Psychology of 3-D - Memories

Metalstorm 3-D. The most successful 3-D movie trailer of all time

The success and the future of Stereo 3-D film making depends on a psychological factor: memories. How do we, humans, perceive the world and store our memories? Storytelling is the conjuring up of situations and images in our minds. We identify with the hero of the story and imagine ourselves in his or her shoes as the story is being told. This is equal to the written or spoken word or the visually presented one. So when we see a movie or television program we compare the images presented to the images stored in our memories. And how are these images stored? Flat. Not in 3-Dimensions.

Seeing a 3-D image will put a viewer in the now, in an abstract mode of fight or flee, as this is real life, real danger, real objects right in front of him or her. It does not touch upon our memory banks, recognition or fantasies, as these are all stored and imagined flat. So the experience of stereoscopic 3-D visuals cannot escape the factor of ‘here and now’ and the viewer of 3-D images will not be taken away on a dream cloud of story and fantasy. Instead, he or she will take in the volumetric images ‘as is’. More or less like a circus act.
Think about it: what sticks with you most, thinking back to a recently enjoyed 3-D movie; the moment the hero kissed the girl or the shot where he poked his sword out of the screen, right into your face?


The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

Clever, intelligent use of 3-D can overcome this serious limitation. 3-D film making has to grow up and evolve to escape the primal imagery and primal reaction it manages to conjure up at the moment. 2-D film making has a slight advantage with 100 years of cinematic culture versus a total of about 8 years of 3-D film production (1923/24, ’53/’54, ’83/’84, and 2007/’08). There is some serious catching up to do!

Psychology of 3-D - Memories

A short refresher on 3-D film history

Chicken Little in 3-D by Disney

3-D film, or stereoscopic film, is a peculiar art form. Stereoscopy, the art of displaying images the way we see them with our two eyes - and combining brain - has been around since the renaissance. The moment these visionary painters understood space and the ways eyes see space better, they were experimenting with drawings in stereo. And so 3-D photography has been around as long as regular photography has, yet it has always stood in the shadow of its natural brother. There is no problem at all in placing two lenses next to each other instead of just one, using the same film but splitting the image on the negative in two for left-eye and right-eye image representation. But a device is then needed to view the stereoscopic photograph; a stereo viewer - on which the Viewmaster™ was later based. This necessity of an external viewer has always been an inhibition to a visual art form, which should have overtaken regular photography as the going standard. It never did because the obstacle of the viewing device proved to be too great a one.

After building the first practical movie camera in history, the Lumiere brothers built a stereoscopic one as well. A lot of their experimental film is actually one of the two reels they normally used to shoot their 3-D. The arrival of a train at la Ciotat (1895) was filmed in 3-D as well as ‘flat’, so the audience did not just run from a train on screen for the first time, they ran for a train approaching them in 3-D for the first time! However much more spectacular 3-D film proved to be over regular film, the necessity of a viewer, now often a pair of anaglyphic red-blue glasses, did again keep it down in terms of popular acceptance.

It is safe to say distributors promoting recent film releases in 3-D are twisting the truth when they claim they have just released the first feature length 3-D film in history because this was done as early as 1922, by an American film called ‘The Power of Love’. The audience would wear 3-D glasses very similar to the modern frame-sequential IMAX glasses, but with the distinct difference of being mechanical rather than electronic to control the shutter closing the left-eye and right-eye side in sequence. Again, distributors and sales people love to proclaim this is all very new technology, painting the brilliant stereoscopic cinematic inventors of a century ago out of the picture.

A short refresher on 3-D film history