Bratz the Movie is better than Citizen Kane

Lately, a lot of journalists and PR-material-copying bloggers (and everything in between) have been writing nasty things about 3-D film releases from before 2007. Blanket statements that would make even Stalin envious of their propagandistic bluntness - and impact - as everybody now appears to agree on the content of these statements.
Just three statements from different articles on modern day 3-D film production to illustrate my point here:

"The presentation of films in 3D is as old as the movie business itself, but clumsy technology and unrealistic effects have so far kept it out of the mainstream."
From C21 Media online

"Stereoscopic 3D, minus the red/green paper glasses, sea-sickness and headaches previously experienced in viewing this dimension."
From 4RFV News Article
"This is not our parent’s 3-D experience, a date night novelty."
From Animation Magazine online

When you look at the facts and actually compare 3-D movies from 1953-54 and 1983-84 (and everything in between) with the most recent 3-D releases, the statements that the latest stuff is always better simply fall apart. ‘House of Wax’ versus ‘Beowulf’? ‘Dial M for Murder’ versus ‘Spy Kids 3-D’? ‘Jaws 3-D’ versus ‘Chicken Little’? I know which movies understood the 3-D better and used the 3-D better - and the better 3-D - as a result. DLP projection of a movie with childish qualities does not outdo 35MM projection of a 3-D work of cinematic intelligence. It’s a story, silly, and a story you tell with the words, not with the book’s cover.

If it were up to these modern journalists, no movie from before the year 2003 is worth another look ever again – especially Stereoscopic 3-D films. As not many people have seen the old 3-D films (even when they write about them), let’s use as an example two well known regular 2D movies. When you follow this ‘newer is better’ line of thought through, you easily come to the following statement:

‘Bratz the Movie’ is better than ‘Citizen Kane’.

Crazy? Not true? Well, let’s look at the facts from the viewpoint of digital journalists.

Bratz was shot with modern day 35MM cameras in Super35 (its only shortcoming), in crisp, clear, modern colour. Edited through a Digital Intermediate on a Digital editing system it is digitally distributed and projected with the best possible, steady, stable, unparalleled digital image in Digital DLP-enabled theatres. Presented in state-of-the art cinemas in Dolby Digital Surround Sound in 2.35:1 widescreen, it engages with all senses and leaves no stone unturned in terms of audio-visual impact. Booming, rich, crisp clear sound and an image so bright and sharp you can cut a rock in two with it.


Bratz (2007)

The editing of the picture is completely of the 21st Century: fast, modern, totally this generation, ready to be beamed onto Cellphone, PSP & iPods with superfast Bluetooth & WiFi. The story is up-to-date and wastes no time with out-dated exposition, boring character-arcs and irrelevant narrative distractions like plot or direction. It is aimed clearly and purely at its target audience, unambiguous and totally clear on its one goal: entertainment.


Citizen Kane (1941)

Using the latest, best special effects, animation and post-production available, it does not fail its audience in any shape or form. There is nothing old, analogue, unstable, stuffy, mono, black & white or boring about it. Therefore, it is a million times better than anything that came before it, and that includes Citizen Kane. Because it simply is everything that Citizen Kane isn’t...

Looking forward to the release of ‘Journey 3-D’, though. Nothing wrong with a bit of innocent fun. Is that a mineshaft P.O.V. 3-D sequence coming up, by the way?


Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3-D

Bratz the Movie is better than Citizen Kane

Glib Reduction

When reading recent articles about 3-D Stereoscopic production in the 21st Century, one cannot escape being snowed under by slick corporate press release material rather than being presented with objective news and facts about 3-D Film production. A recent article in a prominent and well-read television & film industry magazine provides a very good example. It published so many unresearched, uncritical, copy-pasted press release material that I decided to spring into action and reply to the editor-in-chief regarding the gross inaccuracies. Of course, an editor will never admit to these kinds of mistakes and no confirmation of receipt was ever sent back, so here are the article extracts and my responses to them for your 3-D fact finding pleasure.

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Article:
"The presentation of films in 3D is as old as the movie business itself, but clumsy technology and unrealistic effects have so far kept it out of the mainstream."

