Here's the skinny:

The bad/good news: I've been pegged with the nigh impossible task of making three high-definition stereoscopic ("3-D") videos to be shown in Tokyo less than sixty days from now.

The good/bad news: the upstream production company is sending me to California so I can pick the brains of some experienced experts in the field before I start.

Ready? Okay, I'm leaving for the airport now. Details follow.


Day One

The American customs officials weren't very impressed by my beard scissors. They took one look at my scraggly, unkempt facial hair and decided that my story sounded fishy. In fact, they pretty much decided then and there that I was probably a crazed Islamic terrorist.

(Which, for the record, I am not.)

They wanted to know why my passport was only valid for one year (answer: because I lost my passport so many times the good people at Canada Customs began to suspect that I was a terrorist). They wanted to know where I was going, which was fine -- I said, "Burbank, on business." They also wanted to know which hotel I was staying in, which was less fine -- I said, "Um...I don't know yet, actually."

They wanted to know how much money I had. I had none.

They wanted me to boot up my laptop. I explained that the battery was not charged.

So the grim American customs officials set to tearing apart my baggage, unpacking and inspecting every item in minute detail, and asking me about a hundred thousand more probing questions.

It all ended happily when they confiscated my scissors and invited me to run for the final boarding call for my flight. I shoved my clothes into my bag as I pelted through the terminal, sweat running down my brow. Quoth the intercom: "This is the last call for passenger Brown, Cheeseburger aboard Air Canada 791 to Los Angeles...last call."

"Fuuuuuck!"

But I made it. Then I found myself sandwiched between two idiots for four and a half hours while a bad movie played and my ears refused to pop. I spotted the cinematographer further back a few rows, and waved while I used my other hand to jimmy my stoppered ear.

"Hey, Cheeseburger!" called the cinematographer.

"What?" I said.

"How's it going?" he asked.

"What?"

As we flew over the Mojave I spotted every planet from every classic episode of Star Trek. I remarked to myself how the hills looked a lot like what television told me Korea looks like, then I started humming the theme from M*A*S*H. Everything about the landscape was eerily familiar, glimpsed from a thousand movies. We crossed a ridge of low, crumpled-looking tan mountains and across a bowl of flat, brown megalopolitan bric-a-brac that spread from one smoky horizon to the other. We began our descent into the haze.

I met up with Cinematographer and Producer at LAX. Cinematographer is an affable French Canadian who dresses like a surfer, with bleach frosted tips to his hair and tight, sporty shorts. Producer is a shortish, slightish fellow with curly blonde hair, thick-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses and small, girlish hands.

We found our rental car and drove around in circles for a while as Cinematographer attempted to decode the map we'd been faxed from the Ace Stereographers. We finally got on track and negotiated the freeways to Burbank.

My ears popped.

We parked the car and entered a large warehouse space, the walls marked with lines and cross-hairs. We stepped over piles of unhitched dolly track, and into the next section of the warehouse from which we could hear voices. There we found a clusterfuck of geeks young and old gathered around the high definition 3-D camera rig, taking measurements and arguing amongst themselves in a smooth, professional way. They spotted us immediately. "It's the Canadians!"

Like in most places I work, everyone important was male. A very knowledgeable but clearly subordinate girl from Vancouver introduced us to the engineers and princes of stereography. Everyone was wearing loud, Hawaiian-style floral print shirts. Even Producer and Cinematographer. (Not me, though.) Most of them had fabulously expensive sunglasses perched on their stylish hair. Everybody smiled a lot.

Cinematographer wanted to see the housings they were machining for the new polarized filters, so the engineers got to talk for a while. Since we have to run the 3-D rig upsidown for most of the shoot the engineers raised a number of troubling issues, which were then discussed to the point of nausea. Then Producer wanted to know how we would be able to view rushes at the end of each day of shooting, so a circular conversation about high-def formats, time-code locking and interlacing commenced.

Throughout this I hovered on the fringe.

I was trying to decide who to establish a rapport with, whose knowledge would benefit me best. I chose the chief of their tribe, a white-bearded fellow in a Hawaiian shirt who looked a bit like Santa Claus. I listened to him talk for a while so I'd know how to impress him, and then when a quiet moment came I asked him a couple of questions that I hoped showed insight.

It worked. Santa Stereographer suddenly wanted to tell me everything. He took my arm and led me around the warehouse, talking voluminously about stereography, animation and 3-D post production. "You really know your animation," I commented.

