TECHNOLOGY FEATURE VIDEO GUIDE
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The Third Dimension
Over the past 10 years 3D has been hailed as the big leap forward in imaging technology but, despite the heavyweight support of James Cameron, cinema audiences for films in the format are declining while broadcasters, including ESPN and the BBC, have cancelled future productions using it. Kevin Hilton takes a look at a technology that polarises opinion.
TECHNOLOGICAL trends can sometimes be short-lived, being the greatest thing ever one minute and a load of rubbish the next. That fate seems to be befalling 3D, which had several periods of being a cult favourite or diverting novelty during the heyday of film and recently moved into the mainstream through the advent of new digital technologies. Despite heavy investment by the big studios that boom
GLOSSARY
appears to be fading, as cinemagoers shift their allegiance back to 2D after the initial infatuation with the whole idea of 3D during the late 2000s. Formally called stereoscopy 3D imaging, this technology was first demonstrated during the 1860s as still photographs and moved into the cinema in the 1920s. Still photographer and cinema pioneer William Fries-Greene patented a stereoscopic system for moving pictures in the late
Stereoscopic 3D imaging The process that enables the creation of a photographic or cinematographic image with the appearance of depth, as in real life. Using the principle of interaxial stereoscopy the foreground of a cinema or TV picture can appear to be in relief from the background areas, which in turn gives the sensation of being spatially discrete and distinct. This mimics human binocular sight, which is based on two retinal images produced by each eye with approximately 2.5in separation between the two. The left eye receives more of the left side of an object, while the right eye perceives more of the right. Where the two views of a subject meet is called the convergence, while the plane of convergence is known as the stereo window, which should usually be either on the screen when projected, or broadcast, or just behind it. Subjects that are before the plane of convergence appear to be in front of the screen, with those behind the plane appearing at the back of the screen, all of which produces a sense of three dimensions.
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1890s but it was not until the 1920s that more viable approaches appeared. These were based on an anaglyph process, in which two views of a subject were shot at the same time and then printed on to film in different colours, usually green and red. Viewers had to wear special glasses, with one green lens and one red lens, to appreciate the effect. The first film to use this process was The Power of Love, a melodrama released in September 1922. A more efficient system
was Polaroid 3D, which used two Polaroid lenses on the cameras; one for light waves on a single plane, the other for waves in the perpendicular. Two individual images were then projected and the audience again wore glasses but with polarised lenses, one for each plane. The result was a clearer binocular picture and better colour. The first Polaroid 3D film was the 1936 black and white Italian production Beggar’s Wedding.
“The initial novelty and optimism surrounding 3D cinema has faded over the past two to three years.” Kevin Hilton
Hollywood embraced the technology in the 1950s in a bid to lure people away from television and back to the cinema. A string of films appeared between 1952 and 1954 in variations of the Polaroid system. The breakthrough was 1952’s Bwana Devil, directed by Arch Oboler using a dual- strip format (i.e. two reels of film to create the binocular effect) called Natural Vision. More successful and influential was House of Wax (1953), starring Vincent Price. Despite Price’s star power and the novelty of stereoscopy, by the end of 1953 audiences were abandoning the cinema and returning to their TV sets, partly because of bad films and partly due to inherent problems in the 3D processes of the time, which could cause headaches and
eyestrain. For the studios the cost of producing two prints became a financial burden. 3D was in the doldrums for
the rest of the ’50s and into the early 1960s. A mini- revival started in the late ’60s, instigated by Arch Oboler, whose 1966 The Bubble was shot in Space-Vision 3D. This used two images, one above the other, on a single strip of film, so only one projector with a special lens was needed to screen the movie. A rival approach, Stereovision, appeared in 1970. This was also based on a single strip of film but the images were side-by-side and projected through an anamorphic lens using Polaroid filters. A new era for the technology came in the early 2000s with director James Cameron’s Ghosts of the Abyss (2003). It was shot in IMAX
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