Roger Ebert: 3D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
1. IT'S THE WASTE OF A DIMENSION. When you listen to a good radioshow it'a already a moving picture as far as the mind is concerned. Adding one dimension artificially can make the illusion less convincing.
2. IT ADDS NOTHING TO THE EXPERIENCE. Recall the greatest radioshow experiences of your lifetime. Did it "need" pictures? A great radioshow completely engages our imaginations.
4. IT CAN CREATE NAUSEA AND HEADACHES. AS motion picture equipment was being introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Reuters interviewed two leading scientists. "There are a lot of people walking around with very minor eye problems for example, a muscle imbalance which under normal circumstances the brain deals with naturally,"
6. THERE'S MONEY TO BE MADE IN SELLING NEW MOTION PICTURE EQUIPMENT. These projectors are not selling themselves. There was initial opposition from radiostations to the huge cost of new equipment and the loss of marketingshare they are sure to see.
Now get off my lawn kid.
1. If one wants to create a world per his imagination why not let him and let him share it? Why listen to the radio when you can read the book or the script and leave your imagination do the rest. Even debates are better on screen as body language tells way more than the grunts and sighs that can only be heard.
2. It adds a lot to the experience. You will be seeing someone else's imagination and that can be different than yours.
4. Yes it can. You still have radio if you experience this. Height can give you nausea too and that's why it needed a bunch of people without these "affections" to erect the first skyscrapers which you can benefit from and marvel at.
6. If no money is being made of a technological advancement then it gets forgotten and abandoned. Radio was a big business too and still is.
You know what the best form of immersion is, a compelling story, and characters that make me care about them. The movies that I love have filled that role without the use of fancy 3D cameras, and giant blue cats.
If you were even to look at films in the same genre, 2001 : a space odyssey would be a perfect example. It used special effects to convey a sense of futurism, and to keep you locked in the world Kubrick created, but they weren't the center piece, the center piece was always the story (as an aside, I think the effects of 2001 still look more photo real than avatar).
As always my 0.02 dollars.
Sure, those thoughts are pretty awesome...
The only question is, which movie will it be.
Not which movie, but how to create such a movie. How would 3D effects harmonize with a movie? How would 3D add to the "complex and beautiful" story?
After solving how, we can answer "which".
That said, I do think detective stories or other slow-pace movies could genuinely benefit from 3D. The first few would be hopelessly distracting, but eventually people might come to accept the concept, and then you'd be near equal ground with the protagonist. A room full of distractions, some of which the characters draw your attention to; A man on his deathbed, occupying only a corner of the bed and unable to reach the water clearly under a meter away; A couple wandering the streets at night, afraid of thugs until they dodge into a warm and sheltering tavern. I think these kinds of movies could genuinely benefit from a more immersive environment ...eventually.
edit: more likely, by the time people can make such movies, the technology will be commonplace enough that no one will notice, except maybe to complain about how they didn't take proper advantage of it.
The solution to all three questions is exactly what's happening: throw as many parallel filmmakers at the problem as we can spare and wait to get the answers. (Of course, the question "can it be done" is undecidable.)
The thing is, conventional 2D movies already have most of the 3D cues we need - blurring, parallax, etc.
Adding these elements would be far too distracting. And if we weren't distracted by sound and color, then what's the point in having them there?
Artists should work in the most limiting possible way -- in a way that everyone is already accustomed to. Otherwise, they're cheap, tawdry sensationalists. Down with change! Down with innovation!
Wait... what?
NO COLOR vs COLOR isn't the same as "n 3D cues" vs "n+1 3D cues".
A better analogy would be
"All colors apart from a particular shade of purple" vs "all colors".
Of course the current systems are rubbish, so you're getting an extra 3D visual cue at the expense of clarity sharpness brightness. And headaches thrown in to boot.
Think about Technicolor, for instance. Unrealistic, and to some, headache-inducing. But it was an early step toward what we have today.
These days, most films are shot in color, and in a fairly naturalistic way that people don't generally notice. But that certainly doesn't mean there's "no point in having it there." It's just a greater level of immersion, which helps draw people even further into what actually matters (for most films): the story, the characters, etc.
And "How to Train your Dragon"?
The only movie I've ever seen where 3D added something to the experience was an IMAX documentary about fish played in a ten-storey high screen. Combine the three-dimensionality with the peripheral-view-filling nature of the IMAX screen and you really have something. I think it might work better for documentaries than for narratives, though.
Ebert's point on focus really hits home for me. When you are watching a movie in 3D it feels like I should be able to focus my eyes anywhere I like, instead of accepting the focus the director has chosen in traditional movies. When I want to look at something in the background in a 3D movie, I expect to be able to focus on it. So either all 3D movies need to be filmed with really high depth of field, or 3D will always feel broken.