Reply:
The 3-D boom of 1953-54, when over 100 Hollywood 3-D feature titles were released, did so using twin-camera filming and polarized projection - the only difference with today's technology being that it was done on 35MM film, rather than on HD video. You have clearly never seen a twin-projected film from 1953, as most of them blow today's 3-D releases right out of the water in terms of a 3-D cinematic experience. The claim of "unrealistic effects" is based on nothing, as exactly the same 3-D compositions, shots and camera moves are employed today as they were then.


Article:
"The technology to achieve and watch 3D has come a long way since cinema-goers wearing red and green glasses leapt from their seats during Jaws 3D. That was in 1983, when a film created for traditional projection was then rendered into 3D in post-production."

Reply:
Sorry, but this is completely based on fantasy and, I strongly suspect, misinformation supplied by modern day 3-D camera system providers. Jaws 3-D was shot with a 3-D camera adapter called StereoVision, on 35MM film. This was then projected using, as in 1953, polarizing projection lenses, but this time using special StereoVision projector adapters. The beauty of that system is that it all worked with existing technology and standards of the time - unlike today's need for digital switch-over before 3-D can be presented. No red-blue anaglyphs were ever used to project this movie other than maybe for poor cinemas in the Asian subcontinent and lagging-behind (or poorly supplied) Europe!


StereoVision 3-D adapter for 35MM film cameras

Article:
"The high resolution of the twin digital images can now be maintained not only in post-production but through to distribution and exhibition, as digital cinema systems replace 35mm print reels and projectors."

Reply:
I have to remind you about 70MM film 3-D presentations that were done in the 1970s - no newer format other than IMAX has ever gotten close to that image quality. And although digital projection is obviously more stable than 35MM projection, the eyes cannot distinguish between 35MM film projection of 3-D and digital projection of 3-D.


Article:
""There are very few technical challenges left for deploying 3D," declares Joshua Greer, president of RealD, which holds a monopoly on 3D presentation systems."

Reply:
There are at least 3 competing big name digital 3-D projection systems on the market, being Real-D, Dolby 3-D and NuVision, although I can understand that Joshua Greer would like to see that point differently. It is true, though, that Real-D does have the most aggressive marketing strategy and has managed to convince more theatres than any other 3-D projection brand to incorporate their technology in the new digital projection rooms.



Real D Projection adapter

Article:
"Four releases to date have suggested that 3D could drive studio profits in the next decade. Disney's Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons and The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D and Sony's Monster House all earned three times as much revenue per screen as the 2D version of the same film on their first weekend of release."

Reply:
The real fact is that the cinemas showing these movies charged more for the cinema tickets, explaining the higher profits. So although 3-D can mean higher revenue in the short term, it is not a sustainable and realistic business model in the long term, as consumers will not continue to pay higher prices for their cinema tickets. Will you? Especially if 3-D becomes something of a standard?


Article:
"It also currently costs an extra US$10m-15m to make a 3D movie"

Reply:
Compared to what exactly and for what kind of a movie? Animation will quickly cost 130-150% in 3-D, while live-action will easily cost 150-175% of a regular movie. Talk to any stereographer and 3-D consultant like myself and you will hear the same numbers.


Article:
""None of the 3D systems in the past allowed you to immerse yourself in the frame," Walden Media CEO Cary Granat tells Reuters."

Reply:
I am sorry, but that is just pure nonsense. Go and see 1953's 'House of Wax' or 'Dial M for Murder', followed by 'Chicken Little' or 'Meet the Robinsons' and have another look at that statement. Immersing yourself in the frame with 3-D is everything to do with the 3-D camera work, not the technology. And they did that a hell of a lot better in the 50s and 80s than they are doing right now.

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If you are a journalist or an editor and you would like to learn more about 3-D Film, from a more accurate perspective, I will be more than happy to write you a piece on the subject. Large and well-respected magazines like Animation Magazine have already published some of my writing on 3-D focusing on 3-D stereoscopic animation production and the technical and creative implications of 3-D filming and animating.

Alexander Lentjes
3-D Revolution Productions

Glib Reduction

3-D glasses for 3-D movies – can we do without?

