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3-D Movies Turn 50 ... Sort Of
jonerik writes "The Associated Press has this article on the 50th anniversary of the release of 'Bwana Devil.' Released on November 26th, 1952, the film would be largely forgotten today if not for the fact that it's generally regarded as the first full-length 3-D movie, kicking off a burst of 3-D filmmaking which lasted into the mid-'50s and which still takes place today, particularly in the adult film industry and on the IMAX circuit where this year's 43-minute 'Space Station 3-D' has brought in about $33 million so far. 'Bwana Devil' utilized the Polaroid method, which used two lenses filming, and involved lightwaves passing in perpendicular planes to the other lens. However, considering that a long string of 3-D films were made as far back as 1922 using more primitive processes, the claim that 'Bwana Devil' was first can be regarded as open to question. Either way, Robert Stack, who starred in 'Bwana Devil,' is somewhat ambivalent about his small part in movie history, saying 'I'm not sure it was anything to be proud of. It's an honor like being the world's tallest midget.'"
The really good 3D movies turn 360.
Devil' utilized the Polaroid method, which used two lenses filming, and involved lightwaves passing in perpendicular planes to the other lens.
This is incorrect...light is polarized...has nothing to do with Polaroid(TM).
Mike
"Robert Stack, who starred in 'Bwana Devil,' is somewhat ambivalent about his small part in movie history, saying 'I'm not sure it was anything to be proud of."
As opposed to his stellar performance in 'Airplane' (which WAS something to be proud of).
Dial M for Murder, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954, is the best one I've seen. It was at a film festival, and they had the cardboard glasses. All 3-D movies at IMDB are here (215 matches).
A masterful piece of work full of history and technical details.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Nat Deverich's "Power of Love" predates by thirty years. It premiered on September 27, 1922. Using an anaglyphic process developed by Harry Fairall, it starred Terry O'Neil and Barbara Bedford.
I wonder if this is how Robert Stack feels about his portrayal of Ultra Magnus in the Transformers movie.
Why. Oh god. Why? Nothing much else to do in my bathroom but take this stupid test
.Sex - Find It
Lord at 12 or 13 in 1983 I had to go see this 3d flick. Space, 3d, and Molly Ringwald
The other cast.
Peter Strauss
Ernie Hudson
Michael Ironside
This movie was such total crap even at 13 I was disgusted. I mean I had Buckaroo Banzai and Flash Gordon under my belt.
Anyone else remember this one?
Wait. I think Milly showed her titties.
Putp
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I've got this, uh, friend, you know.
He doesn't own a computer, so he thought I should ask Slashdot what, uh, adult movies are 3D, and where he could, uhm, get them, or something.
A couple of years ago I was attending an Apple Computer conference and managed to spend an evening at the Palo Alto Theatre, which was having a 3D festival. I saw "Miss Sadie Thompson" and "Kiss Me, Kate." They were newly struck prints, the projection was good, I had a very good seat--I am sure what I experienced was as good as it would have been when the films were released.
And it seemed gimmicky, like looking into a Viewmaster.
Oh, it had its moments. In "Kiss Me, Kate" you had such a sense of the living presence of the performers that the audience applauded after each musical number. (The 3D process was VERY unflattering to actresses; in 2D, makeup can smooth the contours of the face but in 3D you see the actual contours, makeup or not). It was nice--but it was a gimmick.
In IMAX 3D, the screen looks perfeclty sharp, but it is SO BIG that the edges of the screen are almost out of your field of view. This is very important because ugly things happen at the screen edges in stereoscopic viewing, particularly if the objects you are viewing are "in front of" the screen.
I've now seen four movies in IMAX 3D--"Across the Sea of Time," "Space Station 3D," "Cirque Du Soleil: The Journey of Man," and "Into the Deep." They're fabulous. They give you more of a "you-are-there" feeling than anything else I've ever seen in a movie theatre (and I saw "This Is Cinerama" on its first run). The 3D feels natural. Objects closer than the screen seem comfortable.
Actually, the part of "Space Station 3D" I liked the very best were the scenes filmed on the earth at the Russian Cosmodrome. I was RIGHT there on the gritty pavement, on that walk where they planted a tree for every cosmonaut who had flown in space.
No eyestrain, no motion sickness, just this incredible sense of "really being there."
At least two of the films, "Across the Sea of Time" and "Cirque du Soleil" went beyond a simple travelogue. They weren't exactly narratives, but they were a genuine creative use of the medium.
I hope we see a lot more IMAX 3D. (I hope it isn't going to get killed off by cheap IMAX blowups of 2D 35mm films...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
3D House of Pancakes
Oooh, that's scary.
In Disneyland in Tokyo, they have 3-D "Alladin", and in Florida, they have the movie "Captain EO" staring Michael Jackson.
In the games world, 3-D hasn't caught on that much yet, but back in the 80s, SQUARE actually experiented with 3-D for the NES/Famicom, using red-blue glasses. There were at least 2 titles I remember, 3-D Worldrunner and Rad Racer which used this (albeit primitive) 3-D technology.
