Third Dimensional Murder | |
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Directed by | George Sidney |
Written by | Jerry Hoffman |
Produced by | Pete Smith |
Starring | Pete Smith, Ed Payson |
Narrated by | Pete Smith |
Cinematography | Walter Lundin (Director of Photography) B.C. Parker (camera operator) |
Edited by | Phillip W. Anderson |
Music by | David Snell (uncredited) |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
Release date |
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Running time | 8 minutes |
Country | Template:Film US |
Language | English |
Third Dimensional Murder (1941) is a 3D short comedy film produced and narrated by Pete Smith and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This is the last of the Audioscopiks 3D short film series, after Audioscopiks (1936) and The New Audioscopiks (1938).
Our narrator, Pete Smith, gets a phone call asking for help at an old castle. Smith arrives and is attacked by a witch, a skeleton, an Indian warrior, an archer and Frankenstein. The latter character was specifically modeled after Boris Karloff in Son of Frankenstein.
The third and last in the Pete Smith Audioscopiks 3D series of shorts, Third Dimensional Murder this film used footage shot specifically for it, unlike the previous two shorts which utilized test footage shot by Jacob Leventhal and Jack Norling.[1]
With he success of the first two shorts, Smith consulted J.M. Nikolaus in the camera department at MGM. Nikolaus went to studio manager E. J. Mannix who gave Nikolaus a budget of "about $3,000" to create a stereoscopic camera rig. After some trial and error, Nickolaus created a camera using two Bell & Howell 35mm cameras with specially matched lenses made by Bauch and Lomb. The lenses were 2¾ inches apart and were shot into prisms. George Sidney directed the short.[1] (Sidney later directed the 3-D feature for MGM, Kiss Me Kate.)
As with the two previous Audioscopiks short films, the prints were in red-green anaglyph by Technicolor. None of the three was actually in color, simply produced by Technicolor to achieve the red-green anaglyph prints necessary for 3-D projection.