Gorilla Productions has always worked on projects that are ahead of the curve when it comes to all facets of media creation. From its humble beginnings, almost 20 years now, when we people didn't believe it was possible to edit film on a PC with DV tapes, working remotely with clients via the internet, to working in a new narritive formats like webseries and many other outlier projects. It is definetly part of the DNA of the company and we have been lucky to always attracted these type of exciting projects.
Recently, we have been collaborating to create many tools for the next generation of what filmmaking will become, in our opinion. One of these technologies is the ThreeJs platform which opens a world of posibilities to everyones via your browser. So, we had the possiblility to develop something to push this open source platform forward; it was a no brainer, we were all in.
The REALCAMERA PROJECT is the result of many talented and passionate people and organizations (Seneca CDOT , Filmtyme , Barbara de Graaf). Basically, the objective was to build real traditional camera focus controls to the platform. It is always important ground technology in the real world, having the ability to control the camera in a 3D space and that it acts like a real film camera, is a great advantage to the people that have been working with cameras for all their careers. This was one of the primary reasons that we chose to use Arri set of film lenses as our baseline for the camera in the test scene.
The concept was to build tools with ease of use for people that use cameras or even teach camera operation on a daily basis, this will hopefully bridge the technological gap between filmmakers and the digital tools. Thus, bringing together real world knowledge to a new world of digital filmmaking. When you use the tool, you really can see the possibilities as a cinematographer, a teaching tool and even as a 3d world building tool that brings the very familiar film language to this platform. When we got all the pieces working, I found myself just imagining the different applications for this tool; as I re-framed and adjusted the focus. it's impressive the responsiveness and that it is functional via your browser. (no wacky plug-in installs either! It just works)
The Project is now ready for use and if you do play around with it, please send us some feedback via the short survey. It took some time to get all the work done but without feedback from proffessionals that use cameras on a daily basis it is difficult to get all the UI down. Your feedback is essential to perfect this tool.