Why economics condemns 3D to be no more than a blockbuster gimmick | Hacker News Reader

Why economics condemns 3D to be no more than a blockbuster gimmick

guardian.co.uk

15 pointskqr220 comments

> Up is a tremendous movie; it made me laugh and cry, and was intended to be seen in 3D.

Wrong.

Up was made, first and foremost, as a 2D film, just like every Pixar film before it. 3D was very important to the overall box office strategy, but the primary medium was the 2D big screen, and the 3D was done as post-process, secondary (just like VHS or DVDs are).

The technology behind and amount of artistic energy given towards the 3D version has increased over time, for sure.

I believe Dreamworks has started building their films with 3D as the primary version (staging cameras and shots with 3D in mind) but I have no first hand knowledge of that.

I would strongly disagree that 3D in UP can be dismissed as merely a "post-process like VHS." All future Pixar films are going to be in 3D, and Pixar does not make story / layout choices on a whim. Just because the movie is enjoyable in 2D doesn't mean a lot of thought / early planning went into the 3D, it just means the core story was not strongly affected by it. Here's the first part of this interview with the director of UP talks about the use of 3D in the development process:

http://www.movieretriever.com/blog/336/interview-pete-docter...

Some choice quotes:

"We just focused on telling as strong of a story as we could and then the 3D group followed up with the 3D. And they did use it creatively. We tried to use it like color or like camera or anything else - to emphasize emotion."

Development is pipelined at Pixar, starting with Story. So this sounds like 3D was integrated as soon as Animation got their hands on it.

"If people really embrace it and feel it's the way to go, then we'll do them all that way. This one, you can see either way, which I think is nice. Some people find it really engaging and interesting but other people are kind of put off by the glasses and whatever. I don't think you're losing anything by seeing it in 2D, it's just a different way to see it."

As an extreme analogy, I bet that watching UP with a black and white filter, I would still laugh / cry while watching the film.

Extensive interview on 3D with some of the people in charge of 3D:

http://www.awn.com/articles/reviews/pixar-goes-3-d

"Yes, the most gratifying thing is that we put a lot of time and energy and thought in our approach to 3-D and we never really knew if people would get it. To see some of the online reviews coming out of Cannes, it seems that people really got our nuanced, subtle approach. We want to pull people into the movie and not push them away from it with a lot of gimmicky stuff coming at ya."

"What was really interesting was, not knowing how 3-D was going to work with editing and with composition, how good camera and staging play really nicely in 3-D. And this turned into a motto for us. We did about eight minutes of Ratatouille as a test and it was really stunning."

Gee, I would really like to see that one... anyways there are a bunch of interesting interviews on this stuff.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bob+whitehill+interview+up+3d

Get back to me after the soon-to-be-released wave of 3d TVs and monitors have been out for year or two. I think gamers will buy them, they'll make porn for them, and I know a ton of indie filmmakers who want to shoot in 3d and have been hacking together ways of doing it (it's not all that hard).

People said the same thing about color - it was really crap for many years. And I still like black and white movies. I think 3d is doing just fine.

The industry, actually several industries both electronics manufacturers and media companies, need the new new thing to keep sales up. It is a consumer driven economy after all. And that is why 3D will pushed hard, for as long as it takes.

I think that's a harder case when it comes to large-screen televisions. Do we really expect that people will buy a new TV every few years like they do with iPods, phones, and laptops?

It's going to take something really significant to convince a whole block of TV watchers to upgrade their sets. In the US, it's only happened with the advent of color broadcasting (1960s) and HD/digital broadcasting (2000s).

> People said the same thing about color - it was really crap for many years.

Color really doesn't add too much to the experience of the movie. You can take color out of a lot of movies and still gain the same experience. By this analogy, 99% of the 3D in movies will always be gimmicky, even once adoption rates in theaters and at home are high.

Let's not forget the amount of money the film industry relied on from home audiences at the time of the B&W->Color transition... and the cost of owning a television at that time... and the penetration rate of televisions (b&w or color) people's living rooms (not even like it is today with multiple TVs per household in a lot of cases).

Color arguably isn't essential, but an awful lot of work goes into it. There are, literally, books written about nothing but the use of color in film. Hero was a particularly dramatic example in recent years, if you haven't seen it.

Well..the cinemas are making some money out of 3d for a while - even with a tv, it's a lot different when it's 30 feet tall. People say they don't see the point in the theater any more and I think thy're insane for not wanting to see a film the way it was meant to be seen.

> People say they don't see the point in the theater any more and I think thy're insane for not wanting to see a film the way it was meant to be seen.

