Baywatch Co-Creator Leading Industry-Wide “See Change”
Today’s new, polarized, digital 3-D movies promise to fulfill the original dream of cinema: to bring the otherworldly and uncanny so close audiences feel they have entered the action. And, as seen by the recent successes of Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf and the re-release of Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas, audiences are responding.
“While the studios are making $100-200 million 3-D blockbusters, ‘indie film’ methods can be used to create high-quality polarized 3-D features in the $5-$15 million range,” says Doug Schwartz, chairman of StereoVision Entertainment Inc., an independent, publicly-traded film production company dedicated solely to making low-cost, high-quality 3-D movies. “Similar to what Roger Corman accomplished at American International Pictures in the 1960s and 70s, such a low-budget 3-D production facility could serve as a fertile testing ground for new talent pushing the boundaries of this exciting new platform.”
Co-creator of Baywatch, the most popular television series in history according to The Guinness Book of World Records, Schwartz has envisioned ways to bring an independent film production ethos to this new, high-end technology, and is uniquely positioned to lead the charge into the industry’s 3-D future.
“With faltering theatrical ticket sales, pirating, and more and more audience members watching movies at home, the film industry appreciates the need to offer ticket buyers a radically new and unique movie-going experience,” says Schwartz. “For all the recent advances in home theater technology and portable devices, nothing beats the experience of seeing a movie in a theater.”
With new developments in digital projection and 3-D technology, and the number of screens capable of showing 3-D films steadily rising, there is a bright future for the big screen. In the first six months of 2007, the number of worldwide screens equipped for 3-D projection tripled to 750 (85% of those in the U.S.); that figure is expected to grow to over five thousand by 2009 according to Screen Digest.
StereoVision’s goal is to develop and distribute between twelve-to-fifteen 3-D feature films over the next three-to-five years. “We hope to fill the voids left between the big studios’ tent-pole blockbuster releases,” says Schwartz. “StereoVision will provide ‘summer popcorn movies’ for 3-D equipped theaters to show year-round.”
Visit http://www.stereovision.com to begin changing the way you look at movies.