"Well, I spent a couple of months at Pacific Digital teaching their animation department the ropes so they could make Shrek 3D," he explained without pretention. "Tomorrow we'll sit down and I'll show you the virtual camera rig I designed for them."

I mentioned that I had concerns about painting out shadows and reflections on the car surface, and Santa Stereographer told me about he often shoots with a large, irregular piece of black foam-core taped to his back, so that when his shadow or reflection does turn up at least it doesn't look exactly like "some idiot and a Panaflex." He also told me about the full body black-out "ninja" costume he'd worn when he was standing on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the smoke-room, actually in the shot, running the lighting-rigs along the tracks to make the flashing alien spaceships.

In an hour he explained things more fully and more clearly that any of the pompous jerks I've been consulting through the Internet have in two weeks. When it was time to leave I had a stack of notes bulging out of my briefcase and my head was spinning with formulae, tips, tricks and warnings.

Then the Director of Photography -- a large, friendly, oily man from Chicago who wore a Hawaiian shirt -- took us out to lunch in his giant silver Cadilliac SUV. We had burritos.

The Oily DoP next took us to Universal Studios Hollywood. We had only the briefest glimpse of a hideous crowd of fat people and their mewling children before being ushered into a series of employee-only alleyways behind the main strips, populated by security guards and janitors. The DoP led the way to the Terminator 3D theatre, where we cut in front of the forty-minute line of milling tourists and went directly inside. We did the same thing at the Shrek 4D theatre (which plays Shrek 3D along with "immersive" effects like shaking chairs, sprays of water, and so on).

It was a hoot -- not just because the movies were fun, but also because I really enjoyed the bewildered, envious grimaces on the faces of the sweating plebes we cut ahead of. (I am cru-el, so cru-el!) But we had every right. Whenever a security guard approached us the DoP identified himself and crisply said, "Look buddy, I made this movie. Don't make me call your supervisor."

I admit it freely: I felt cool to be a member of his party.

"I want ice cream," declared Cinematographer out of the blue.

Producer groaned and pulled out his wallet.

On the way back I asked the DoP about some of the close range photography in Ghosts of the Abyss, and asked why it looked so much crappier than the 3-D shows we'd seen that afternoon. "Simple," he replied; "Jim Cameron is a cocksucker control-freak who won't let people do their jobs. I wanted to use the beam-splitter instead of toeing-in the cameras -- Jim didn't. He won. The net result: crappy fucking 3-D."

"Ah."

The freeway traffic was without form. Cars drifted along and across the four lane traffic in amorphous strands, dreamily but swiftly. Every so often a line of cars would compress and honk as someone paid too much attention to their telephone conversation at the wrong moment.

(Almost everything we passed was guilded by barbed wire or spikes -- the spaces under bridges, the walls around buildings, the alleys behind stores. In LA they are ever ready for an invasion of angry Visigoths...or racial rioters, I guess.)

We went back to the Ace Stereographers' workshop and had another meeting to address questions raised by what we'd seen at Universal. Then Producer, Cinematographer and I drove to a nearby Holiday Inn and checked in. We had a quick dinner of beers and pasta across the street, and made our plans to meet up in the morning. In the hotel elevator Cinematographer confessed to me for some reason that he really had to take a shit. "Good luck with that," I said as he stepped off on his floor.

Now I'm sitting in my room, watching Futurama in my underwear, eating a granola bar and typing. I have no Internet access. Outside my window, an endless field of sparkling cityscape, dwindling into the thick, wavering air before the scrubby hills. The sun is gone, and I'm dog tired.


Day Two

The telephone rang at five thirty in the morning. It was my wife. She was upset after having an argument with her father. She was also confused about how exactly the time-zones work. "I'm sorry!" she said.

"Humphf-abluff," I said.

I met up with Producer and Cinematographer at breakfast, and then we drove to Beverly Hills, to the private 3-D digital theatre of a Canadian ex-patriot animator and stereographer. We watched an early cut of NFL Films' 3-D recording of last year's Superbowl, and some material from PDI's 3-D version of Antz. Afterward he offered us Coca-Colas and told us all about James Cameron's new picture, a feature-length 3-D science-fiction epic entitled Battle Angel which takes place in the 26th century, based on some Japanese manga. The budget: two hundred million dollars.

"It's people like Jim who are going out there and creating the content. It's people like me who are negotiating the deals to set-up the 3-D projection facilities in all the major exhibitor chains. We'll be rolling out twenty-five hundred 3-D screens this year, and hopefully double that next year. We're still talking with AMC, but we're close to a deal."

