Specs appeal

Put away those blue-and-red glasses. Stereoscopic films may be back in vogue, but the new breed of projection systems have little to do with the old anaglyph technology. We probe Hollywood’s claim that true 3D filmmaking is here to stay.

The term ‘3D’ may have belonged to stereoscopic cinema long before CG came along, but that’s not necessarily something to be proud of. True, stereo films were wowing audiences as far back as 1903 when the Lumière brothers made a blurry train wobble about on the screen for up to a minute, but until recently, the format has yielded more novelty than substance.

Stereoscopic films briefly came back into vogue with the moviegoing public during the 1950s and 1980s. But their B-movie shock tactics and disorientating technology left audiences with nothing more than a mild headache. Anaglyphic projection, and those iconic blue- and-red specs, are now just a footnote in cinema history. Stereoscopic film making is a gimmick, a cinematic dodo too stupid to survive. It’s rightly dead.

So why is every studio of note intent on digging the corpse back up? Sony Imageworks shocked life into the beast when it had success with 3D screenings of Open Season and Polar Express, using the new breed of digital stereoscopic display systems. Then Disney Digital 3D let the monster loose on the townsfolk by running 3D versions of Chicken Little that pulled in a per-screen box office average two to three times that of the 2D version. When Meet the Robinsons came out in March this year in the US, the 13 per cent of the cinemas showing the 3D version took over a quarter of its opening weekend’s box-office gross.

You don’t need the new generation of polarised 3D glasses to see that projected earnings have been the first things studios have tried to reach out and touch. Addressing industry analysts at a Bank of America conference, Michael Campbell, CEO of the top US movie theatre chain Regal, pointed out the value of switching to the new digital projection systems. He claimed that box-office results from the handful of films made with digital 3D technology released so far have convinced him that audiences are happy to pay $2.50 to $4 on top of the regular ticket price, preferring them by a two-to-one margin to standard screenings.

Now DreamWorks has announced that by 2009, by which time nearly 6,000 cinemas in the US will be 3D compatible, its animated films will be produced using stereoscopic 3D techniques. The new wave is here, and experts predict that there will be well over a dozen live-action and animated 3D films in theatres by the end of the decade.

Chequebooks have flipped open and several big-league directors have been appointed to the helm of mega-budget 3D projects. James Cameron has confirmed that his big-screen comeback, Avatar, will be a state-of-the-art sci-fi movie filmed entirely in 3D. Director Robert Zemeckis is bringing Germanic poetry to life (metaphorically) with Beowulf. And although details about DreamWorks’ Monsters vs Aliens flick are sketchy, it has announced that the film will open on the lucrative Memorial Day weekend holiday in the US in 2009, the same day as Avatar.

3D treatments of 2D films look like a financially viable way of dusting off old films for a second money-spinning airing as well. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is being converted by ILM and Disney into 3D for an October US release, and George Lucas has said he’ll open the vaults to certain space- based epics in his back catalogue. Even Irish rock gods U2 will be competing for theatre space after their full-length concert film U2 3D wowed the preview audience at Cannes in May. Nearly every household-name movie studio has at least one or two 3D titles in production, though few release dates have been written in stone. But as DreamWorks’ CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg observes, making animated films in 3D adds close to $15 million to the costs of production. This means that while it might be an expense that fat-cat studios can write off, it’s not an option that small-budget films can try as well. “The mainstream of moviemaking is going to be the 3D experience,” says Katzenberg. “And consumers will pay a premium.” It looks like the studios are willing to spend money to make money, but even a cursory flick through the history books suggests that stereoscopic 3D has no real staying power. So why do they think that it will be any different this time around?

POLARISING OPINION
Technology that actually works is the driving force behind this resurgence. Stereo viewing systems have come a long way from the old anaglyph days, and cinemas have come a long way from the B-movie fleapits. Although there are competing digital technologies in the works, including a highly anticipated system by Dolby, LA-based company Real D is the only one commercially available today. Promising 1,000 installations in US cinemas by November this year, Real D is working with virtually every major studio, and about 25 different production companies, to develop 3D-ready projects to run on them.

Advancements in technology mean that Real D’s projection quality creates a seamless perception of depth, allowing the audience to forget all about the ‘effects’ and engage in a world of rich perspectives and pin-sharp detail instead.