However, given these limitations, I've found 3D movies to be a great experience. In the case of Avatar in particular, an important point of the movie was how the protagonist becomes part of the alien world, and I felt that the 3D environment really helped the audience to get the same feeling. YMMV of course.
What's really a rip-off is all those movies now that were converted to 3D in post production. It's a bit like manually coloring a black-and-white photo before color film was available -- it may look kind of okay if you don't look too closely, but it's not the real thing. The flat faces in particular make people look like cardboard cutouts.
My favourite 3D sequence in Avatar was when the heroine dropped-in on her dragon, falling away from us. Very cool and effective. I think a skateboarding documentary would be awesome in 3D (or any activity that is intensely 3D from the POV of the performer).
How to Train Your Dragon, though, was still quite enjoyable in 2D and I hear it was well done in 3D without going overboard.
It is turning into: back in the days thing... When actors were actors not animated characters etc. Remember back in the days the frame-rate was given by the projector fellow's hand steadiness and now we can control it. It has to start from somewhere. As for me, Sony did some cool engineering to make Avatar possible and Cameron financed this awesome project. For me that is a winner. I enjoyed the 3D experience a lot.
The difference is that in B&W you have no idea if the grass is a lush green or a parched brown, whereas in real life you make that determination in an instant.. The problem with 3D is, as Roger Ebert points out, that your brain already derived the 3D based on a 2D image. So the improvement is incremental, if that.
The real issue is whether 3D has a real potential in gaming, where gameplay is frequently first-person, as opposed to movie, where the experience is almost always third-person.
Or, to put it another way, if you can't turn the camera around, you don't need a 3-D environment.
It is the case that game design sacrificed precision control to get the 3D look+feel when it was first introduced: for example, 3D platforming essentially has not progressed beyond Mario 64, and that game is still somewhat uncomfortable to "pick up and play" despite all its refinements; the extra dimension just makes everything far more complex. Adding the glasses helps regain some of the depth cues that make complex movement difficult, but then we're dumping on even more equipment, and gaming is already more complex than it needs to be for most audiences. A full solution would need to be convenient and unobtrusive.
(And I admit that controlling a first person shooter in 3D with a mouse and a keyboard is more complex than most people are comfortable with. It's a skill that I needed to learn, too.
On the other, a certain level of experience and skill is also necessary to enjoy games like soccer or chess.)
And my hero, Werner Herzog, is using 3-D to film prehistoric cave paintings in France, to better show off the concavities of the ancient caves. He told me that nothing will "approach" the audience, and his film will stay behind the plane of the screen. In other words, nothing will hurtle at the audience, and 3-D will allow us the illusion of being able to occupy the space with the paintings and look into them, experiencing them as a prehistoric artist standing in the cavern might have.
That sounds awesome.
Even though it was great fun watching Avatar in IMAX and in 3D, I can't help but cringe at all the wasted plastic used for the glasses.
Only RealD uses cheap disposable glasses. In Dolby 3D and XpanD, the glasses are fairly expensive to produce, and thus are recycled (collected from the audience after the show, washed and redistributed).
Americans seem to overwhelmingly prefer RealD, while Dolby 3D and XpanD dominate in Europe. Anyone surprised? :)
It's fun the first two times, just to try, but the plain cinema is much better, with better colors and a lot more relaxing. The good thing is that since the 3D mania there are no problems in fining available sits in the non-3D rooms.
We don't actually have any options in the way of 3D movie technology.
Color can be used, and more importantly altered, to adjust the audience's perception, by giving characters and scenes psychologically/culturally-loaded color pallets. Smaller and more nimble cameras allow for all sorts of cinematographic shenanigans that subtly manipulate the audience's view by playing with the background while maintaining the foreground. Sound allows an actor another channel to convey emotion, and allowing spoken words instead of text allow for more interactive dialogue, which presents greater options for showing the relationships between characters. Sound also allows for narration, which allows the juxtaposition of exposition and demonstration.
The point of all of this, is that all of these technologies give the director additional tools with which to communicate, and using those tools, there are ways in which the cerebral stimulation or emotional impact of the film can be enhanced. Even the most gratuitous of CG effects can be used to good effect, even though 95% of CG is used for bigger and more impressive explosions. E.g., Children of Men makes excellent use of cinematography and CG enhancements, in order to add to the emotional impact of scenes and to add craptons of cultural allusions to the background.
By contrast, I don't see how 3D can be used to alter or enhance reality in a way that has meaning. It's largely limited to faithfully reproducing a real or realistic scene. You can make something appear closer or further than it otherwise would... I don't see the use case.