His offices were grandiose, framed in marble and glass with ceilings two storeys high. "Jesus Christ there's a lot of money flying around this business!" whispered Cinematographer.

"The future of entertainment is 3-D," nodded Producer earnestly.

"Now we're working on system to display 3-D material on high-def televisions without needing glasses," continued our host. "Once we get that nailed everyone's going to come on board. Fox will be there first, with 3-D football. We're talking to Paramount about 3-D television programming, too."

We broke for lunch. Producer, Cinematographer and I went to Mel's Drive-In on Sunset Boulevard, which was featured in American Graffiti. Our waitress was a haggard old thing who looked at least sixty percent synthetic, but she was bubbly and friendly like a teenage girl. After we left Producer pointed out the froofrooey police station that Eddie Murphy was tossed out of in Beverly Hills Cop, the Fox building that had its windows blown out for Die Hard, and the hotel Julia Roberts stayed at in Pretty Woman. Producer also pointed out various locations where celebrities had lost or taken their own lives. "That's where Belushi bit it," he called glibly, pointing out the window to a castle-like hotel nestled into a pallid cliffside. "And that's the club that River Phoenix died in front of."

The streets were lined with Polynesian palm trees -- tall, reedy things that looked like they would fail in the first strong wind. Everywhere around us were movie posters fifty feet high, the massively overblown faces of stars smiling or frowning down on us from every angle -- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Catwoman, The Bourne Supremacy, Spider-Man 2...

We drove down Rodeo Drive and checked out the nineteen-year-olds with hundred thousand dollar sportscars and artificial bosoms. Plastic people walked the sunny streets, all of them talking on tiny telephones clipped to their ears like Uhura. The driver of every passing car was talking on the phone, too. I'm pretty sure I saw a poodle with a cellular, but I may just have had too much beer and sun.

And yes, I saw the tall white letters spelling HOLLYWOOD standing against the face of that famous hill in Griffith Park. Cinematographer took a picture of it through the grey smog. "It's not as big as I thought it would be," he said sadly.

We drove on, and wound our way back to the Ace Stereographers' workshop in Burbank. A tedious afternoon was spent going through the storyboard scene by scene shot by shot, angle by angle -- most of in cinematographic jargon that was way over my head. "Can I use the sticks to make this turn here?" asked Cinematographer.

"No, you should just fly it out on the giraffe."

"And we'll be on the hot-head the whole time, even with the jib?"

"Right -- we'll dolly the giraffe from the base, and then you can jib in at the end of the shot. How many grips do we have?"

"Six."

"Even so we'd need at least an hour to an hour and a half to take it off the giraffe otherwise. Forget the sticks."

"What about on the crane shot?"

"We'll talk about the crane shot later. We're still on shot twenty-six. So, the camera car is tucked in here while the grips cable it up for twenty-seven, we're on the giraffe, jibbing in at the curve as we settle beside the driver's window."

"Is the window up or down?"

"It's up."

"You're going to get ghosting on the reflections, because of the contrast there."

"Okay -- so the window has to be open, right?"

"CheeseburgerBrown, can you put in the reflections in post, so that it looks like the window is still up?"

"On a curving dolly shot? No, not without motion-control."

"We can do mo-co, no problem. How do you like your data?"

"Hot and spicy."

And on and on and on, for hours and hours and hours. A squat little oriental boy brought us a plate of cookies and bottles of water. The Digital Imaging Technician, or DIT, was in the Marines reserve so he answered everything put to him by saying, "Rogers that." Pretty soon everyone was saying "Roger that." When Santa Stereographer saw some of the visual effects shots we would be trying to pull off, he sighed heavily. "What a shit-storm!" he moaned, stroking his white beard and furrowing his brow.

"Roger that," we all said, and laughed not a little maniacally.

Marine Sergeant DIT shook his head as we laid out the challenges he would have to face on the shoot he started to chuckle. "Jesus H. Christ," he mumbled. "I think I want to go back to Iraq."

One hundred and fifteen shots later we decided to break for dinner. Santa Stereographer approached me as I gathered my notes. "Are you going to be there on all the shoot days?" he asked.

"None of the shoot days, actually. I have a Jell-o commercial to do as soon as I get back to Canada, and then I've got two more 3-D videos to design."

"Oh dear," he said, stroking his beard. "I'm still going to want to go over the shot data with you before we fly back here. How many production days do we have until the show?"

"Not enough," I said gloomily.

