And still it drags on. The eternal battle between the naysayers and the 3 dimensional fanboys seems never to end. Esteemed critic
Roger Ebert this week received
quite an interesting letter from
Walter Murch, who won an Academy Award for sound on the Francis Ford Coppola epic Apocalypse Now. He is also the man who coined the phrase 'Sound Design'. The letter came in response to
Ebert's review of The Green Hornet, which Ebert called an 'almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about.' He goes on to criticise the quality and pointlessness of the 3D in the picture. So why does Ebert think Murch has had the final word on the matter? Well it's all down to evolution and the capabilities of the brain. Murch explains it better so here's the letter;
Hello Roger,
I read your review of "Green Hornet" and though I haven't seen the film, I agree with your comments about 3D.
The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses "gather in" the image -- even on a huge Imax screen -- and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses. I edited one 3D film back in the 1980's -- "Captain Eo" -- and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in. 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. And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain "perspective" relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are "in" the picture in a kind of dreamlike "spaceless" space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with. So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up? All best wishes, Walter Murch
Stitch that Jimmy Cameron! Now I think Ebert exaggerates the letter's profundity, but they do seem to be inescapable facts about our poor brain's capability to deal with a fast moving 3D image. Murch makes a good point about great storytelling being sufficient enough for purposes of immersion. But what's that tapping sound, I can almost hear James Cameron writing his reposte as we speak! What is certain is that the extra few dollars/pounds on a ticket is way too tempting for the studio execs to resist, so they will be pushing for post conversions hack jobs till the cash cows come home. And after a years solid turnover of shot in 3D and post conversion releases, do you see an end to this argument? Seconds out, round 353, ding.