatamaker*. The cameras were linked with a custom switch built by Frans van de Kamp of the Netherlands. At my request he had included a socket to receive the input of an intervalometer. The two cameras were mounted side by side on a twin bar built by Jasper Engineering. The entire rig was quite portable.

On any given night I was able to capture several sequences. Afterwards there would be a lot of data transfer, file management, and nuking of any pairs that were out of sync. Selected sequence pairs were edited to the instrumental piece "La Gaie Divorceé" by the late Rebo Flordigan.

*StereoDatamaker, a variant of the Canon Hack Developer Kit, is developed by Masuji Suto and David Sykes.