Yours?

No, other people’s movies. One of them is with one of the biggest directors on the planet. I just can’t say who it is but I’m looking forward to being able to announce it sometime.

And they’ll be using MAGI?

Yeah. I hope so.

You hope so?

Well, if we can get through the minefield of studio trepidation. [Laughs.]

I noticed the “speed-up effect” I saw in "The Hobbit" wasn’t very present in "UFOTOG." That was odd.

Yeah, see? It didn’t seem like television.

No, not at all. It was different.

It’s different, that’s for sure—but it doesn’t look like television. That was my first big challenge to myself. I could have easily done this test that I told you about and found out, “Oh, it looks even worse. If 48’s worse than 24 and 60’s worse than that, and television is 60, then 120 is going to look terrible. But that’s the risk, we’ll just try it.”

And voíla, there’s actually—with this cadence idea of matching the photography to projection, you go into new territory. It’s a new land of imagery that doesn’t have any of those restrictions. It doesn’t look like television. It’s a new thing. It’s a new different thing. We also took this whole film and interpolated it up to 120 frames per eye which actually looks stunning.

The version of "UFOTOG" that I saw was 60 frames per eye?

You saw 60 per eye. But we’ve actually screened this at 120 per eye at IBC and Amsterdam and at the Giant Screen Cinema Association in Toronto with the [new Dolby] 6P laser projector.

And it was impressive?

It was mindboggling—and that’s only at 2K! Because nobody has a 4K version of it yet. So the 4K version of it is in the pipeline.

Why did you decide to make a narrative film to show off your new technology?

This movie is just an experiment using [MAGI] because I knew that just you know aiming the camera at some pretty flowers or somebody’s face or landscape would be totally inconclusive in terms of applying it to a dramatic story. And I also wanted to prove this whole thing about these virtual sets and locations because this whole movie was shot right here, [on this stage], very inexpensively. So it’s just an experiment in how to use this process, or how to begin exploring this process.