31 VR Profile
had been interested in 3D ever since I was 12 years old. I had a school project about how NASA was mapping the world in 3D, and I
her skills as a camera operator, and she received a call from a friend, Florian Maier, who now heads high-end 3D camera rig developer Stereotec. Maier was riding the 3D boom, bringing his stereoscopic gear to the burgeoning 3D sector. “Florian told me: ‘I’ve just signed to shoot this 3D feature film, but you’re the only one who knows how to operate my rig. Can you move to Germany?’” So Mikkelsen moved to Germany – and stayed there for two and half years. “Florian and I were full-time live action stereographers. We’re the ones who move the cameras, a bit like being a focus puller in a 2D film, but you’re moving the rig – the interaxial distance between the cameras – rather than the focus.” The pair went on to shoot 3D features, including the German film Vicky and the Treasure of the Gods and Paramount’s Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters , and they won the Advanced Imaging Society’s Lumiere Award two years in a row for best stereography. “We were all very taken up with the technology,” remembers Mikkelsen. “You were very used to doing the best possible job, with the production not paying for any
MAY THE FORCE Guitarist and 3D tech enthusiast Dr Brian May called on Mikkelsen to make a 3D 360 concert film of the 2016 Queen tour
thought ‘Wow! What’s this all about?!’” Years before Oculus Rift was a gleam in Palmer Luckey’s eye, Norwegian director Jannicke Mikkelsen had fallen in love with using technology to vision immersive worlds. Now she is one of the world’s top VR filmmakers and seems determined to take immersive filmmaking to the next level. “After that school project, I gradually learned how to take 3D pictures – and how to view them the old stereoscopic way, instead of seeing them on a 3D screen – and I began to find an online community of people interested in 3D.” Mikkelsen’s interest in cinematography continued to grow, but in the meantime, she was deeply immersed in another passion – skating. In fact, she was a member of the Norwegian Olympic speed skating team and only missed qualification for the Vancouver Games by .02 seconds (she was in the midst of watching some of her teammates competing in Pyongchang when we called her for this article). By 2009, Mikkelsen had fully developed
correction in post. We had to make certain everything was perfect on set. That was our trademark.”
VIRTUAL REALITY SETS IN Then the 3D bubble burst and a community of craftspeople, who
knew more about human vision and capturing depth spaces than any other cinematographers in history, were wandering around trying to figure out what to do with their lives. How did Mikkelsen cope? “This is really embarrassing, but I got
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