3D Films – Why we don’t like them. And how we could.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about 3D films over the last couple of years. “3D is shit”, “Fucking gimmick” and “it won’t fucking last” are just a few of the things my mum has told me about it over a wholesome family breakfast.

But I think I know why 3D is so terrible that even though so many of us pay the extra money to see it, we rarely enjoy it.

1. The Directors

The Directors making 3D movies from scratch, not just doubling the film up later, are tired old men who just want to look cool for keeping up with technology but don’t bother updating how they film anything for the different medium. Same angles, same people walking in and off screen fucking with our perspective and still going for that artistic blurry shot that makes an audience’s eyes water

...in pain not at the beauty. 

I’m basically saying these film makers are having a mid life crisis and we would all be better served if they would just buy a super car and bang some hookers.

2. Perspective

As mentioned above the film makers don’t really change their tune. We the audience are expected to sit there and look at what they want, how they want. It doesn’t matter if they’ve used perspective to have a dragon less than 2 feet from our faces looking hungry. If they want to bring firey death slowly into focus as our eyes desperately strain to see the potentially lethal situation, they will do.

 This is how they see us.

For a 2D film thats fine. Our eyes are only focusing at a single point so its not a strain to have blur here and there for artistic effect and to isolate a subject. But for 3D it just wont do. The human eye likes to look around in 3 dimensional spaces and it gets awfully confused when the thing your looking straight at isn’t in focus and something you have no interest in off in the corner is crisp as the morning frost. You may have heard a lot of people, maybe even yourself complain about their eyes hurting a bit during and after watchign a 3D movie.

Filmmakers haven’t twigged that in real life, which I have on good authority from a scientist is in 3D, people choose what to look at and what not to. We automatically blur what we aren’t looking straight at and instead of acknowledging that fact and making use of that art history course they all were forced to take in college that tells you to use lines and objects to draw the eye towards the subject , the filmmakers turn round with a big FUCK YOU and say

 

3. Frame Rate

The cinema is guilty of this far more than the home Blu-ray. I remember watching Avatar at the Imax and finding it a bit jumpy. There were a lot of epic looking scenes that suffered from the motion blur caused by moving the cameras too quickly and bear in mind that the cameras were collecting 3 dimensional imagery so when it blurred it blurred across dimensions. I later learned this was because James Cameron (The dude having both a mid-life crisis and the menopause) had decided that we really didn’t need more than 24 frames per second, the standard for any "Normal" movie.

I want to say right now that 24fps is fine for 2D but not for 3D, there are far too many perspective shifts and panning issues for 24 little frames to keep up. A lot of TV’s will make this up now by inserting frames made up from the next and previous frames and this whilst not a perfect solution it does make you wonder. 

"They had how much fucking money and it took days to render a single frame but they couldn’t afford to just stick a couple of extra ones in there when a TV will do it for free?"

You see once again we’re back to my first point about directors being assholes because whilst they happily adopt new technologies, they rarely adapt themselves to it.

4. Rebuilding Collections

Lets see, when VHS came out we were promised the most amazing movie watching experience ever (or at least a cheap way to record the telly). When DVD came out we were promised the most amazing movie watching experience ever. When HD DVD came out.....When Blu-Ray crushed HD DVD.....When they realised they could fit 3D on a Blu-Ray and started converting every movie they could find that was never meant to be watched that way. 

Theres a pattern here and seeing as technology is already moving beyond 1080p we can be guaranteed that you’re just going to repeat the cycle. Essentially dear greedy studios, we’re tired of rebuilding collections of movies we already own just because you’ve added pixels, extra dimensions or a few minutes of film you didn’t think were good enough to be there the first time. I really cannot blame internet pirates for stealing your supposed sales because as far as I’m concerned updates should be free and by the laws of physics an equal reaction is due in response to your greedy actions.

Advice for consumers
 Some new TV’s will convert and upscale your old DVD’s to 1080p and make them 3D and probably do just as good a job as the studio re-re-releasing it bothered to do. Let’s not fall into the trap.

You’ll also find if you fail a few times and have to purchase a repurposed movie that computer animated movies make the jump better to 3D than regular movies as they were created in a way that should allow their makers to go back and just add an extra camera and tweak the virtual spaces to make a decent 3D image (Assuming thats what they do). I actually quite enjoyed Shrek 3D even if the textures did appear flat and layered.

An open letter moment to directors and studios
 Please change your game if you want 3D to succeed. You can’t call it a more immersive experience and expect us to sit there doing nothing whilst you make our eyes bleed by using old filmmaking techniques and you cannot expect people to buy 3D movies when they were never designed to be shown that way....Which technically at this point is all of them and will be until one of you roots out the fixed f/11 lenses.