James Cameron thinks 3D will never die, but regrets it. Wants people to make films in 3D and not do it in Post-Production. The issue with this is he think his "stero-scopic" 3D is a) different than the old Blue/Green 3D, b) wants people to actually think its real 100% 3D experience, and c) he has no problem with the fact that film art is forged out of the fact film is not 3D.
There are still limitations to even Cameron's camera. All it can do is mimic "reality." If you want an actual 3D experience you will need to shoot a film at your eye level standing up and then design a theater as to fit the specifications of you standing up in that shot. Then you need to shoot one static shot with two cameras and then project that shot with two projectors, not meshing the shot together like 3D film does in editing, but doing it with the projectors. That single shot will be the closest you get to 3D, but still doesn't a screen end?
I see this push towards "actually being there," with technology that is hardly getting you there a real threat. I agree with Cameron that its worse when a film does it in post-production just to get on the bandwagon. Still, I really think this will die off because some films just shouldn't be made in 3D. He thinks this is different than the 50s when red/green 3D was used, but I see it as the same. Those 50s 3D horror films were used to contend with television, now Hollywood has to contend with people not going to the movies for even more reasons (like they are making poor films, piracy, etc.) So they have found, through Cameron, a way to get them out of the dumps. I just think they need to not think of this as a golden parachute and get "real."
Film is not reality. Here are my views on this and 3D summed up in a quote:
"Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off... The two-dimensional relationships, of course, become almost as slight, and the manner in which one object appears behind another in space will be so obvious that the projective as well as any inherent symbolic connections will hardly make themselves felt at all. Engineers are not artists... It vexes the engineer that film is so lacking in stereoscopic quality. His ideal is exactly to imitate real life." -Rudolf Arnheim
4 comments:
holy shit, great article. 3D sucks.
Stereoscopic 3D does use two cameras and IMAX 3D uses two projectors.
There is also that fix that guy on youtube came up with involving strapping wii remotes to your head:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw&feature=fvw
but presumably that would only work for one person in their home.
And ultimately that doesn't fix the limitations of the frame. Maybe making a big enough screen for one person with wii remotes strapped to their head or one of those helmets they made for video games that never really worked. None of that is going to happen though.
That said, and ignoring Cameron's desire to take film closer to reality, I did like the 3D in Avatar and the more immersive film world it enabled. I really like it's confusion too. You can't say it was like a real experience as it was so much more bewildering than real life and I feel like the technicians knew that and composed their film with that limitation in mind. I think families are going to buy 2D copies of Avatar and suddenly notice A LOT more alien half nipple than they remember in the original film.
On the other hand, 3D is going to kill real IMAX since the shitty nature documentaries that are still shot on the format for the sake of the format and nothing else have no point now now that the new format for format's sake is digital 3D. Cameron himself convinced NASA to send a stereoscopic 3D camera to mars to shoot 3D in HD at 10 frames per second (so who knows what the hell that will look like).
All of that said, James Cameron is a huge asshole and the enemy of cinema. And who knows, maybe his campaign to change the infrastructure of the theaters themselves is going to make it so that we are never again watch a film on film outside of a repertory theater. Who will campaign for the understanding that an entire artform is about to be lost and that cinema aesthetics are about to change forever? We are leaving the physical world as James Cameron prepares our profitable alternative.
Also, watching Avatar on Blu-ray, without the 3D experience to distract, it is much more apparent how NOT REAL the Na'vi look, it's a lot like watching a cartoon, not much different from watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Really, the animation hardly looks any better than Star Wars Episodes 1-3. It came across as cheesy when getting the "full experience" in 3D IMAX, now watching it at home I am having trouble grasping how some people can take the movie seriously. The scene at the end where the cult of Na'vi circle around Sigourney Weaver in an attempt to bring her back to life, is nothing but funny. But it's demanding on the audience to take it as drama, even though it looks like her character had just jumped into the pages of a comic book and this is one of those funny crossover movies, except here the animation isn't supposed to be noticeable in any way, and her character being with the Na'vi just emphasized how cheesy they looked. It's just very dumb.
I know that the Fusion 3D is 2 cameras, but was unaware that IMAX 3D uses two cameras. Being that I have only seen 3D on non-IMAX and most theaters only have the funds to buy an apparatus that is put on their old projectors that makes things Real-D 3D. So those aren't two cameras.
Anyway, that wasn't my point. The screen ends ultimately, but second the camera pans, dollies, etc., it will expose even more its lack of steroscopicity. So, the Fusion 3D camera had to be created that works like our eyes, which by the way don't work that well. Still, our heads can move and that is the allure of IMAX 3D because depending on your seating situation you have to move your head. Yet, unless the shot is static and the film is designed for a single viewer, you still wont get even close to partial 3D.
My thing is film is not reality and I see many advances in art and film as trying to get us "there." The issue is film is better when it is not trying to be real, in a aesthetic and narrative sense. So, in narrative terms Avatar wasn't reality, but Cameron's aim with the film was to "bring you there." Hence the 3D and typical story structure to make it "real." I actually didn't find it fantastical or confusing in anyway. I just thought was a decent popcorn movie, but I expected more out of Cameron. One shouldn't though because as Sasha was saying, he is just an asshole now.
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