Joshua Greer, president and co-founder of Real D, says the technology “is finally at a point where you can deliver an incredibly high quality, comfortable 3D experience.” The technique requires its own brand of glasses with circular polarised lenses, crucially allowing wearers to move their heads without losing the 3D effect. The set-up includes a single projector, with a liquid-crystal screen placed in front of the lens, and a specially formulated silver screen. Images are then beamed to the audiences’ left and right eyes at a frame rate of 72fps, making the image look continuous and appear to leap out of the screen in a credible way. Like all new technology, however, it carries a hefty price tag. If a theatre already has digital projection, an upgrade to a Real D system costs about $40,000 to $50,000 upfront, with annual fees of about $25,000 on top of that.

It is costly advancements like this that are out to shame the distorted blue-and-red images that the early attempts at 3D yielded. The new aim is to make the 3D elements of a movie vital to the story so that audiences engage with the plot rather than just ‘coo-ing’ at the cheap effects. “What is really exciting is the way that content producers are thinking about 3D,” says Greer. “They realise that this is simply not a fad or a gimmick, but a whole new way to tell stories and entertain. Films like Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf should really elevate the medium when they’re released.”

IN-DEPTH STORYTELLING
Buzz Hayes is the senior producer of stereoscopic feature films over at Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio responsible for creating Beowulf. He’s seen 3D cinema come and go, but thinks if it’s to have any staying power this time around it will have to be developed as a complementary layer to the film narrative, rather than just a gimmicky effect. The art form must develop alongside the technology, it seems. “It’s nice to have the novelty of 3D. But it must have a reason to be in the story,” says Hayes. “Success will be down to what I call ‘stereoscripting,’ where the 3D version of the film is produced in tandem with the 2D version. In Monster House [the production crew] started the 3D take on the film two months before the 2D version was finished. This meant the 3D team had to go into the archives and set up two cameras to turn the shots into 3D, which was difficult as you’ve got artists re-working shots that they hadn’t seen being made. With Beowulf, we are shooting both at the same time.”

Hayes thinks that what will sell these new 3D films is subtlety, as opposed to the constant big wow factors the previous waves of movies employed. “You’ve got to mix up the subtle with the exaggerated,” he says. “It’s tempting to make everything jump out, but while foreground objects can give good perspective, for instance, they can become distracting if constantly brought out. You need to focus on the action, like on who is talking. There is no need to beat people over the head with 3D in every frame.”

Despite the hype surrounding 3D, it is clear that the movie business is driven by content as well as format. 3D veterans like Hayes understand the potential novelty trap of 3D and he knows that this new film technique will require a different approach to normal movies. Hayes’ way to do that is by recognising that the brain needs an extra beat to take in the 3D image on the screen, which is why he employs longer shot lengths to give viewers more time to linger on all the information they’re presented with. “On Monster House the average shot length was four seconds,” says Hayes. “With Beowulf we aimed for eight.”

PROJECTED EARNINGS
Damian Wader from In-Three, the California-based stereoscopic 3D facility tapped to produce 3D versions of Lucas’ Star Wars franchise, notes that the new 3D technology has emerged at the same time as advancements in digital cinema systems and CGI film production. He thinks this makes true 3D a more viable option than ever. “The quality is there, both in production of content and the projection of it,” he says. “The dramatic impact has always been there, even when [the quality] was lousy, but now that new standards are being set, it’s starting to create a groundswell of excitement in moviegoers.”

With current spirits high and the money flowing, it looks like the 3D bubble is expanding healthily. Theatre owners are sold on the prospect of wrestling the dwindling numbers of patrons from the comfort of home cinemas, and studios have found a counter-attraction to the cheapness of pirated movies. But is this just the boom before the bubble bursts again? Will production reach a plateau and level off like it has in the past? Buzz Hayes sees through the ‘second coming’ hysteria, resigning this new wave of 3D to a niche, but profitable, market in the future. “I think it’s unlikely that every new film will be made solely in 3D,” he says. “But I do think that 3D films will fill a similar role to today’s blockbusters. It’s conceivable that, just as VFX films comprise the majority of big box-office releases today, 3D could take over this segment of productions in the not-too-distant future. It’s already proven that 3D films are more attractive to audiences than their 2D counterparts, as most 3D films in the past three years have taken nearly three times as much of their gross.”

So can we avoid a new case of been there, done that, got the headache? If this new wave of 3D technology is going to succeed in reinvigorating the cinematic blockbuster, it will have to learn from its past mistakes. But if the fledgling industry can keep on developing a comfortable and unobtrusive format, for filmmakers that are sensitive to the subtleties of 3D storytelling, then it just may be time to raise those glasses in appreciation of stereoscopic 3D again.