Fire Ants 3D: The Invincible Army

The Invincible Army portrays the unique behaviour that is of great interest to scientists. For more than 80 years, Solenopsis Invicta has been on a ceaseless march across the United States, racking up six billion dollars every year in crop damage, equipment repair, and pest control. Scientists are now cracking the ants ancient secrets to success and breeding winged assassins to hunt them down. American Filmmaker Michael Watchulonis produced this film in stereoscopic (real) 3D and explores the secret world of the fire ant and the cutting-edge research into stopping it. The film posed many challenges to the team 'It took several weeks for our Director of Photography to experiment with different lenses, set ups, inter axial distances and focus. Using the lenses that we were using, if we were more than two millimeters off, the shot was unusable. Of course, fire ants don't really do what you tell them to do; they are always moving so to get those shots without all that testing would have been impossible. These fire ants are only 3 mm long but on a TV, we re making them a foot long. You can see the hairs on their antennas; that stuff is absolutely stunning. (Cornerstone Media)