3D: Transporting to a world of all senses
How much does Phil McNally love 3-D? So much that he legally listed his name on his British driver’s licence, and later on his social security card and American licence, as ‘Phil Captain III D McNally’.
“Apparently you can’t have numbers in your name in the UK, so I had to do Roman numerals,” the DreamWorks global stereoscopic supervisor told me. “My dad wasn’t impressed. Parents are very possessive of the names they give you.”
Captain 3-D, a 42-year-old Northern Ireland native, is also known as the resident ‘hurl-o-meter’ at DreamWorks, the guy who goes through every frame to adjust the amount of depth, dial the intensity up or down, and fix the right-eye/left-eye camera settings so that moviegoers can enjoy dragons skydiving past them without having to turn their popcorn bags into motion-sickness bags.
“I am certain that it is not good to be in a business in which the result of what you do is to make people hurl,” says Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO, DreamWorks Animation.
Because 3-D gels in the brain, the Captain spends his time seeking an equipoise where objects can fly around without making you dizzy — a synchronicity that has a technical name that sounds like a spy thriller: ‘the zero parallax setting’.
A long journey
As we realised watching James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ explode into the highest-grossing film of all time, 3-D technology has come a long way since it was the butt of jokes on ‘I Love Lucy’ and a gimmick with polarised glasses in the ’50s horror classics ‘House of Wax’ and ‘Creature From the Black Lagoon’.
I had coffee with Katzenberg in Los Angeles recently because ever since he was ‘blown away’ by seeing ‘The Polar Express’ in an Imax theatre, he has emerged as one of his industry’s biggest 3-D boosters, even when it meant rooting for Cameron’s blockbuster for another studio.
He knows that a 3-D revolution would be great for his business by spurring people to desert their home entertainment centres and actually go into theatres. It’s rare in this economy, he notes, for people to opt for “the more expensive, higher-end experience first.”
Echoing the King of the World, Captain 3-D observes that “the struggle of movies has always been to transport viewers to a virtual world.”
Katzenberg says that “if you look at the history of film, there have now been three great revolutions. The first was silent to talkies. The second was black-and-white to colour, 70 years ago. And this is the third great revolution, a quantum leap.”
The 3-D market is popping. Studios are fighting over 3-D theatre space and are well aware that the handful of new 3-D movies made in the last year represented a disproportionate chunk of the box office. Burberry is planning to live-stream a catwalk from London in 3-D.
ESPN and Discovery Channel both plan on beaming 3-D into homes, and the porn industry is nuzzling the new technology. Tinto Brass, the 76-year-old Italian director of ‘Caligula’, said he wants to overhaul his original and make the first 3-D porn feature.
Katzenberg envisions a world where you can process so many pixels into space that we’ll all be watching 3-D TVs (without glasses in 10 to 20 years) and seeing every big-scale movie — not to mention every poster or painting you walk by on a wall — in 3-D.
But both Katzenberg and the Captain concede that some movies may be too action-packed or intense to be experienced in 3-D because, as McNally says, “carrying that much data into the brain is not an enjoyable situation.”
Like his boss, the Captain thinks we are on the cusp of being immersed in a virtual world akin to lucid dreaming or the Star Trek holodeck, “where you start with a blank room and you are transported to a whole world of all the senses.”
Just as we had to be dragged into acknowledging that sound and colour made movies more realistic, now we must get accustomed to films where, with apologies to a colleague, the world is not flat.