He clapped me on the back and grinned. "Roger that."

Producer, Cinematographer and I strolled down the busy throng of San Fernando in the twilight. I bummed a cigarette off an old lady. We found a little Greek place and ordered up a round of beers. Producer regaled us with a tale the Oily DoP had told him about working on the set of Titanic when a gaffer who'd been cussed out publicly by James Cameron sought revenge by spiking the crew's coffee with LSD. Half the crew spent the night in a Halifax hospital. "But Jim, who had done more than a little acid in his time, recognised what was going on and forced himself to puke before he started tripping."

"Did he tell you guys about 'making a Lucas'?" asked Cinematographer. We shook our heads, so Cinematographer relayed the story: when their sister company had been setting up all of Lucasfilm's digital cameras for Attack of the Clones auteur George Lucas had been so tense that his stomach was bothering him. Apparently, he had explosive and horrendously smelly diarrhea in their washroom. "They said it took days to get that funk out of the toilet," Cinematographer giggled. "So now whenever any of them have taken a smelly shit they warn each other off the washroom by saying, 'Watch it man, I just Lucassed in there.'"

Yes, we drank beers and ate lamb and talked about James Cameron's puke and George Lucas' ass. We watched synthetic people parade down the avenue. We had more beers. We talked about anything except stereography, because our brains were overloaded and sore.

Cinematographer told us that he'd watched the famous videotape of Paris Hilton being impaled on some chatty fellow's wang. In his opinion her sexual performance was lacklustre in the extreme, especially compared to the comparable antics of Pamela Anderson. Producer was quick to agree. I was just embarrassed.

At the next table a semi-bionic girl with brass hair and CG skin was loudly complaining about Michael Moore and his dirty propaganda. Her boyfriend was annoyed, because he wanted to go see Fahrenheit 911. "Why should I like give money to like something I don't even agree with?" reasoned the whiny girl.

When I turned my attention back to Producer and Cinematographer they were discussing the tits of the Ace Stereographer girl. They had decided that the tits could only be artificial on the grounds that "she really fuckin' knows her stuff."

"I don't follow you," I said, sipping my beer.

"No girl with natural tits that nice can be that smart, because they just don't have to be," explained Producer.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

He was. (I've seen his wife. Her tits are like fried eggs. Maybe he thinks she's a genius.) At any rate I let the point go. I don't train monkeys.

Exhaustion overcame us, and we trudged back to the hotel.

Now I'm sitting in my room in my underwear watching Family Guy and typing. My space bar isn't working right and it's bugging the hell out of me. I'm tired but not sleepy. I am anxious to be home. Just one more day of LA to face, and then I'm released. Ah, me.


Day Three

I had a dream.

I had discovered a secret grotto that was a perfect hideout. I was digging it deeper with my hands, the bedrock melting like butter at the gentlest probe of my fingertips. A little Asian girl stood at the top of the hole, and urged me to "finish the club-house faster" so I picked her up and we flew around underground for a while, along a tunnel-river and into the dark. Later, we caught a train that moved sideways.

I woke up to LA talk radio 640. They were making jokes around the French surrendering to things. I yawned and stretched and shat and showered and shaved and packed my stuff to travel-readiness. Through the window the strange twilight of the morning made the milky smog glow, hiding the nearby hills completely. I looked under the bed and left the room.

In the elevator on the way down to the lobby I chatted with two grey-haired men with suits. They were friendly and engaging, instead of silently avoiding my eye like in most elevators. People in LA work so hard at being charming.

I had breakfast with Cinematographer. He told me had had a dream as well, about trying to buy a haunted house. He had battled the lead ghost all night, and the experience had left him feeling unrested and ill. "I have heart-burn and my back hurts and I'm not hungry," he said forlornly. He ate six crumpets.

Producer showed up with a storyboard covered in notes and started asking us high-def format questions again. (During this conversation I was able to quietly establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they are both...simple men.) Producer ordered eggs benedict and when it didn't come quickly enough he started setting himself up at the buffet; he was interrupted by the arrival of his ordered meal and then he refused to pay for both. "I don't have time for this fucking West Coast sloth," he muttered. His phone rang, so he excused himself and Cinematographer and I went to wait for him in the lobby.

I pulled out my book. "What are you reading?" asked Cinematographer.

"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. What about you?"

"Catwoman movie tie-in," he shrugged.