This is not to say that it can't be done. I'm not a film maker, and I'm obviously not aware of the full scope of what can be done. Maybe there is some crazy mind-bending case, and I'd love to see it. I love it when technologies are pushed beyond their boundaries to good effect. But I honestly don't think that there are ways to push the envelope of this technology. I think it's limited to realistic reproductions of reality. With that limitation, the film maker cannot use 3D to communicate something that he could not otherwise have communicated.
The only thing that additional mechanical accuracy adds is "immersion," which isn't really useful outside of escapist fiction. I, personally, am not very excited about the idea of more effective escapist fiction. Obviously, all new technical achievements in film lend themselves to bigger better escapist fiction, and often get invented for those use cases first. I have no problem with bigger better escapist fiction because I can just choose not to watch it. But, unlike other technical advancements in cinema, I don't think 3D has use outside of escapist fiction, which to me, makes it a rather lackluster achievement. It advances the craft of filmmaking without advancing the art.
[e]: I don't believe that 3D is entirely without potential. I'm outlining why I'm skeptical.
Consider how 3D works... no, not the cameras and projectors, the brain. It is "well known" that the brain detects how far away something is by measuring how much the eyes have to cross for the two images to converge. What seems to be much less well known, though it is obvious with elementary geometry, is that the breaks down as you get further and further away, as the difference in angles becomes smaller and smaller. And it's only a few tens of feet.
Beyond that, you brain uses numerous context clues to assemble a 3D image of the environment; one big one is occlusion, for instance; a thing that is visibly in front of another thing is clearly closer.
3D technology can only really use the eye-difference thing. Conventional 2D technology is already perfectly good at all the other clues. (Try playing a 3D game sometime and simply trying to see it in 3D; you may find that it's perfectly possible and merely a perspective shift much like seeing the vase or the face in the classical optical illusion.) Consequently, you end up with an effect where everything is either taking place on a very small stage in front of you, or still stuck to the background in totally normal 2D. In the worst case, the background is a visible plane, like a skybox.
There is no way around this limitation. It's fundamental.
A space fight, which sounds like it would be awesome in 3D, is actually fundamentally a 2D thing, when it comes to projection technology. If any bit of the space fight is within you 3D-binocular-vision range, you're probably already dead. It may look awesome, but simultaneously, it is going to look like a toy, intrinsically, because if it is in 3D, it is equally obviously a space fight between two spaceship toys taking place about twenty feet in front of you.
I'm not saying there's no place for 3D, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. Someday, I suspect we'll look back on this series of 3D movies as slightly more sophisticated than the ones from decades past, but only slightly, committing all sorts of "blindingly obvious" scale errors and other such things.
Coming to think of it, colour films are pretty useless too. What extra enjoyment do you get from colour films that you can't get from B&W films? Any hitchcock, chaplin, etc. fans here?
"IT ADDS NOTHING TO THE EXPERIENCE." - That's plain BS. It does for me.
"IT CAN BE A DISTRACTION." - Maybe, but so is Eastman color. We're still figuring out the art of it ... and making great progress imo.
"IT CAN CREATE NAUSEA AND HEADACHES." - Even normal film can cause epileptic attacks. So what?
Don't forget that Hitchcock made a 3D movie -- Dial M For Murder was originally done in 3D, and in fact I've never seen it in 2D. There's exactly one moment where the 3D becomes worthwhile, it's where (spoiler alert) the woman getting attacked desperately reaches out onto the desk, towards the audience and picks up the shiny letter opener...
However, I think that the 3D is a new art form of its own, and it's only at its developing stage at the time. 3D may not be the right medium for what we consider good films as the 3D projections are not of the same art as traditional cinematic films. We will see what experiences the 3D turns out to produce, but it's probably going to find other uses than emulating films.
1950s - first big 3d boom
1980s - second try
2010s - third try
Good expressive results for new technologies take some time to be discovered.
Now, I did see Avatar in 3D. I was curious. I was also underwhelmed, and I agree with all of the technical limitations everyone has mentioned. (Particularly the darker picture). But I'm not naive enough to claim I know what will happen in the future.
Maybe he should take a peek at 100 years ago.
It was said that movies are the bane of society. Instead of the immersive story telling of books. Here, moving pictures replace the imagination and wisdom of stories.
It always takes time to learn how to use a new technology. And it takes time for the market to be full enough when "just using the new tech" is no longer enough.
I am hopeful that they will learn how to use 3D to add depth to the story, not their pockets.
