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Hollywood Going Digital and 3D
teutonic_leech writes "Last weekend the Directors Guild of America hosted its annual Digital Day event, which gives filmmakers a look at revolutionary new movie-making gear. Judging from a Wired article reporting on the gathering, Hollywood's future not only seems to be digital - there are also indications that stereoscopic 3D has caught the attention of filmmakers in and outside tinseltown. One Indie filmmaker even went so far as to build his own homebrew stereolens attachment enabling him to film in 3D."
I hope so too. I hope so too.
TOO LATE!
Video Games have gone digital and 3D like 15 years ago.
Movie and TV are doomed to death!
End of story... Nothing to see.. Move along...
... 3D stereoscopic, dolby Digital 14.2, environmental simulation, smell replicators, ... ... only one thing missing: good movies ...
But isn't equipment needed to view these 3D images? People aren't going to be using them much if they need to wear special glasses to see the movies.
Once, when I was little, I saw a stereoscopic spy photograph at the Smithsonian. They had a viewing port through which two images would be superimposed on each other giving the resulting image a 3 dimensional quality.
I don't know how well they can bring that sort of 3 dimensionality to a film without requiring strange and uncomfortable glasses (remember Jaws 3D?). The closest I've seen is in plays where the actors and props are all in three dimensions (naturally).
But the improvement in 3 dimensional rendering in digital filmmaking has been absolutely outstanding in recent years. Just compare old movies like Tron and Dungeons and Dragons with their blocky and obviously computer-rendered scenes to today's Toy Story 2, Incredibles, even Star Wars. The difference is night and day.
I hope that digital film making becomes more than just special effects, though. The medium allows for such a broad range of uses that it is virtually limitless. Take the anime film Grave of the Fireflies as an example of pushing a medium to its limits. Who could have thought a cartoon could have such an emotional impact? Now figure that whatever was done there is only scratching the surface in what can be done with digital films and a whole universe of possibilities opens up.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
But somewhere along the line a stigma was attached to it which keeps anything other then sci-fi/horror filmmakers away from the format.
Hitchcock saw 3D as an exciting new direction to take the art of films, and originally shot and released one of his pictures in 3D format. Aparently, this wasn't enough to get it to catch on in serious film making circles.
Ultimatly the push towards 3D may simply be found in the new technology. Directors who never considered 3D--because of the 'out of sight, out of mind' nature of the "novelty" of 3D--might see the new and exciting equipment and processes for 3D production and give it a shot.
3D stands as one of the last methods in film making which has yet to be explored artistically (Alfred Hitchcock's single effort aside). I for one would be delighted if serious film makers picked up the process and did something more then "we can use this to make the audience feel like a shark is floating right in front of them, read to attack" or "watch as the blood splatter appears to fly out into the audience". In other words, I'd like to see a director try to do more with 3D then just gee-wiz novelty special effects and try to make a serious, artistic film which uses 3D to compliment the overall value of the work.
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Crap with depth.
I found 1d radio broadcasts like Alan Shepard in the 60s more interesting than most of the ooze oozing out of my TV set today.
Just came back from the Futuroscope in France where they have plenty of this 3D shit. Some is with LCD glasses (heavy and annoying), but some also with simple polaroid filter glasses. This is great for 10 minutes demo movies, but I think that after 1 hour, a lot of people will leave the theatre with a serious headache. Not only are the polaroid glasses not perfect, but you are still tricking the eye: the eye is focussing on a fixed distance (screen), but seeing objects all over the depth field. This could be good for some wild action movies, but don't hold your breath for mainstream 3D movies.
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...because the 2D editions aren't as he imagined them, not to do with making more money or anything. It's like a generation of Sci-Fi fans cried out "Nooooooooooo!" and were silenced.
Greebo is rumoured to be 3D'ed first. Before Han...
(some of the above may not be true)
I've seen 3D IMAX films three times so far, and the glasses are, indeed, large. Which is good, because it meant they fitted over my glasses. But they aren't heavy, or unwieldy.
Modern 3D uses polarised light, with the left eye filtering out horizontalally polarised light, and the right eye filtering out the vertical. This means that a very light pair of plastic glasses can allow for proper 3D without changing the colours at all.
It looks _fantastic_.
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We'll have some actors that aren't shallow :)
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I can't help to think that 3D hasn't taken off yet because, to date, there hasn't been a really good movie to take advantage of the process, which could explain that while 3D has existed in various forms for the last 60 years, it's rare to see a wide released feature film.
I can remember, as an example, computer animation. When it first hit the scene, it was more of a novelty, and I can remember thinking to myself "computer animation will never be successful, it's doomed to stay a novelty for all time, even if it does get better".
