TORONTO -- The National Film Board of Canada is exploring another dimension at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.
The NFB is touting four 3D animated shorts at the movie marathon, including an 11-minute film from Oscar winner Chris Landreth.
NFB producer Michael Fukushima says they're all intimate projects designed to pull in an audience, rather than push them back with eye-popping visuals.
Landreth's "Subconscious Password" imagines what goes on inside the mind when it goes searching for information.
Then there's Bruce Alcock's food-themed "Impromptu," Theodore Ushev's war critique "Gloria Victoria," and Claire Blanchet's hand-drawn tale "The End of Pinky," adapted from a short story by author Heather O'Neill.
The Toronto International Film Festival kicks off Sept. 5 with the WikiLeaks story, "The Fifth Estate."
"It's quite remarkable to have this many of our stereoscopic 3D films in a single festival," says Fukushima, who produced "The End of Pinky" and "Impromptu."
"I think we were lucky this year. The timing was great because we had four (shorts) and they were all pretty strong. TIFF decide to take them all and the fact that there are four makes it much easier for the programmers to say, 'OK. We're going to compel audiences to pop the glasses on at a certain point for 15 or 20 minutes as opposed to asking an audience to pop the glasses on for five minutes in the course of a short program."
He says NFB filmmakers are experimenting with a very intimate form of 3D in a bid for "one-on-one interaction with their audience."
"They've decided that they're going to get that by drawing the audience in rather than overwhelming them with 'gosh, golly' stuff that pops out of the screen."
Landreth, who won an Oscar for his 2004 film "Ryan," says 3D was a good way to really immerse the audience in his imaginary big-screen brain.
"I use it kind of gradually," Landreth says of the technology.
"At the beginning of the film it's relatively flat, there really isn't that much 3D in it. And then as the film goes on, the 3D becomes more and more deep and more and more envelopes the audience. Hopefully in a good way."