Producer appeared a quarter hour later and we set out again to the workshop of the Ace Stereographers. In the parking lot we passed an SUV with a giant American flag on the back and a long bumper sticker that read SUPPORT THE TROOPS. "Gosh, I wonder if this is Marine Sergeant DIT's car," joked Producer.

"This is America, man," I said. "It could belong to anybody."

We stepped inside. This time the outer warehouse space at the Ace Stereographers' workshop was in use: a line of coloured pinlights had been set up on spaced stands. Producer wandered across the line as we approached the inner sanctum and angry voices barked out overlapping: "Clear, please! Clear!"

There was a problem.

The rig was misaligned due to the unevenly distributed weight of the newly machined parts, and there was tension in the air. Santa Stereographer, Oily DoP, Marine Sergeant DIT, CheeseburgerTools, Lenticular Limey and GeekBoobs were all gathered around the switching box, watching the Sony HDTV monitors. Santa Stereographer was running one camera and Marine Sergeant DIT was running the other. They both frowned. "I'm converging at twelve feet, zero inches."

"Roger that."

"Damn it."

It was handed off to the engineers again and Santa Stereographer went to talk with Producer. I hung around with Cinematographer, not sure what to do with myself. Marine Sergeant DIT explained how he had adjusted Cinematographer's camera to match the B camera. "Oh, mean you matched the software menus? Yeah, GeekBoobs told me about that. No problem."

"I also fixed your hardware settings."

"You changed my hardware settings?" asked Cinematographer, his voice edged with panic.

"I fixed them," corrected Marine Sergeant DIT, biting into an apple.

"How can I restore my old settings, after the show?"

"You can't. You wouldn't want to anyway. I made it better."

"Can you at least tell me what you did?"

"It isn't a matter of any one or two parameters. I tweaked everything. Tweaking a camera like this is like tuning a Ferrari -- it's a hundred co-dependent factors that make it work just right." He clapped Cinematographer on the back. "Trust me -- getting this tweak-job is your perk for working this show with us."

Cinematographer looked kind of sick and pale. He wasn't happy about his camera being messed with. But there were other fish to fry, and Producer scooped him over to the rig itself to talk about tripod issues.

Santa Stereographer scooped me to talk more about post-production plan. "This is really great," he said, grinning. "It's so rare for the front end of the production and the back end of the production to be in touch!" I showed him my preliminary design for the virtual stereo rigs, and he corrected it for me.

Later on I ran into GeekBoobs, who was trying to piece together a cable-head that she'd accidentally broken. "I've been fighting with thing for half an hour," she grumbled. Then she smacked it into my palm. "Here, see what you can do with it. I'll trust in my fellow Canadian to figure it out."

Oh crap, here's my chance to look stupid, I figured. But then I somehow managed to click the pieces back together. "Holy shit!" she said.

So then maybe she thought I was smart so she tried to talk to me about advances in real-time colour-space processing in the newest line of digital motion picture cameras, and how they will virtually eliminate the need to hire legions of rotoscopers to clean up bad greenscreen mattes such Lucas was being forced to do for his latest Star Wars episode. "Chewbacca has been a real problem," she said. Almost everything she said was over my head.

"This is all over my head," I said.

"Me too," said Cinematographer, who had appeared beside me.

Because the hot-head wasn't ready for Cinematographer to inspect he would be obliged to stay another day. But Producer and I had a flight to catch. He shook everybody's hands and said we'd see them all in Toronto on Saturday. We headed to LAX and returned the rental car as jetliners screamed in for landings over our heads, one after the next in tight clockstep.

Producer and I talked shop while we waited in long, folded queues to be digested by metal detectors and X-rays. Little signs were mounted every few feet bearing the logo of the Department of Homeland Security with informative slogans like, CONDITION YELLOW: MAINTAIN EXTRA VIGILANCE AT ALL TIMES, and THREATENING SECURITY PERSONNEL IS AN ARRESTABLE OFFENCE and WAR IS PEACE and RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. Most people had to take off their shoes, but I wore sandals.

We boarded swiftly, and took off without delay. I lost Producer in the gate, and didn't see him again.

A twelve-year-old Jewish girl dressed like a streetwalker sat beside me on the plane and complained to her homely mother about anything she could. When their Kosher meals arrived she snapped her gum and said, "The only choice is chicken? I don't like chicken."

I zoned out, and fell asleep.

LittleStar met me at the airport with kisses. As we drove home through the lush, wet dark of Ontario I told her the story I'm typing for you now. We picked up cheeseburgers, and I kept on talking. Eventually I wound down and passed out.

The air smells sweet here. The end.