Nature follows the Path of Least Resistance

Like water finding its way down a hill, people take the easiest route to their goal. And when it comes to entertainment, every barrier is one too many. With 3-D movies, people hate wearing the 3-D specs and the sheer mention of the need to wear special glasses can turn people away from a 3-D film. Almost every article and Blog entry about 3-D screens and 3-D films mentions the need or absence of the need for 3-D glasses. Bloggers and journalists cry: ‘Silly glasses’, ‘Cumbersome specs’ and ‘Goofy glasses’ as a standard. Why this resistance to 3-D eye wear? Is it really that bad to wear plastic or cardboard glasses for 90 minutes when 1/3 of the world’s population wears glasses on a daily basis? From the adverse reaction, I gather it must be. Very well then, but what ways of seeing a 3-D film currently actually exist?

On the side of glasses there’s:

Polarized glasses
Used in Real-D cinemas, using horizontal and vertical light wavelength separation. So horizontal lightwaves will pass through the left-eye glass and the vertical lightwaves through the right-eye. This means full colour 3-D images, but the need for a silver screen to retain polarization of the light.


Dolby 3-D
Interference wavelength, or colour bandwidth separation. Using slightly different parts of the RGB spectrum, full colour 3-D images are possible with the use of a normal cinema screen. Pretty amazing technology, sometimes also called 'souped-up anaglyph'. But it doesn't bear any resemblance to anaglyph 3-D whatsoever.

The Dolby 3-D glasses will look a lot like shutterglasses, only flatter and lighter



Artistic impression of how Dolby 3-D works


Anaglyph
Red-blue or red-green filters. Been around for over 100 years and is unbeatable for its simplicity and application in pretty much all 3-D media. Film, print, web and RGB TV (4:4:4 transmission and viewing).

Dr. Who donning anaglyph 3-D glasses to see a dimensional rift

ColorCode
Amber-Blue filters; basically anaglyph but with two other Colour Triangle opposites. Another possibility would be Green-Purple. Quick, patent that idea!


Chromadepth
Hue-dependent colour-depth placement. As you can see, it limits the kind of imagery you can display with this technique.

Red comes forward, blue recedes

Pulfrich
One dark, one transparent filter for delayed image reception by the right eye. Combined with a spinning camera or horizontally moving imagery on different planes that makes for pretty well working 3-D. Dizzying, though.

3rd Rock from the Sun made Pulfrich famous with their special 3-D episode

Field/frame sequential
On-off-left-right electronic shutters. These are most often used for TV and computer viewing of 3-D and can also be found at some IMAX 3-D performances.

Wireless shutterglasses

Chroma
Hold-your-head-very-still parallel side-by-side viewing with a plastic separator. A great idea with wide-angle 3-D results, but don't move or tilt your head!

Anachrome's Chroma glasses


Glassless methods available are:

Lenticular
Like the famous Philips 3-D Plasma screen and Spielberg’s plans for a massive LCD/DLP video wall for use in future cinemas. Horizontal striped lenslets do the work, halving resolution of the image and applying a bit of a blur to the 3-D end result.

Artistic impression of a Philips 3-D screen. Of course the chip can't fly past the screen's edge...

Fresnel
Lenslets that work much the same as lenticulars, but in a round fashion. This allows for more angles of view, but less detail in the image.


Raster Screen
The Ivanov Soviet idea of a fine horizontal mesh in front of a screen with imagery pretty much equal to lenticular imagery. This technique reduces the available viewing zones dramatically, but when in a sweet spot, the 3-D is impressive. And oh-so glassless!


Curved Screen
Very sweet-spot sensitive reflective curved surface. Nice for single-person display, not good for a large audience.


Holography
This is a very different way of creating and displaying 3-D imagery and cannot really be mentioned in this lineup because in holographics the subject manner is captured as-is, from all angles, rather than from a set, fixed angle as happens in stereography. Stereo=2 angles, Holo=all angles. In this way, holography is a form of virtual theatre with no specific camera angle as opposed to cinematography, with a controlled camera angle. Also, holographic imagery requires an insane amount of bandwidth to be recorded and transmitted, making theatrical display a thing of the distant future.

Strong & weak points

All methods have their strong points and their drawbacks. The most obvious drawback of glasses is the need to wear them. After that, the quality of the materials used will influence the ability to separate left-eye and right-eye imagery. And thirdly, it’s inconvenient for distributors and theatre owners as the glasses cost money, get dirty, break and get lost. Most glasses options also suffer from colour problems as the 3-D is encoded in the image by using colours, and thus resulting in different colours going to different eyes. Anaglyph 3-D being the most obvious example of this issue.