Then Toy Story came out, and my opinion instantly changed. It wasn't because I thought the graphics were especially good, it was because as a whole I really, really enjoyed the movie. They did some things in it that you couldn't do in convential ink and pen animation, and ommitted several traditional animation techniques commonly found in previous hand drawn films.
When I first saw Toy Story, it was on video shown at the free 'mini' theatre on my college campus. I avoided it at the box office because I thought "why spend money on something that's going to be a fad?", and only went to the free showing because going to the free movies was a great way to kill time while procrastinating on that paper you're supposed to be writing.
I really was taken aback. "This is a pretty good movie" I thought, and realized I was compleatly wrong about computer animation. Since the release of Toy Story, computer animation has become the rule instead of the exception, with (it seems to be, at least) more computer animation movies being released now then the tridtional hand drawn animated features.
If 3D could score a toy story, it could really take off. But since the bulk of all 3D movies are usually really bad, and nobody has yet to release a "masterpeice" in the format, I think most people's impressions of 3D are akin to my initial take on computer animation; that is, it's kind of neat, but not something I'd go out of my way for.
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The core challenge for 3-D is creating a system that works when a person tilts their head. Current 3-D filming and multi-person viewing systems assume that the viewers left eye is a fixed horizontal distance to the left of the right eye with no vertical displacement between the eyes' pupils. This assumption is only true when everyone is sitting upright in their chairs. If the viewer tilts their head, then the parallax of the scene appears unnaturally displaced and gives the viewer eyestrain, headache, or a sensation of double-images. With 3-D, you can't rest your head on your partner's shoulder, tilt your head to see around the person in front of your, or lie on the couch and watch it without some visual discomfort. I'd imagine that most people won't consciously notice the problem but might subconsciously become aware that they get eyestrain, neck-pains, headaches, or a vaguely nauseous disoriented feeling when they see a 3D movie -- not a recipe for repeat business.
One nearterm solution to the problem is constructing tilt-dependent parallax for each viewer. The person with their head tilted to the right needs to see a different pair of images than the person who is sitting up straight or who has tilted their head to the left. This pushes 3D into the realm of more awkward and more expensive personal viewing headsets and the need for tracking head tilt and recomputing/rerendering the scene parallax in realtime.
The longterm solution is holographic or volumetric systems that create/reconstruct an optical 3-D field. This solves the head tilt problem, although adds the minor cinematic problem that the people on the left side of the theatre may have an obstructed view (relative to the people in the center or right-side) if, for example, the main character's hand covers some important object from some angles.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Ok, so they have some new "tech" available, will we see some impressive movies yet? I hope so. The movies coming out these days, are just rediculous. Dont get me wrong, there are some decent movies out there now, but none of them strike me like a movie did 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Over the last few years, have we been so overstimulated that nothing impresses us? Possibly, but I dont think so. Lets get some unique things out there! Hollywood always bitches and moans about low box office earnings, well come out with something new!! Kind of interesting, an article at a gaming site I am an editor for wrote an article about this a few days ago, hollywood needs to friggin show some unique ideas, new tech alone wont do it, it will help, but we need some new ideas and some innovation.
The big problem with traditional stereoscopic 3D isn't the need for glasses. It's problems with geometrical distortion. Sitting in a theatre, everyone sees slightly different images with their left and right eyes. But a person sitting front left sees a VERY different PAIR of images than a person sitting in the back right.
With the traditional two-image processes--versions of Wheatstone's nineteenth century stereoscope--everyone in the house sees the SAME thing through their left eye and the SAME thing through their right eye.
This has serious intrinsic limitations.
The audience view appears geometrically distorted, except for a few lucky members sitting in a fairly small central "sweet spot."
3D tends to make every movie look like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."
Suppose Ann Miller is twenty feet from the camera, and she chucks a handkerchief at the camera, and it lands ten feet away. In the theatre, EVERYONE sees the handkerchief chucked straight at them, and landing halfway between them and the screen. People near the front see a flattened version of the original space. People near the back get exaggerated depth. People at the sides see rectangular geometry as rhomboidal.
Even in the sweet spot, there is only one camera focal length that reproduces depth accurately. If the cinematographer chooses to use a long lens for a closeup, rather than physically moving the camera closer, the picture will look wrong.
These geometrical distortions actually apply to ordinary 2D films as well, but you do not notice them because the image is already so spatially distorted by being flat that you are not processing it as an accurate representation of reality.
(Warning: ageist/sexist alert): Another issue is that 3D is unflattering to actresses, as it reveals the true spatial contour of their faces regardless of makeup. A forty-year-old actress can be made up to look twenty-five in regular films, but not in 3D.
They struggled with all these things in the 1950s, both with stereoscopic 3D and with the ultra-wide-angle processes like Cinerama.
All of these problems suggest to me that 3D will be fine for fantasy, science-fiction, and generally surrealistic subject matter, but I don't see how it can ever be used for traditional mainstream cinematic drama.
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