- Image via Wikipedia
So like just about everyone else in the known universe, I went to see Avatar in 3D the other week. While the story was solid enough and the effects were just stunning, I walked out of the theatre feeling a bit empty.
It was the 3D. It just didn’t work for me. Admittedly I’d had this element of the film oversold to me by various parties, but ultimately I found it annoying for the following reasons:
1) Unless an object is in full view, it doesn’t really work. A ball in the centre of the screen works great, but as soon as the camera moves in and the edges of the ball touch the edge of the screen, the 3D effect is lost – sometimes distractingly so. Several times in the movie my eyes were pulled away from the action by a branch or something that was floating in the middle distance, apparently between me and the screen, suddenly snapping back as it hit the side of the screen.
2) Because of the depth element to the image, I found it took me a fraction of a second longer to get into the shot and adjust my brain to what I was seeing after each cut. Towards the end of the film my poor noodle was struggling to keep up with some of the faster cut action sequences, and I often found myself mentally two or three shots behind trying to process what I’d seen (This may just be me getting older and stupider…).
3) One of the key weapons a Director has in his cinematic armoury is depth of field. With the aid of a good focus puller he can draw the eye around a scene and add punctuation and stylistic elements to a shot that greatly aid the storytelling. This means that quite often much of the foreground and background is out of focus (the ‘filmic’ look), so burning embers falling down, apparently just in front of me, are also out of focus. When I try to look at them, they stay out of focus and it makes my eyes go funny.
I think this is possibly the biggest flaw with 3D. A perfect 3D system would be like life, where your eyes can alight on something in the near distance and everything in the background goes out of focus, then, when you shift your gaze to the wide blue yonder, objects near you go out of focus. But this is no good to the Director who is saying, ‘Oi! Over here – look at this wonderful actor, see our story’!
The problem, I suppose, is that 3D is cheating – you’re still looking at a two 2D images and your brain is being tricked into perceiving a depth that’s not really there.
The only solution to this would be to open up and have a wide depth of field, which would destroy every cinematographer living and make all films look crap. Even then it still wouldn’t work as everything would be in focus and it would still seem wrong.
I think for sports events, this is a good thing. You want a wide depth of field to keep the fast moving ball in focus at all times and get a much better sense of where the ball and players are in relation to each other, greatly enhancing the experience. But for cinema, it just doesn’t cut it.
It’s a shame as I went in really believing that 3D was upon us, but now I think it’s just a novelty, a gimmick that really adds no great value to cinematic storytelling. It’ll just take one major 3D film to flop (Alice in Wonderland?) and it’ll all be over (again).
What do yo think? Does 3D have a future for you? Do we just need to rethink or refine how we shoot it? Or is it dead in the water?
7 comments
Imo says:
February 13, 2010 at 9:52 pm (UTC 1 )
3D will have a place when you don’t need to wear the glasses… a large percentage of the population has something wrong with their eyes even if it’s just one side is stronger than the other… from my 3D experiences this makes the colours very unbalanced. For me, last one I watched was mainly purple.
James Tuverson says:
February 20, 2010 at 11:10 pm (UTC 1 )
I love your site, especially the name. Sounds custom-made for me! I’m working on directing my first short film, “Zombies Take The Schoolyard” and documenting it on my blog, http://jtuverson.com. Maybe you’ll check me out and we can cross-link or something.
James
Andy Coughlan says:
February 22, 2010 at 11:43 am (UTC 1 )
Hi James, good luck with your short. I’ve added a link to your blog.
Andy Coughlan says:
February 22, 2010 at 11:47 am (UTC 1 )
@imo Wow, I wasn’t aware of that. Sounds like another nail in the coffin for 3D (at least with glasses).
I guess if we want true 3D we should just go to the theatre.
Joe says:
March 1, 2010 at 6:02 am (UTC 1 )
The glasses were the weak part of the process. They degraded the image, which was already at a relatively low 1920×1080 (relative in terms of cutting edge imaging: Imax, 65mm, 4K digital).
The glasses cut the light and were not high quality lenses. They are disposable plastic to watch a show filmed on $50,000 lenses. It’s a bottleneck.
The glasses had the effect of distancing me from what was on screen by having this very real barrier between the eyes and the image.
I would have preferred Avatar in higher quality 2D. Since audiences made it the biggest grossing film ever though, I guess that puts me in the minority.
Mike Buonaiuto says:
March 12, 2010 at 3:43 pm (UTC 1 )
Hi Andy,
I have been reading your site for the last couple of weeks and saw that you have written about various 2010 Empire Awards Nominees.
I thought this competition from Citroën to win tickets to the awards ceremony would be of interest to you and your readers.
The following video explains how it all works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om911XG531I
If you would like any more information please feel free to contact me.
Mike
Pete G says:
April 20, 2010 at 3:59 pm (UTC 1 )
I’ve been reading your blog with interest and found your views on the new 3D phenonenum particularly interesting. What might be of interest to you as a filmmaker might be a new live internet tv show from the author of the Guerilla Filmmakers Handbook. It’s everything you might expect from Chris Jones, especially if you’ve read any of his books on filmmaking. Perhaps you might like to have a look…. it might even be worth blogging about!
http://www.livestream.com/guerillafilm