The glassless options all have the big problem of angle of view (with varied degrees of precision sweet spots), where not sitting in a sweet spot, or viewing zone, means losing the 3-D image, seeing an inverse, hollow 3-D image or seeing mid-image artefacts that ruin the enjoyment of the picture. The only technique escaping this problem is holography, but, as said, it’s got some serious other drawbacks.


Kodak's silly 3-D HD solution. It certainly fixes the sweet-spot issue!

The problem with viewing zones can be attacked by placing cinema seats in a specific pattern, basically resulting in much fewer seats in the house. The Soviet 3-D cinemas employing the Raster Screen technique indeed had much fewer seats than normal cinemas have. With subsidised cinemas that’s not a problem, but in a free market economy such a solution is uneconomical. And in a home situation, will people be prepared to always sit in an exact spot on their sofa, at an exact distance to the screen, or is wearing a pair of specs to watch 3-D TV the path of least resistance?

3-D glasses for 3-D movies – can we do without?

Today is Yesterday’s Tomorrow

Wax Darth Maul in a 3-D photograph

The title sounds obvious, but what it means is that the marvels of the future that were talked about in the past, should be happening just about now. An excellent example of how that doesn’t necessarily hold true is the assertion of Jaws 3-D director Joe Alves in a 1983 Starburst interview that:
“(…) I can definitely see Superman 4 or the new Star Wars (Return of the Jedi) being made in 3-D. (…) Imagine flying a space ship over the audience’s heads, or having Superman fly out? Actually, the latter would be difficult.”

Besides having a point about Superman flying out of the screen being difficult (he’d look like a miniature Superman and couldn’t fly anywhere off-screen effectively), he missed the mark on his assertion of those two films being shot and released in 3-D. Hollywood lost interest in 3-D film very quickly when the audiences got tired of the onslaught of 3-D movies after just one year of 3-D film exhibition in 1983. 25 mediocre 3-D movies in one year can do that to an audience. With the 1953 boom more than twice that amount were released theatrically: 65 3-D movies within two years alone!

Ironically, Star Wars: a New Hope is right now being dimensionalized for 3-D re-re-re-release next year (with ‘Empire’ and ‘Jedi’ on hold until this proves to be a profitable undertaking) and Superman Returns utilized dimensionalized sections in its IMAX release. Clearly, New Hollywood feels that digital projection is a guarantee for audience acceptance of 3-D, ignoring the possibility of audience exhaustion and bad use of 3-D being a factor in 3-D film’s previous crashes.


Dan Symmes shooting with his Dimension-3 Camera Adapter in 1982

In another of yesterday’s articles on 3-D film, written by a fresh-faced Daniel Symmes in 1983’s Cinefantastique, Dan writes:
“(…) Most filmmakers simply don’t understand the possibilities and limitations of the process. (…) Properly used, 3-D is probably one of the last frontiers of magic, but it’s very rarely used properly. Right now, 3-D is thrown at you, poked at you and so sloppily done that it creates eyestrain.”

The assumption Symmes made was that filmmakers would, by now, be using 3-D as an integral part of the story and use it in a proper, educated way. Because 3-D filmmaking was never taught in any film school, though, this never happened and with the disappearance of 3-D off cinema screens for 20 years, the existing knowledge of 3-D filmmaking gained a thick layer of dust. Now, with 3-D’s latest resurgence, directors who get their hands on a 3-D project for the first time and have to use the medium without fully understanding it will indeed run the risk of making terrible mistakes. Because although the concept of 3-D may be easy to grasp, its correct execution is a finely tuned piece of professionalism that cannot be underestimated.


Dreamworks' Monsters vs. Aliens

3ality Digital’s Steve Schklair shares this vision with us, telling us:
“One of my biggest concerns is the quality of 3D that reaches the screen during the next two years. This business is now in its infancy and as such is very fragile. Our audience does not know the difference between 3D and good 3D. Someday, after a few really well shot films reach the market, the audience will be able to discern between the two. But for now, the market can ill afford a really bad 3D film in release by novices. This concern is shared by many of us in Hollywood, including Dreamworks and RealD.”

Well said.

Today is Yesterday’s Tomorrow