There seems to be some use of 3-D in the scientific world. SGI and several other companies have LCD glasses which are synchrnoized to a monitor/projector, displaying alternating left-right eye images. I've been in SGI's RealityCenters which are basically rooms surrounded by wall-sized screens on all sides, and are used for visualizing extremely large data sets, such as large molecules in the pharmaceutical industry or geologic data in the petroleum industry. With 3-D glasses used, the experience in one of those places can literally cause some people to vomit (and I've seen it happen)!
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
A few years ago at the local indy theatre in my home town of Albany NY (the spectrum) they ran a 3d film series. One night they had a 3d porn. Yeah I went, and let me tell you /., the line for this flick ran out the door and around the block! Men, women, freeks and geeks, everyone loves the 3d porn. It was like opening night for episode I.
Maybe some albanian can back me up on this.
Surrender YR pattent!
Its protected by the MPAA so don't copy it!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Simply put: There must be. I mean, what would be better than having those breasts and, uhm, other body parts in glorious 3D? It's not a question of does it exist. It's a question of where is it, and how would we play it?
3D still photography is actually pretty easy. Nikon even made a stereo adapter for their SLR cameras back in the '80s. For the Apollo missions, they taught the astronauts how to do 3D moonscape shots. It turned out to be pretty easy:
"Shift your weight to the left leg, take a picture. Shift to the right leg, take another picture. Back on earth, the two images are put into a 3D viewer, and VOILA!. (why waste weight on stereo photo equipment when you don't have to?)
Many years ago, I owned a 3D camera.. Got lots of wonderful pictures (sorry -- no porn shots). My camera disappeared more than a decade ago, but I still sometimes do the apollo trick for things that I think would look good in 3D (and that don't move very fast). I then use a cross-eyed trick that I learned to view the results.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Three years ago, I wanted to do something special for my birthday party, so I tried to find a genuine anaglyphic 3D movie to show during the party.
To my surprise, it's easy to find one, at least here in Germany (so I guess it will be just as easy in the US). Most movie distributors offer a 16 mm rental service mostly used by University film clubs and by tiny home-run community cinemas. They also have the classics and you can rent these movies very cheap for non-commercial showings.
In the end, renting a copy of "Creature from the Black Lagoon" over the weekend, a couple of red/green glasses, a 16 mm projector and a small silverscreen was cheaper than renting a video projector and a DVD player. (Ok, that was three years ago and video projectors are much cheaper now. But still.)
They also had "It came from Outer Space" on rental. And the folks at the movie distributor were extremely helpful and really nice folks to deal with.
If you want a special movie evening, I can only recommend you to ask the 16 mm rental service of the large movie distributors to help you out with a classic, be it 3D or not.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
of this guy. or this guy and these dudes.
I wonder could you fit IMAX 3D cameras on the next Mars lander? :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
THIS WEEK'S REVIEW: "."
This all too brief foray into pared down cinematics was, to say the least, tedious. Dull, lifeless, 1-dimensional performances punctuated a scant script which drastically needed to be fleshed out. The art of story-telling plays a distant second to this vulgar onanistic show of avant-garde.
RATING: */*****
OK, 3D porn production stills. Site requires red and green glasses. Are you happy now?
A quick inspection shows it misses (at a minimum) Andy Warhol's Frankenstien and Andy Warhol's Dracula, two polorized 3D flicks from the 70's. Surprising since it does include "The Stewardesses".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Does Mrs NickName know about this?
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I recently (like 2 months ago) saw a 3D IMAX movie about Dinosaurs ... I forget the exact title, but it involved a young girl going back in time (or so she thought).
While it was extremely boring, I have to admit: the 3D effects where absolutely phenominal. I have seen a scattering of 3D movies (starting with that lovely SciFi thriller: Parasite) and I honestly didn't know the technology had progressed so far.
I was impressed.
I was also nauseous. I had to take my glasses off once every 10 minutes or so to let my stomach settle down. But I am perfectly willing to entertain the idea that it was my age causing the sickness, not the technology.
...go through a period where they are overused (or just used to impress audiences). Then filmmakers begin to discover ways to use the new technology cinematically to better tell a story. That's when the new technology really takes off.
Hitchcock considered 3D to be a gimmick, but was forced by the studio to use it in Dial M for Murder. In spite of this, this was the movie which moved 3D into the cinematic. Hitchcock tried to improve the storytelling with 3D in three scenes:
The first two worked; the third didn't. Hitchcocks seems to have realized that we not only figure out where other things are (in a 3D environment) using our stereoscopic vision, but also where we are. He also seems to have understood that we are not afraid for ourselves in the movies, but for characters we care about but are helpless to help. (Other 3D filmmakers have never seemed to learn this and are constantly firing flaming arrows - or something - out of the screen at us.) He shot the phone call so it feels like we are standing close enough to interfere. And he shot the desk scene so it looks like she's reaching out to us for help. Just as we see the scissors, her hand finds them. It almost feels like we have put them in her hand.
