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3D Underwater Camera Housing
In April 2009 I was invited to join a French Production team to produce a 3d film on the world Champion freediver Herbert Nitsch. We spent 2 weeks in the Bahamas on the idyllic/quite Island of Long Island. The film was about the diver, ad was mostly filmed in Deans Blue Hole.
We worked closely with Panavision France,who supplied us the Modular HD cameras system made by Easylook mini camera systems. These cameras shoot full HD, and shoot comparable footage to shooting 35mm film.
Each camera had it own recorder, and an array of cables, sync boxes, and a 3d monitor.
The production commissions me to to build a housing for the shoot We had limited budgets, and only a shot time to build the camera housing.
Designing the Camera
I spent 3 hours at Panavision in Paris, and was given measurements of all the equipment to fit in the housing, and given 10 days to build a watertight housing to fit all this equipment..
As I had little time to make the camera, I designed the system using perspex, for the construction.The Housing was made of 20mm plate, and was glued together with adhesive. The total weight of the camera empty was 18kgs.
Controls were constructed using conventional controls from underwater still cameras, with control rods and button to access the camera features.
One of the biggest hurdles for shooting 3d is deciding the placement of the cameras. The distance between the two camera will determine how you shoot different shot. I built two configuration of double dome ports for different sequences.
Before each shoot, we had to carefully decide what effect we wanted to archive. If the selection was incorrect, the shot could be us less for the film.
Shooting 3d has many of its own problems, and since taking up the challenge, shooting 2d appears to be a breeze now!
As we were using two lens side by side, I handmade 2 mini domes to correct the 9mm lens we used.
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