Hope 3D - first Estonian 3D film Interview with the filmmakers

Interview with Arko Okk, director : If 3D is the present of film-industry, what is the future?

3D is yesterday! It’s a denial of the new if you think that 3D is something so modern. 3D is four generations old technology; it’s more like a renaissance in a film art.

You said that 3D in your films is an aesthetics, not just a technique, that you use the aesthetics of modern times to observe modern times.

I try to create an illusion; either through ways in which I build up the mise-en-scene, the perspective, and the ways I do choices before and after the shooting. Montage-cinema is filled with manoeuvres of absurdity. But I try to go inside of the human soul. Above all 3D is the outcome of overproduction. It’s back to the roots, actually. This is also why „Hope 3D” is a silent-film.

Indeed, 3D separates ordinary cell phone-moviemakers from the professional ones. What other possibilities does it offer to filmmakers?

Technology really is just a tool, but the poetics of it is to create your own world. 12 years ago with my first film “Highway Crossing” I was criticized for making an absurd film and telling everyone to believe in it. With „Hope 3D” I said: „don’t believe in the film.” You see, film is an art of hiding. Television speaks with you frontally, but film always hides something. It speaks of that Something that is hidden behind shadows.

Andres Köster (played an NKVD soldier), actor:

This was my first experience in film, since my real profession is a tenor-singer. But I did understand the differences between film and theatre. Actor has to hold back about 80% emotions on screen, because film is more real than theatre, and 3D film is the most real of all arts. Yet as in music, you can sing with the right tone, but if there’s no emotion, no feeling behind it, it’s just a tune, not a song.

Hans Mülberg (played Olderman, head of tribunal), actor :

3D is the most perfect realization of „destroying the 4th wall”; the barrier that separates the screen and the audience. People sitting next to you in the cinema fade in the same room and space with people on screen. If you presume that such film technology brings new methods of acting, my opinion is that you are absolutely right. Creating your role demands even more concentration, since we see more details, more connections between characters. It increases actor’s alertness.

Rein Rannap, music composer:

Ever since time of silent films, it was a pianist who gave the sound. I didn’t try to recreate words or story into a melody, rather to focus on moods, synchronize rhythms and, of course, play the role of the pianist in the era of silent films. My goal was to make a unity of aesthetics for image and sound, in order to keep everything in the same language, in the same tonality, avoiding contrasts. Camera allowed with its movement to give versatile background sounds, and editing only made me to react on the changes and back it up with melody. It was truly an inspirational way to compose music.

Max Golomidov, 2nd camera operator :

We had lots of long-takes, so everyone had to co-operate and everything had to be well thought through. I worked closely with director of photography Ališer Hamidhodžajev. He was a very strategic in his filming, foreseeing very fast if the scene was not going to work. Thanks to his strategic eye all those long-takes succeeded. 3D has lots of nuances, including its working in certain positions with the filmed object. The connection between actor and camera still remains, it just has more mathematics in it.

Eduard Vaselo, 3D digital Sputnik :

Some Hollywood films tend to have rather controlled 3D effects; we chose to amplify the effect. What comes out of camera is rough, so you as an illusionist need to make it into something good and believable. It is a very technological process: all the editing, programming, inputs and outputs, rendering… But in order to make the 3D work, it needs to have a purpose, it needs to have both the visual and emotional dimension. And if you ask me about future of film, it’s not only a technological question. Personally I believe that films will continue to exist, but the impressionism will increase. The story as such will always remain.

By Kerli Adov