In case you haven't noticed, 3D movies are making a comeback. Again.
Since the start of the year, at least 14 new 3D movies have been slated for release from all the major Hollywood studios. It seemed that every week during the summer a new stereoscopic feature hit the screens—mostly animated family fare, rock concerts, and horror movies—and more are on their way this holiday season.
James Cameron will release his first feature since Titanic, a science fiction epic called Avatar. Forest Gump director Robert Zemekis is at work on a 3D Christmas Carol. Early next year Tim Burton will present a multi-dimensional Alice in Wonderland. Steven Spielberg is at work on a 3D treatment of the Tintin stories. Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has announced that his next movie, a remake of the World War II aviation drama, Dam Busters, will be in 3D, and to up the ante, several Websites report he's pledged never to film a movie in two dimensions again.
This most recent 3D renaissance didn't happen overnight or coincidentally. It's been in the works for years, largely spearheaded by the Beverly Hills-based company RealD, which, in addition to developing a practical technical solution for displaying 3D movies, has also worked closely with film studios and cinema owners to create a business model that excites both parties enough to invest vast sums in it. When My Bloody Valentine 3D was released this January, in addition to being shown widely in a non-3D format, it was the first movie to be released in more than 1,000 theaters equipped with the digital projectors required for adding the extra dimension. Despite tepid critical response for the movie itself, in a press release RealD proudly announced that the 3D-enhanced version of the slasher movie "brought in 71 percent of the total box office&. Verifying the growing strategy of releasing films in 3D, opening week 3D screens outperformed 2D screens 6:1."
The CEO of RealD, Michael Lewis, said, "3D continues to be the bright spot in the industry and it's clear that audiences responded to the promise of this superior film-going experience in RealD 3D." Throughout the summer, the company has had similar success with each new 3D movie; it says that the number of screens using its technology has grown 100 percent world wide this year, and 400 percent in Europe.
There's little doubt that, technically and financially, the advances RealD offers are impressive. But do the enhanced optics actually enhance the narratives they're used to tell?
In an interview with Forbes, Lewis said, "We're past the 'Gee, is this a gimmick?' … The studios have committed billions to 3D production. We have a film slate of over 40 movies. We have the best filmmakers in the world making [3D] movies." In another press release, Joshua Greer, the president of RealD, made the unsubstantiated claim, "3D content is more engaging, memorable and productive."
In interviews, directors Peter Jackson and James Cameron have concurred with these lofty claims, appearing to embrace the questionable logic that somehow more money and more technology equals better art. As far as 3D movies go, that appears to have been the unproven operating philosophy for over a hundred years .
While technology is required to capture and display a 3D image, what creates the illusion of depth is organic.
When you look into someone else's eyes and gently press your forehead against theirs, the two eyes you're looking at become one. Your friend becomes a Cyclops, and you've just witnessed the basic principle behind how stereo imagery works. Every day, most of us who can see with both eyes see in stereo. This ability allows us to discern depth and helps us judge distances. Without it, we might find it difficult to thread a needle, shake someone's hand, or drive through traffic.
Stereo photographs are made up of two images of the same subject taken from two slightly different perspectives: the difference between the vantage points is equal to the space between your eyes. All you need to do to make your own stereo image is take two photos of the same, static subject. Hold the camera in front of one eye and click. Then move the camera in front of the other eye and take the second image.
While using a stereoscope or other optic tool helps the person viewing them merge the resulting images into a single, dimensional image, it's also possible to fool your eyes and create the effect without lenses. While holding the images close to your face, one in front of each eye, try focusing on some distant point beyond the photos. Gradually, like your friend turning into a Cyclops, a third, united image ought to appear between the two independent ones. Some people can "free-view" stereo image pairs easily, but for others it's hard or impossible. For the best results, try your favorite stereo optic device.
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I remember gasping out loud the first time I peeked into a View-Master viewer.
A friend had just returned from a cross-country journey with her parents, and she had several View-Master reels of the places she had visited. With the red plastic viewer pressed to my face, I was suddenly no longer in her suburban kitchen, but looking at the craggy Rocky Mountains. Tiny flowers grew on a boulder in the foreground, and beyond a plain of glacial ice, a distant valley twisted far below. This was no mere snapshot or dull slideshow. I felt like I was there. Even though the paper disc I'd inserted had only fourteen little frames of film on it, when it was inserted into the device, it seemed like I was holding a small, infinitely detailed model in my hand. From around the age of five, I was hooked on stereo imagery.
As an adult, my interest in stereo images grew when I bought an old, beat-up Victorian stereoscope at a garage sale, along with a small stack of antique stereoviews (or stereographs, as they're also called). Looking through the optic device made of wood and glass at the black and white photographs mounted on yellowing cardboard, I began to grasp that, once upon a time, the audience for 3D images was much larger, more sophisticated and more discriminating than it is now. Instead of being a technology used mostly for children's toys and genre entertainment, stereo photography was as critical to Victorians for news, entertainment and education as video is today.
Before movies, television, and print publications that included photographs, stereography was the first mass-marketed photographic medium.
The principles behind stereo imagery had been understood even before photography was invented, and as early as 1838, an apparatus was built in England by Sir William Brewster for viewing stereo images. Initially, it was only capable of viewing Daguerreotypes (photographs caught on light-sensitized sheets of metal that could not be duplicated) and wasn't widely manufactured. Still, the device excited considerable interest in Europe, and it was on display in the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition of 1851, where it caught the interest of Queen Victoria.
With the invention of print photography, and the ability to create multiple exact copies of the same image from a single negative, stereography became more widely enjoyed. In 1854 the London Stereoscopic Company was created and within two years half a million Brewster stereoscopes had been sold. As demand grew, stereoview shops began to appear in major European cities, but generally it was a luxury only the wealthy could afford. Most people experienced stereo imagery in museums and arcades.
It wasn't until 1859 that stereography became a medium available for home use to the general public. In Boston, Oliver Wendell Holmes designed a simple, wooden hand-held device he named the Holmes stereoscope. As William C. Darrah writes in The World of Stereographs, "The Holmes stereoscope not only met with immediate enthusiastic success but it shifted the center of stereo activity to America, where it remained unchallenged for eighty years. Holmes did not apply for a patent, and within a few months similar instruments were being made by many opticians throughout eastern United States."
The appetite for new stereo images was voracious. More stereoview emporiums and arcades opened, all boasting the widest selection of subject matter to buy or view. Armchair travel to distant lands or national landmarks was a favorite topic, and from early on, the cards were sold in sets as virtual tours, each card depicting a different vista or location with an explanation on the back. Newsworthy events were captured, such as political conventions, disasters and wars.
Darrah estimates that during the heyday of stereography, between 1860 and 1920, over 6 million individual stereoview images were published in America and millions more worldwide. "For an investment of only forty or fifty dollars," he writes, "an individual could obtain ten lessons, a camera, and the materials sufficient to make two dozen& negatives."
Over the years, tastes and talents emerged. The earliest stereoviews were rarely accompanied by written descriptions, but then, gradually, more established photographers began pasting printed descriptions of the backs of their images, usually including their name and location. Toward the end of the century, the names of the individual stereographers began to disappear from the cards and be replaced by the names of publishing companies, the two most prominent being the Keystone View Company and Underwood and Underwood Publishers. The print quality improved tremendously, as did the descriptive text on the backs. Collections of hundreds of cards were published in cases that looked like hardcover books, and the names of the places the stereoviews depicted were printed on the spines. More significantly, though, the stereo images themselves evolved and techniques for maximizing the effect of stereo depth were developed.
Stereoview publishers held on until the 1920s, but gradually radio and cinema drove 3D images into a niche market. In 1939 Sawyer's Photographic Services, a company that specialized in picture postcards, developed the View-Master. Originally it was intended for audiences of all ages as a more affordable, compact alternative to the stereoscope, but increasingly it was seen as a toy, and the 3D subject matter published for it reflected that. After a series of acquisitions, Fisher-Price now owns the product and earlier this year the company announced it would discontinue 70 years of publishing scenic views. It will focus exclusively on animated cartoon characters.
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Almost as soon as the first cinematic images flickered on the screen, there were technicians and entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to present stereoscopic movies to ticket buyers. Systems were patented as early as 1890 in which two films were projected side by side and each audience member had a stereoscope attached to their chair. No films were ever produced by this method, though, as the 3D only worked for those sitting in the center of the theater.
In order for all seats to be able to enjoy the stereo effect, a solution needed to be found where the left and right hand images could somehow both fill the same screen, yet each eye would only see the appropriate view. In 1922, the Teleview system was introduced; here the left- and right-hand images were projected alternately at high speed, and synchronized viewers attached to the seats had eye patches that fluttered, permitting each eye to see only the images it was supposed to. While only one movie was ever produced with the system, the idea of alternately displaying the two views was key to RealD's most recent advancements.
In the 1930s, the anaglyph system was introduced, and the red and blue glasses associated with it became iconic of 3D movies for the rest of the century. Instead of alternating between the left and right images, both were displayed together on the screen, overlapping. Projected at the same time, the right view was in red and the left in cyan; the colored glasses the audience wore filtered the images so each eye only saw what it was supposed to.
At best, the results were only satisfactory and the extra equipment and finesse required to show 3D movies barely justified the effort. In the 1950s and later in the 1980s, different Hollywood studios tried to capitalize on technical advancements to promote B-grade horror and science fiction films, but neither the stereo effect nor the movies that employed the technique impressed anyone.
RealD's solution combines elements of the Teleview and anaglyph systems. It requires a high-quality silver screen and a digital projector. The right and left frames are projected alternately at a very high rate (144 frames per second, as opposed the usual 24) through a synchronized filter that alternately polarizes the left and right frames. The tinted glasses the audience wears use the same polarization to assure each eye sees only what it's supposed to see.
After over a century of barely adequate solutions, RealD has presented one that provides nearly the equivalent resolution and stereoscopic depth of the old stereoviews.
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In addition to the technical challenges, RealD needed to break a longstanding standoff between the production companies and the cinemas. Before theaters were going to invest the approximately $75,000 to convert a screen to 3D, they wanted to be certain there were movies being made that people wanted to see. (They probably still had a bad taste in their mouths from '80s movies like Jaws 3D and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.) Before production companies were going to devote the resources to create quality 3D films, they wanted assurance there were enough screens available to get a return on the investment.
In addition to showing feature films, the digital projection systems can broadcast live events in 3D. To sweeten the deal for theaters, RealD promised they would eventually be presenting live sporting events and concerts in 3D during their non-peak movie hours.
To entice the studios, they pointed out that the technology they were currently using to create their lucrative computer animated movies (think Toy Story and Ice Age) was already producing high-quality dimensional imagery relatively cheaply. Since the cameras that record the frames of a digitally animated feature are just code, adding a second virtual lens doesn't double your equipment budget. By returning to the original computer files used to create the Toy Story movies a decade ago, digital animators were recently able to "re-shoot" both the movies in stereo, and this holiday season, the movies will be re-released in 3D.
Several of this summer's 3D releases, such as Up and G-Force, were originally slated to be plain old 2D productions, but as more and more theaters converted to 3D, production companies began ramping up production and adding a dimension where they could. U2 and Miley Cyrus put out 3D concert movies (both reportedly "awesome"). Several horror movies came out (one sequel and two remakes), and there was an extreme sports movie. Except for Henry Selick's Coraline, the rest were digitally animated family fare that ran in both formats, and while the 3D effects were often stunning, they felt like an afterthought and did little to contribute to the narrative or characterizations.
Coraline, released early this year, was the first stop-motion animated film that used 3D. Instead of virtual models, the animators worked with actual ones built by hand, and the sumptuous physicality of the sets comes alive in 3D. More impressive, though, is how the stereo effect is used to accentuate the differences between the real world and the strange alternate universe the heroine finds herself in. In addition to directing the characters and the camera, director Selick pays attention to how he uses the 3D, intensifying the effect when necessary, but rarely flaunting it. The strange angles and wide lenses he used fit the medium perfectly.
But until James Cameron's Avatar arrives in theaters this Christmas season, there doesn't appear to be another major production being directed with 3D seen as critical to its success and not just a bonus. Since directing Titanic in 1997, Cameron's been spending much of his time and money working to develop a stereo camera and computer effects lab able to realize his 3D dreams. Like Coraline, it appears he intends to use the 3D to help transport audiences to a believable alien landscape, and the early hype is positive.
Cameron, like Peter Jackson, has also committed himself to a future of making only 3D films, and given the box office increases this summer, it seems like a lucrative plan. There seems little question someone will make a mint off of these advances, but unlike early stereography, there's little question who it will be.
Whereas once stereoviews were being taken of uncles and their candy wagons by proud amateurs, the exciting new sandbox of making 3D movies appears to be one only fantastically wealthy directors of multiple billion-dollar blockbusters can play in. Instead of a multitude of photographers capturing life in their lenses, we have a select few transporting us to worlds that only exist in their Technicolor imagination.
Just as personal computers and digital cameras begin to make creating our own fantasy epics possible—an original prequel to the Lord of the Rings recently appeared on YouTube—the big boys seem to be pulling up the ladder to the tree house. Until something trumps or approaches the apparent fluke of Coraline, it's impossible to determine whether the new interest in 3D comes from a place of creative fervor, or whether it's still really just being used as a gimmick.
