Espoo Ciné is all about films, but they managed to fit a small seminar somewhere in between the shows there, with quite an ambitious title: “The End of Film – The Future of Cinema”. I was invited there as a speaker to talk about digital distribution, and with me there was a video artist Luc Courchesne from Canada, and Kasimir Lehto from Stereoscape.
Photo from espoocine.fi
Kasimir had brought along a psychologist who’s been active researching the 3D and how the human eye and brains form a three-dimensional vision.
In his research he uses an eye-tracking system, that tracks the movement of the eye when it’s looking at a picture. With this method, you can estimate what are the most interesting parts of the picture that the people keep looking at, and how it changes if you go from two-dimensional picture into stereoscopic one.
In one test, they had a scene with a boy and a girl chatting by the pool. In 2D version, the perception was much more focused on the actors, and viewers remembered very well the dialogue afterwards. But in 3D, people paid much more attention to other elements, like moving water, and didn’t remember the dialogue so well.
Photo from espoocine.fi
Shooting in 3D gives a little less control for the filmmaker on where to guide the focus of the viewer – they may want to focus on other, less important things, and miss something. I started to think would this affect also to the work of a director – meaning, would the director need to build wider shots differently, and even ask the actors to act a bit “over” in order to deliver their performance across the screen, and then tone it down a bit to closeups.
Probably not, but the storytelling for 3D need to change. The rules we’ve used in today’s cinema don’t apply 100% in the future, and this will also affect the way the films of future will look like.
Photo from espoocine.fi
I’m sitting on a car, doing location scouting for Iron Sky, with the team, and since we’re all bored rushing on an autobahn, I thought about doing a small interview with Mika Orasmaa, the cinematographer for Iron Sky, about 3D.
What’s the meaning of 3D to the film? Is it as important as color or sound, or just another new thing to rip the customers off of their money with?
- I wouldn’t say it has the same importance as color for example did – to be honest, I’m not that enthusiastic about 3D so far, but probably that will change as time goes by. For me, it takes the first 15 minutes to get used to the glasses and the fact that colour tones are much darker, and I miss much of the immersion.
How about in let’s say ten years, what’s the situation then? Do we still make 2D movies?
- If they are able to make the screening technology work so that you don’t need glasses anymore, and shooting in 3D doesn’t require such huge systems as it still does nowadays, I don’t see why they wouldn’t change entirely to 3D in the future. People experience the world in three dimensions anyway, so why not the films, too.
- I’ve already seen these displays that don’t require the 3D glasses. Those you need to watch from a certain distance, and you need to watch “through” them. It takes a moment to adjust to it, since you have to use some muscles in your eye you don’t normally use. Some people get it quick, and for some people it can take anything from 15 to 30 minutes to get used to the effect. But once you get it, it works very well.
In what ways do you think that doing films in 3D will change the way the films are made?
- With 3D, you need to take in consideration the way the people like to watch 3D picture, which is quite different from 2D. The basic fact is that wider shots work better – what used to be a closeup, works better in medium closeup and so on.
- One of the problems today is that the filmmakers need to do both versions from the same material – which leads into big compromises. It’s either unwatchable in 3D or boring in 2D.
- One of the biggest changes in 3D is the depth of field, which you can’t use so much to blur down the backgrounds or foregrounds, because it looks bad in 3D. So for a filmmaker it’s harder to point out the things the audience should focus on. So if one wants the viewer to focus on actors, the best way is actually to do a much simplier settings.
I’ve always felt that the actors, especially the female actors, look much thinner and much smaller in 3D than in 2D – it’s almost like meeting an actress, they are always so thin and frail when you see them in real life. It’s said that camera gives you extra 20 pounds of weight, but with 3D this doesn’t seem to be the case. Why do you think that is?
- That’s a good point, and probably very true. In 3D, the viewer definitively has much more accurate understanding on the proportions of the elements, so the tiny actoresses or short actors feel much more the size they really are.
So Mika, what’s the coolest film you’ve seen in 3D so far?
- I think the animations work quite well. I haven’t seen UP yet, but Bolt had some great moments.
- I also went to see the short Avatar preview in the theaters, and it seemed to work quite well. Cameron had really understood not to fiddle around too much with the focal length. It’s easier for the eye, and makes more pleasant experience for the viewer. They had considered very carefully the technology, and used the foreground elements very extensively.
