There is a fascinating article quoting a letter from Walter Murch with his thoughts on the issues with 3D films, below is a small excerpt but read ROGER EBERT’S JOURNAL post for the whole piece.
“The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues – darkness and “smallness” – are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen – say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.
But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.
If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now “opened up” so that your lines of sight are almost – almost – parallel to each other.
We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn’t. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the “CPU” of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.
Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.”
thanks for the tip Ray!
photo by Dominic’s Pics on Flickr // licensed via Creative Commons 2.0
One film I am very keen to see in 3D is a new film by Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams:
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people freaked out when moving pictures (film) was first projected over 100 years ago. it was just as significant of a change in reality as 3D – probably more so.
i agree with murch generally – 3D is just a gimmick in my opinion, especially in the sense that it doesn’t produce better movies. story telling is still storytelling…
3D is here to stay in terms of big budget hollywood films – independent ones, I guess it’s only a matter of time.