The history of 3D film starring Newark and New York

The history of 3D film starring Newark and New York will be the first 2012 featured lecture this fall of the NJIT Technology and Society Forum presentations. The Emmy-nominated, award-winning Newark filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno will screen and discuss their short 3D films on Newark and the Brooklyn waterfront on Oct. 3, 2012 from 3-4:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Ballroom. NJIT University Lecturer Jon Curley, a poet, will be featured at the free event, which is open to the public. The filmmakers draw inspiration from Manhatta, the six-minute 1921 avant garde film by artists Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand with text by Walt Whitman, which will also be shown. The Bongiornos have updated the technology to 3D, shifted the sites to Newark and Brooklyn and created soundscapes.

Their "city symphony" films extend a tradition that includes Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927); Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice (1930).

New Work: Newark in 3D (6 minutes) was commissioned by the Newark Museum in 2009 for its 100th anniversary celebration and is part of the museum's permanent collection. The spoken word poetry was written and performed by Jon Curley and the music soundtrack is by Newark area artists.

Curley's first book of poems, New Shadows, was published in 2009. A second collection, Angles of Incidents, will be published this fall. His critical study, Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland, came out last year.

New Work: The Brooklyn Waterfront in 3D (6 minutes.) was shot in conjunction with the CUNY/NEH Landmarks workshop Along the Shore: Changing and Preserving the Landmarks of Brooklyn's Industrial Waterfront for a presentation at the Museum of the City of New York in 2010. It features a soundscape with music by a Brooklyn artist.

The Bongiornos' presentation will also discuss the history of 3D filmmaking, explaining the technical intricacies of capturing a full cityscape in 3D through their innovative use of two side-by-side Sony XDCAM HD EX camcorders, with two Mino-HD camcorders employed for select shots.

More information:
Take away 3D glasses will be provided. For a discussion of stereoscopy, or 3D imaging, see blog.digitalcontentproducer.co … /06/5-ex3-x-2-diy-3d. For the Newark Museum podcast, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tIGET-W6YM.

Provided by New Jersey Institute of Technology