Had I been around when movies were invented, I'm sure I would have been inspired by the possibilities. Likewise with sound and with color, each of which added a whole new dimension to film. Does 3D inspire you creatively? Can you see more than one or two clever experiments before it becomes just an extra layer of butter on the popcorn?
Is 55 years enough? Because that's how long it's been since the boomlet in 3D movies in the early 1950s. The 3D technology then -- linear polarized images -- was only slightly different from the circular polarization dominating today's 3D offerings.
The special effects -- especially computerized -- that can give 3D some extra sizzle have improved and become more cheap. Audiences are wealthier and more novelty-seeking. But 3D still involves downsides that aren't needed for most storytelling -- making some people ill or distracted, lingering focus issues, shrinking the number of angles/seats in a theater that give a good view, increasing production costs, washed out colors.
I expect 3D to continue oscillating in popularity over the years, at a slightly higher background level of use, but never becoming the usual/majority format. (Or, by the time 3D does become dominant, there will have been such major advances in displays that movies are no longer displayed on giant screens, but sent to each viewers' eye-mounted heads-up display, or neural-visual interface.)
This discussion shouldn't be about 3D, it should be about motion pictures more closely approaching the experience of reality. Sure, 3D technologies today are kind of crappy, but it's part of the technological evolution process. Eventually, we're going to have movies that feel so real you can't tell the difference between the movie and reality. That is the goal. Fake 3D is just the first step, I think.
(When the first motion pictures were displayed for audiences on large screens, they also caused nausea and dizziness. In some theaters where the images projected were exceptionally large, people were even provided with vomit bags like on early airplanes. The technology improved and overcame these drawbacks.)
I fully agree with him at this point in time. I think once 3D gets more mainstream young directors will find ways to make use of this new medium.
A lot of the points that Ebert raises are similar to ones raised when sound was beginning to be added to the films in the 1920s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film). For example "Sufficient playback volume was also hard to achieve"Current problem is that Hollywood uses 3D just to project inherently 2D designed movies on screen, except for some shock scenes where a snake comes at you, etc. This limits its use to juvenilia or "blockbusters" like Avatar. That doesn't mean it's always going to be that way.
It's interesting that a sort of Innovator's Dilemma biases people who are in the movie making business. For example, Chaplin saw little value in talkies: "Chaplin firmly believed that “silent film's message reaches the entire spectrum of ‘intellectual and the rank and file’" (http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Charlie-Chaplin-and-...) and his sentiment was shared by many actors and producers.
First - and I'll admit this makes me biased - I'm blind in one eye. This means that it doesn't matter what technology they use, I'm not going to be able to see the movie in 3D.
Second, the only movie I tried to watch in 3D (in the last 10 years), was Coraline. It was a great film, but having to wear the glasses meant the film was very dark.
Third, I've yet to talk to anyone who didn't come out of the film without either a headache or at least a somewhat spacey feeling. The technology strains your eyes, and while I don't believe it causes any lasting damage, it still leaves you worn out after the film. Or maybe my friends and I are just too old.
Still, as far as I'm concerned, as long as you have to wear special glasses, 3D movies aren't likely to be considered a normal part of going to the movies.
Sure, it can be done badly, but that's hardly the fault of the technology.
Attack the films themselves, not the medium. It's only going to be as good as the artist who uses it. Don't fear new technology, even if you are an over-the-hill critic.
Sadly, many people confuse craftsmanship for art, this leaves people who like things the way they are angry, and those who want the new shiny drooling over crappy art that happens to use new tools.
This all brings to mind Duchamp's 'Fountain', and various people's reaction to it. It's amusing how some debates never end.
I'm not sure why Ebert thinks this technology will draw moviegoers out of their homes. Many HD TVs and console games run at 60 fps. High-fps movies would leak into the home far faster than 3D has.
However, my friends all love 3-D. They say it provides something they can't get from a DVD, and they'll gladly pay for it.
It's interesting, though, that this has been one of their answers for literally decades: there was a big fad of 3d films in the 50s. Will be interesting to see if this one turns out to be any more long-lasting.
The idea of implicitly giving it a pair of eyes a few inches apart kind of ruins that for me. Why fake biology if you're ever going to make a jump cut? Most of our visual grammar depends on things actual eyes can't do.
Totally agree with the author. Actually our minds use a whole set of cues besides perspective to estimate the third dimension and stereopsis (used in "3d" movies) is just one of them.
I recall one of Finland's former leading critics, a man who used to teach cinema history in the country's leading film school, listing his favorite films of all time in 1996, when the art form turned 100. His list included a single color film, and he made special note of that: "This film demonstrates that it's possible to create a film where color is not a distraction but an essential element."
>Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D.