Some films are meant to be seen on a huge screen, but some films aren't. Off the top of my head, '7 Pounds' doesn't need to be seen on a 30' screen to be appreciated. Films that are especially character-driven with little 'action' don't need to be seen on a huge screen (barring other things like shots of vast landscapes that set the tone for parts of the movie,etc).

I've seen Hero. There are films that make great use of color. Even looking at blockbusters like The Matrix, the mood of the film is set by the tone of the colors used and the lack of saturation throughout (and the 'lady in the red dress' scene wouldn't have made as much sense in b&w). Films like Amelie and (arguably it's spiritual successor.. though a tv series) Pushing Daisies also make great use of color (though it's much more in-your-face in Hero).

I can't email you, but if you'd like an inside look at how color is manipulated for use in film you might find this interesting: http://vimeo.com/5298634

There maybe a lot of films that you can take the colour away from with relatively little cost to the viewer.

But some of the best films: Schindler's list, The Matrix, V for Vendetta, etc would lose a lot if the had to be entirely black and white. I would say that most films would lose quite a lot of humanness if they where to be presented in anything but colour.

I suspect that the studios want 3D to be no more than a blockbuster gimmick. Right now 3D can't be pirated, which probably sounds like a good thing to every studio head in the world. It's an experience that 60" tv's and home surround can't emulate. It's a reason to go to the theatre, and they probably want to hold on to that as long as they can.

As somebody with non-stereoscopic vision, I sincerely hope that this (3d) fails miserably.

Going to the movies is one of my favorite pass-times. If this becomes normal, that will be ruined for me :(.

that's true for me too. one of my eyes is so poor that i have effectively no 3d vision. it keeps me out of sports involving balls as well.

but on the other hand, color-blind folks have had this type of impairment forever, so i guess it's only fair.

Perhaps I don't get it, but unless 3D movies become "interactive", there really doesn't seem to be a point to 3D. I've seen the latest slew of 3D movies in 3D just because I'm a sucker, and I have to say my overall impression was something like this:

1. "This is kind of irritative to my eyes".

2. Completely forgot I'm even watching it in 3D to the point that my memory is of the movie being in 2D.

And frankly I feel that short of gimmicky scenes where a ball "flies right at you!", this will always be the case. 3D is cool in the real world because I interact with the real world. If you had a video game that was 3D it would add a new dimension of playability, but not so much in a passive entertainment environment like movies.

But perhaps I'm wrong.

I both agree and disagree. I feel that unless they are able to get early adopters for 3D TVs and monitors, then it will never be more than a gimmick in the theaters.

While someone tried to make a good point in the comments on the article about the transition from silent films to sound in movies, it doesn't stand up in today's economy. Back then the money that you expected to make back on a your film did not include: home movie sales, licensing for television broadcast, or licensing/sales for video-on-demand. In the 1920s, the only place that you made your money back on a film was in the theater (or advertisements I guess, but I don't know if the filmmakers did that or just the theater owners between films).

Today, movie studios are able to make huge blockbuster movies with budgets to match by using the money they will make from those additional revenue streams as justification. There need to be early adopters of personal 3D displays for there to be any hope of making it mainstream.

As to where this adopters will come from? Well, as someone pointed out already games are a good candidate. Hardcore gamers are a market that is willing to spend copious amounts of money to get a better gaming experience. I don't quite agree with the knee-jerk reaction of the porn industry though. The porn industry is arguably in the midst of imploding. It's too easy for people to shoot their own amateur porn videos, and a lot of people find it more entertaining porn when it's 'real people' as opposed to porn stars (not even mentioning all of the porn piracy that happens).

Now on the other hand, if '3D Technology' starts getting incorporated into the latest and greatest TVs at not much additional cost... People will start adopting it (some without even realizing it I'll bet).

What sort of movie would only work in 3D? Current so-called "2D" movies actually provide an approximation of 3D--the eye perceives depth from parallax and other visual cues just fine.

I'm not sure what sort of movie there is that would require it.

Reality only requires 2D (you can see everything there is to see just fine with one eye.) You could definitely encode important information into the depth-of-field of the shot, but I'd call the result of that "psychedelic."

While Pixar may have "planned for 3D" from the beginning, I would bet cold hard cash that the director's preferred version is 2D and 3D is just what has to be done for the bottom line folks.

You see, the problem with 3D is that for the addition of the 3D effect you lose SOOO much of the nuance of color and texture as it's masked by the polarizing lenses.

As another voice on the matter, Roger Ebert has a great post on this very subject. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/05/up_up_and_away_in_my...

"In 10 years, we'll look back on the current round of 3D films and say, "Remember that 3D gimmick? Whatever happened to that, anyway? Hey, giant robot, watch where you're throwing that building!""

Annnnd history repeats itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_film#History

This guy seems so sure that I bet he's wrong.

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