The phone call works in both 3D and 2D. The desk scene looks strange in 2D, but works in 3D. The courtroom scene doesn't work either way.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Adult IMAX
In 3D?
"Wow, this 3D theatre is amazing! It's like I'm really getting splattered with jizz!"
"Hey, wait a minute..."
-GrantMy stupid web site
...for the lions and tigers they had jumping out of the screen at the audience. They shot it with circus animals which were trained to jump over a pole strung between the two cameras, which were spaced between four to six feet apart during filming.
Unfortunately, depth of field is not the only information our brains derive from stereoscopic visual data. In fact, the depth of field information is not just relative (this is closer than that, etc), it is also absolute. In other words, we can tell how far away things are. Absolute depth plus visual size gives us absolute size. In other words, if the lion looks like he's four feet away and he fills up half our vision, we know he's a big cat. Good 3D camerawork requires that the two lenses be separated by approximately the same distance as the average human eyeballs are separated.
Consequently, when Bwana Devil set up their cameras so widely spaced (so the cats could jump between them), they messed with everybody's size perceptions. The lions looked like kittens made up to look like lions. Tigers looked like painted cats. To audiences Robert Stack didn't look like Robert Stack. He looked like a Robert-Stack doll. Instead of having audiences leaving the theater saying, "Wasn't it incredible the way the lions jumped out of the screen?" they had: "Wasn't it amazing the way they made the cats look like miniature lions?" Think of it as if the audience was turned into giants whose heads were so big their eyes were five feet apart.
To my knowledge no one made use of this effect for cinematic purposes before the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience 3D show at Disney World.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
In the late '70s I was assistant manager at the Tiffany Theatre on Sunset Strip, and we showed "Dial M for Murder" with the original two-projector setup for 3D, which hadn't been done since the 1950s and to my knowledge hasn't been done in a regular theater since.
Most Polaroid system 3D movies use a single film with both images in each frame, either one on top of the other or side by side. These images are distorted in order to squeeze them both onto one frame of film. The images are projected through a beam splitter and then sent through an anamorphic lens to get the correct aspect ratio and remove distortion. When viewed through the Polaroid glasses, which are dark like sunglasses, these films tend to appear very dim because the amount of light reaching each eye is less than half of the light from a normally-projected film. There is also a great loss of image detail because each frame is only one-half the size of a normal film frame, and sent through extra optics to boot. Coupled with the fact that theatres tend to project movies much dimmer than they should in a misguided attempt to stretch bulb life, modern 3D projection is pretty damned unsatisfactory.
The two-projector system, which is the way these movies were intended to be viewed, is frankly a bitch to set up, but wow, what a difference. There are two different prints of the film, one for each eye, and each shot from that eye's viewpoint. The films must be threaded into the two projectors, making sure that they both start on exactly the same frame. (This little requirement is the reason for all the "3D causes eyestrain and headaches" bad press 3D got in the 'fifties, by the way. Untrained and/or uncaring projectionists could ruin a 3D movie.) In order to ensure that the projectors remain in sync with each other, a steel rod actually connected the takeup reels with each other across the projection booth. Since each image receives the entire illumination from the projector lamp, after putting on the glasses the 3D film looks just as bright as any other film. There is no loss of image quality because each image is a full frame.
We also showed a 3D Hong-Kong martial-arts period piece called "Dynasty."
On a side note, the article linked to claims that the Soviets never had an operational glasses-less projection system. This is incorrect. A friend of mine saw a 3D movie without glasses in a theater in Moscow in the mid-eighties. It was a lenticular screen, and the theater itself was much narrower than usual to ensure the correct viewing angle.
Now, don't get me started on how morons in suits have ruined every attempt to do 3D on television.
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
Interestingly, working in a molecular moddeling lab is where I learned to do walleyed (and got crosseyed down to a science). I have a stereo image that I created of pepsinogen (a pre-activated version of pepsin) that I created back then. (no -- I don't remember which colors correspond to which atoms).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
That's Incredible showed some footage - and incredibly it had "depth" - it showed footage of people throwing a frisbee (to a dog?), and some other things - the TV seemed to gain "depth" (in other words, things didn't "pop-out", but rather it looked like there was depth into the TV). Even more amazing, you could close one eye - and you could STILL see the effect. You could even videotape it, and replay the tape - and view it - I had a tape of the show at one time, but eventually it was lost (I think my dad taped over it).
Anyhow, since then, I have not seen anything on how it was done, nor can I remember who did it, etc - I do remember that the video seemed to be shaking up and down - so I don't know if there was some funkiness going on with interleaving frames (fields) in the NTSC signal to achieve the effect or what...
Has anyone here seen this, or know what I am talking about? It was a very interesting system...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon