3D means new rules for directors
The rise of 3D technology for movies and television will force a change in how directors tell stories.
Say good-bye to gut-wrenching drops off cliffs and swoops through asteroid fields to call attention to 3D effects. Be prepared for directors to use slower pans, less cutting, and more deliberate camera moves to blend the technology into the story. These new 3D movies may look boring in 2D, but they'll end up feeling more engaging when seen in three dimensions.
"Unfortunately, the history of 3D is bad 3D," says Sandy Climan, CEO of 3ality, a company that makes, as he calls it, "end-to-end technologies from image capture to processing" for three-dimensional entertainment. The technology hasn't been up to snuff until recently, he says. He claims his company's tech is leagues better, naturally. But the art hasn't advanced, either, and no amount of technology can fix that. Directors need new rules.
The film, 'Up,' was released in 3D as well as 2D.
(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)I talked with Climan about the changes coming to cinematography and television in the move to 3D, as well as to Didier Debons and Isabelle de Montagu, CEO and business development manager of 3DTV Solutions, which makes 3D video recording products, and Tuyen Pham, CEO of A-volute, a 3D audio encoding company. The short takeaway: if you're in the video or entertainment business, forget what you know about directing and editing. 3D changes everything.
Think 3D is a gimmick and that professional cinematographers and television directors don't take it seriously? Financials, Climan says, dispute this. 3D films in 3D theaters gross two to five times what the 2D versions of those films do. Commercials in 3D yield better recall rates. And it's not just the novelty factor, Climan says. If so, the trend would have faded. Grosses for 3D films are growing.
"The family movie business has largely moved to 3D," Climan continues, pointing to films like "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Coraline," and "Up"--the last two having being taken far more seriously than standard 3D matinee fare. On the grownup front, Climan says that for sports and concerts, there's nothing like the 3D movie or TV experience. The upcoming James Cameron film, "Avatar" is a 3D production and is expected to be a watershed for mainstream 3D entertainment.
For now, the growth of 3D looks inevitable. The next step for the medium, after family films and fantastic blockbusters, is for 3D to move into independent and artisan films. Climan thinks the technology is becoming straightforward enough to make that likely.
How do you zoom?
If you accept that 3D on-screen entertainment is a growth market, how do you create the content for it? Companies like 3ality and 3DTV Solutions will deliver camera systems for you, but they don't direct your shows. Using the technology effectively requires a new art.
3DTV's camera rig has eight lenses and sensors.
(Credit: 3DTV Solutions)De Montagu of 3DTV told me, "If you are looking at 3D it is because you want to be as close to reality as possible." That means, she said, you need to write more realistic shooting scripts. Using 3D primarily for special effects is counterproductive. "The brain doesn't get it," de Montagu says.
The purpose of 3D has to be to render reality. You can push a viewer's willing suspension of disbelief quite far in a 2D show, since we've been trained to "read" movies and accept unreal conventions, like zooming and cutting. But in 3D, if you push it too far, you break the illusion. The viewer has to feel like they're in real life.
And that means no reliance on many standard cinematic methods, including zooming and cutting back and forth between people talking to each other. The viewer can get confused, even physically sick if you immerse them in a world that's constantly shifting. "You don't zoom in real life," A-Volute's Pham said. And if you do rapid-fire cuts and move the sound stage around the audience with the visuals, he says, plainly, "you will get sick."
Climan says, "In 2D, you move the camera to create a sense of motion. In 3D, you leave the camera since the audience is in the middle of things. You need to have many fewer camera moves. In sports, you just leave the camera in a low position, and you feel like you're on the field. You have a much more clear view of the players in 3D due to the dimensionality."
3ality is launching a service, "3DIQ," to train people in 3D video and cinematography, but it's clearly an emerging art form. As 3DTV's de Montagu says, "We are going back to the fundamentals of audio and vision."
Climan says that educating a film crew to shoot for 3D is not terribly difficult. To turn out an episode of "Chuck," in 3D, he says, it took about one and a half days to get "the 2D crew" adjusted to the new medium. "They didn't miss a beat."
However, while a film shot for 3D might play fine on 2D equipment, it clearly won't feel as engaging if displayed in 2D as a show shot for the old-fashioned flat medium, with its jump cuts and zooms and sweeping pans. So directors will have to make a choice of primary format or shoot things twice. In big sports events, Climan says, "there will be a director for 2D and a director for 3D."
(Personally, I hope no video, movie, or game ever gets released without a 2D version alongside it, since I'm one of the small percentage of people--about 7 percent, I'm told--whose eyes and brain don't process true 3D correctly. Every 3D demo I have ever seen either looks like double vision to me, makes me queasy, or both.)
Emerging technologies
Anyone who's watched 3D content knows that the technology to play it is evolving, to put it kindly.
"The good stuff requires glasses," Climan says, which makes the at-home experience troubling. Who wants to walk to the fridge wearing glass that make the real world look odd (which they do)? But there are technologies coming out that get us part of the way there without it.
The 3DTV team showed me a demo using another company's monitor with a lenticular grating on it ("It puts the glasses on the screen," Didier Debons said) that gave what appeared to me a decent 3D experience without requiring that I wear glasses. However, to support this and all the other 3D technologies, the company's camera system has eight lenses on a horizontal mount, not the usual two lenses most people think of when they imagine a steroscopic camera rig.
The 3D audio technology by A-Volute does not require any special equipment at the listener's location, and is quite remarkable. Using signal processing and a model of how the inner ear, outer ear, and a person's head changes the shape of the sound the ear hears and that the brain translates into positional information, it can play, over ordinary stereo speakers and without relying on bouncing sounds off walls, sounds that you will swear are coming from behind you or above you.
The demo I heard made my jaw drop. The technology can add positional cues to sounds in real-time, making it useful not just for movies and TV shows, but for games and for military and transportation applications as well. Bose has competitive technology.
3D is still seen as gimmick by most consumers, but it's becoming more mainstream. That means content producers and artists will be thinking about 3D content more in the near future: Not just how to have it call attention to itself, but rather how to have 3D fade, as it were, into the background of the storytelling.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
Unfortunately, Hollywood has embraced it and sometimes I have to actually look to find a 2D showing.
My big concern is if the film is shot to address 3D, then it detracts in 2D.
Maybe in another 20 years...
~Rob Patrick
http://www.mytextsecret.com
The technology in modern 3D relies on polarized lenses. The physical strain to the eyes are no different then when using polarized sunglasses. Polarized sunglasses have been around for decades....but I suppose you're also one of the <7% of the world's population who get's sick wearing sunglasses.
I don't envy you; living where every movie theatre is in 3D and you react negatively to sunglasses.
Yes, went to the closest theater to watch 'Up' only to find only 3D showings. So, had to get on the internet to find a theater showing in 2D which actually turned out to be across town. 4 complexes in town, showing 'Up", 2 were only showing 3D and the other 2 had 1 showing each in 2D. When the theaters can charge more for a 3D showing (which two of the theaters were doing), what do you think they will show?
As to the glasses, yes, they cause all of these problems, especially for people like me who wear glasses. Unlike 'real' sunglasses, the lenses are polarized differently, the optics are terrible, are uncomfortable, and except for IMAX are simply not maintained.
Next time, know your topic *before* trolling. But then, I guess that was the point.
This technology will die out just as it did in the early years. If they can't do it without glasses don't do it!
UP, in my opinion, is the best one yet. I don't recall anything pandering to the 3D effect yet the experience enhanced it greatly.
I have yet to experience anything @MadLyb has experienced in terms of eye strain, headaches, or otherwise. Even my wife who wears prescription glasses hasn't had a problem.
Both of these innovations in the past came in as gimmicky stunts that required film makes to change the way movies are created. The same will happen with 3D.
Then it will just be another choice for film makes to use. Just as some makes choose to create a black and white, or even a silent movie they can in the future choose to make a 2D or 3D movie and it will dictate how the film is created.
As for people with one eye viewing a 3D film, I presume they will choose whether the experience is worth it or not, just as deaf or blind people choose today. As well, I expect, adaptive technology will come along.
Both of these innovations in the past came in as gimmicky stunts that required film makes to change the way movies are created. The same will happen with 3D.
Then it will just be another choice for film makes to use. Just as some makes choose to create a black and white, or even a silent movie they can in the future choose to make a 2D or 3D movie and it will dictate how the film is created.
As for people with one eye viewing a 3D film, I presume they will choose whether the experience is worth it or not, just as deaf or blind people choose today. As well, I expect, adaptive technology will come along.
I can't wait to see where this goes. I'm more curious about 3D being built into the new LCD displays.
me that, because of eye problems, cannot view the movie in 3D can they claim discrimination?
Do the blind or deaf claim discrimination because of color or sound in every movie?.... No they don't.
The first happens when objects are leaving the screen. Instead of simply leaving the frame, it feels like a chainsaw is being used on the objects. If you have a screen that is large enough to fill your field of vision, that negative artifact is a moot point.
The second problem I find is double vision when objects get too close. I realize that this is the basis of 3D, and this happens in real life, but we generally don't get close enough to objects enough to make it a problem. For a computer animated feature, I am sure there are view transformations that can be applied to counteract this artifact for closer objects, but what about live action? A lot of action sequences can be quite exciting because they put us "in the driver's seat". I would hate to see film makers not use them in service of minimizing camera moves, especially when those are the kinds of things that really scream for 3D.
As for quick cutting, I find it is typically distracting in 2D as well.
The challenge is adapting the vocabulary of cinema production to the implementations of standard nodes in a common vocabulary.
For musicians, digital sound systems metaphorically resemble physical systems in the GUI.
Until now, 3D has been conceived by math geeks, not cinematographers.
Jump cuts still work. If you insist on capture over scripts, it means you get longer sequences. The writer AND the camera director have to think at the scene level.
FWIW, X3D has proposals for new camera nodes that do just what I described.
Fun times. New art forms. Right now cinematographers are trying to make movies with 3D whereas the 3D artists are trying to conceive in real-time 3D.... which is what the new hypermedia is.
A 3D world is a multi-arc scene simultaneously. Adapting to that means deep endowment of character (repetoire, norms, cultural symbols, and history of the instance) and writers have not yet grasped the depth of that or we wouldn't still be talking about movies.
- by tonhogg June 19, 2009 1:48 AM PDT
- Funny but just a few weeks ago I read an piece that talked about the same thing this article talks about. When the larger screens came out in the 1950's people said that quick cuts and fast movements would be just to much for the viewing audience and cause motion sickness. Of course as time went on and people got used to the larger screens they also inturn got used to the quicker motions that directors kept pushing with each movie release. Really when any of us go to a movie we should get motion sickness from beginning to end. The reason we don't is because we have come to accept and ajust to the laws of the world around us that a motion picture breaks. That is what causes motion sickness. To that person what he is seeing visually compared to his equlibrium are clashing to what laws of the physical world he has determined in his mind. If you start to take notice of how much they sling that camera around in an action movie you can start to relize just how rediculous it looks, but we don't even notice because we are used to it and actually the movie is exciting to us during those scenes.
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(26 Comments)People can actually get used to anything visually if they can just get passed the struggle between what they are seeing and being stationary at the same time. Like I said, we do it everytime we go to a movie or even when watching television. They were cautious about in the 1950's but that cautiousness soon faded.