Image  – Kazuhiro Goshima

Kazuhiro Goshima’s film Shadowland uses the night-time Tokyo to construct the illusion of 3D vision discovering this process with one 2D DSLR camera.

“Shadows” are cast on the streets by the headlights of cars driving through the city. Every night, the city itself is overwritten like a retina thousands of times, and no one can decipher its memories [1] – this observation has led the artist to focus on the poetic nature of city at night that became a key to creating 3D imagery. Shadowland is a stereoscopic (3D) film but unlike common 3D works it takes the viewer on a journey of immersion from 2D to 3D image unveiling the subtlety of 3D formation through the language of shadows.

How does Shadowland work? Kazuhiro Goshima explains its main principle: The essential factor of 3D vision is binocular parallax. I derive parallax from the slight time lag between the movies projected onto the right and left eyes. There are no digital special effects. I show the same movies to each eye but there is slight time lag (1-5 frames). (…) In Shadowland, I shot footage using one fixed camera. The moving element as the source of parallax is the car headlights [2].

SHADOWLAND-mechanism-by-Kazuhiro-Goshima

Full story of the technical production of Shadowland can be found on the Ars Electronica webpage: http://prix2014.aec.at/prixwinner/12220/

The film poetically embraces the feeling of walking the streets at night and being present in the moment, appreciating the beauty and uniqueness of imagery that emerges and disappears like ocean waves. The viewer is bound to discover aesthetic pleasure in reading shadows.

Shadowland won Award of Distinction in the world’s leading forum of electronic media art Ars Electronica in 2014 in the category of  Computer Animation/Film/VFX. Fragment of the jury statement: Shadowland is a wonderful combination of what we call  “found animation” with an innovative use of stereoscopic technique [3].

The stereoscopic side-by-side version of Shadowland will be presented for watching with 3D glasses within Telematic Cafe: On Air (at Beavs Bar) as part of Geelong After Dark on the 6th May 2016 between 6pm and 10pm.

Image – Kazuhiro Goshima

Kazuhiro Goshima’s website.

[1] Kazuhiro Goshima. 2014. Shadowland. In CyberArts 2014, Ars Electronica, 26-27.

[2] Kazuhiro Goshima. 2014. Shadowland. In CyberArts 2014, Ars Electronica, 26-27.

[3] Suzanne Buchan, Joe Gerhard, Jurgen Hagler, Sabine Hirtes, Quayola. 2014. Intangible Worlds. In CyberArts 2014, Ars Elecronica, 17.