3D killed the Indie filmmaker star!

The world has always had a 3rd dimension! But why is everyone so interested in it, all of a sudden!? The answer is very simple… capitalism! Money! Profit! The studios’ profit, to be precise!

Since our cave man times, we’ve been trying to graphically represent what our eyes see. Attempts to reproduce depth go as far back as old Egypt where very simply, closer elements were drawn bigger then background counterparts. The Greeks took it a little further but it was only in the 14th century, during the Renaissance that we started producing 3 dimensional images. Amazing that it took 4 centuries for the rest of the most brilliant minds of the time, to get it… That’s right, 400 years earlier, an Iraqi physicist and mathematician wrote about how light projected conically into our eyes, explaining how we perceived depth.

After the event of photography, creating 3 dimensional images was at the push of a button. Nowadays, we use depth of field and composition to enhance that feeling. It takes artistry and skill, sometimes luck, to masterfully reproduce it and that’s why just buying the latest camera suffices… not!

So what is 3D really!? If the 3rd dimension already lives in so many of our paintings and pictures, maybe what we should be asking is: what are we calling 3D these days?! Shouldn’t it be called 4th dimension, because what the world is all hyped about, is a dimension that lives outside of the plane where the image is originated. But for some reason someone decided they were re-inventing the wheel… a good 12o years ago or so…

The first reason that comes to mind why we shouldn’t go 3D yet; the technology isn’t really there yet! We should be worrying about bigger problems that persist in the way we reproduce images (still or motion) today.

We’re still limited by handicapped color modules like RGB and CMYK, which both present their own set of virtues and limitations.

Try looking at a picture of your son while he’s away in college and you miss him to death… your heart fills with emotions, because you’re able to interpret the conglomerate of CMYK dots (RGB in this case, since you’re looking at a screen) and interpret that it represents the image of your son.

Yeah, that’s my gorgeous older son! ; )~

Now try showing it to his dog, who has no idea what college is and why his beloved master left him for no good reason… he might just ignore it, or maybe chew it… no, not because he’s mad… because he just sees what’s really there; a conglomerate of dots! Nothing more… so, wouldn’t you think that’s what we should be addressing before we want to add a 4th dimension to what now will be 2 layers of conglomerated dots, that somehow are supposed to represent 2 images, each intended for one eye and with that create “3D”?!

The first lecture on moving beyond RGB and into Spectral Color (the way our eyes see) happened in the past decade, at Siggraph 2007… So why haven’t we heard anything else about it, you may ask?! Because no one found an angle to cash on it, fast enough… and maybe we need another 40 years or so, for our “most brilliant minds” to get it… it took 4 centuries before the Renaissance… but things move a little faster today… so lets be hopeful I can enjoy a spectral 4D movie when I’m 80…

So after the monumental failure of Blue Ray, where some genius thought we would all go and buy all the films we already own for double the price, so we could watch them in HD… a 120 year old technology seemed like the only rope of salvation…?!

Marketing is the driving force of the world we live in. Whether it is done intentionally, unintentionally, by the producers themselves or anyone else for them… a good example is the whole HDSLR phenomenon! All it took was one brilliant mistake and lack of vision of one producer and we all offered them, what has probably been the world’s largest best free marketing campaign in human history…

3D is no exception. Great marketing, turned into hype. A generation that has no better excuse to get their asses off computer and voila! 3D is in! 3D is the future!

“Do we need it? NO!
Do we want it? YEAH!
This is the new shit
Stand up and admit!”

Wise words of Marilyn Manson

-Does it cause tremendous stress to your eyes? Yeah!

-Can it give you head aches?! Yeah!

-Does it enhance story telling?! Debatable… but so far, having sh!t flying at me from the screen hasn’t felt much like a storytelling enhancement… but maybe that’s just that old square side of me?!

-Did it work for Avatar? I agree it did! But it was a 90% CG movie… and that’s where I see it working well! Animation. CG animation! You can bend any optical rules in a CG world! Just write the code for it! But in real life… unless you have a direct line to the only One who can change the code… good luck!

But now think about this; my younger kid, who I usually have to threaten to send off to bed, came back home after watching Alice in Wonderland, had a glass of milk and went to bed by his own free will, because he “thought” he had a headache…

That’s my younger son on a day he hasn’t watched a 3D movie…

Great… brilliant, actually! The studios will make a ton more money! The share holders will be happy and because they also have shares in some optical franchise, they will have a happy surprise when their corrective glasses company shows an unexpected raise! Oh! and my son will start going early to bed! So everyone wins!!! Right?!

WRONG!
Our kids are, unfortunately, already burning their eyes on Playstations, Xboxes and any other form of video game they play for way too long. We… we shouldn’t even have to mention ourselves, who spend hours on end either looking at our computer screens, or through viewfinders… worst, when trying to focus HDSLRs with some adapted view finder that never really gets 100% sharp… our eyes are definitely heading to a bright future (pun intended)…

So, where am I going with all this, you should be asking by now?! It’s us! independent filmmakers! We’re the ones who will suffer the biggest impact! Because with the world going 3D, the studios will have the silverscreen monopoly, once again! At least for another good decade, give or take…

The cutoff buzz number of the moment is 7 million, to make a decent 3D feature… true? false? Only time will tell, but your dream HVX 200 camera that allowed thousands of filmmakers to achieve their dream of making a feature film (Such as myself) has more then quadrupled its price, in the form of an AG3D-A1. And post… how much will 3D impact desktop filmmaking?! How long is going to take Apple to launch Final Cut Studio 3D?!

And if by now you have your evil smirk on, because you only work for TV… look at the effort they are making to take TV to the 3D route… and if you haven’t put 2 and 2 together… it’s the same people, because all the major studios have been bought by them…

All in all we have to recognize that there are some brilliant minds behind 3D. Too bad they don’t focus in good storytelling…

In the mean while, I guess we’ll be biting our nails, until Phillip posts the results of his first HDSLR 3D tests… Go Phillip!

T ; )~