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Lenny Lipton Inventor, Author, Songwriter and Filmmaker
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Lenny
received the Society
for Information Display Silver Display of the Year
Award, on behalf of RealD, for his contributions to the digital stereoscopic
cinema. In July of 2007 he was the physicist of the month in Physics World magazine.
In 2011 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International 3D
Society and he was profiled in The Wall
Street Journal (illustration © WSJ). The year before was an invited
speaker at the Cinémathèque Française. After
founding StereoGraphics Corporation in 1980 he led the team that invented
the ZScreen electro-optical
modulator, at the heart of today's 3D theatrical projection. During his
tenure as Chief Technology Officer of RealD, which acquired StereoGraphics in
2005, Lenny helped perfect the projection system (based on the ZScreen) which
is installed in 20,000 cinemas worldwide. After more than a century of effort
3D has become, a standard filmmaking tool. Lenny
received an award from the Smithsonian Institution for StereoGraphic’s
invention of CrystalEyes, the
first electronic eyewear for computer graphics and video applications such as
molecular modeling, aerial mapping and medical imaging. CrystalEyes remained in production for two
decades and is the basis for current 3D TV viewing technology from Sony,
Panasonic, Samsung, and others. NASA selected it to remotely pilot the Mars Rovers and it
was used by Lockheed to design the upgrade for the Hubble Space Telescope. He
has independently produced 25 films that have aired on PBS, Italian
television and the BBC, and are now in the Pacific Film
Archive collection at the University of California. His
film Let a Thousand Parks
Bloom was selected for the Summer of Love exhibition at
the Tate Liverpool Museum (2005)
and the Whitney
Museum of American Art (2007). In the 1970s he
received a grant from the American
Film Institute to produce his film Revelation of the Foundation. He has acted as cultural
representative for the State Department on trips to Venezuela and Brazil and
has been a juror at film festivals around the world. |
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His
book, Independent Filmmaking, was
in print for 20 years and he is the author of Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema, which remains the
definitive book on the subject, wherein he enunciated the creative method of
stereoscopic cinematography used by theatrical filmmakers and also the
principal of binocular symmetries, the fundamental engineering theory for
stereoscopic system design. |
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He
has written articles for American Cinematographer, The Society of Motion
Picture and Television Engineers Journal, and
other industry-related publications, and was an editor at Popular
Photography. During the chaos and adventure of 1960's American
counterculture, Lenny was the film reviewer for the Berkeley
Barb underground newspaper, hung out with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, and was
a contributor to Paul Krassner's
satirical magazine The Realist. Lenny
Lipton was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Cornell, where he
majored in physics. He has lived in California since 1965, and makes his home
in Los Angeles's Laurel Canyon with his wife, three children, two dogs, cat,
fish, and ill-tempered bird. Copyright
© Lenny Lipton. All rights reserved.¹ ¹Nonexclusive Permission to
reprint the above photograph of Lenny, or any text appearing on this page, is
hereby granted for the sole purpose of reporting on Lenny Lipton or his work. |
