I don’t think you are parsing Mangetout’s sentence correctly. He isn’t saying 3D is inaccessible to an overwhelming majority of the audience. He is saying 3D is not as accessible (or comfortable) to such an overwhelming majority as colour and stereo sound are. Modern colour and stereo sound are seamless wheras 3D is not, or at least not yet.
Maybe current 3D is analogous to early colour, kind of like the effect mimicked in The Aviator, and it will continue to improve until it is seamless and we don’t even notice it. However, the technical aspects of the improvements required aren’t as simple as getting colour rendition correct. Losing the glasses and introducing other 3D cues besides stereoscopy won’t be easy.
Regardless of how Mangetout intended it to be understood, this thread is still the greatest concentration of Anti-3D whining I’ve seen anywhere, online or in the real world.
I know a sub-handful of people IRL who can’t watch 3D movies because of headaches or stereoscopic vision issues, and one of them used to loudly complain about the 3D trend until I said to him “You know, I bet there were deaf people back in the late 1920s complaining about all those newfangled Talking Movies”.
Look, I’m sorry there are people out there who can’t see 3D movies for whatever reason- but there are plenty of people (most of the population?) who can, and I don’t think “A number of people on an obscure internet messageboard hate 3D” is a compelling reason for it to be summarily disinvented and made to go away forever.
Well it is a pit thread, which by definition is going to be whining about something! Although if you substitute “venting” for “whining” it doesn’t seem so bad.
I don’t know anyone who can’t watch them. Barring the one-eyed, I have trouble understanding it. That said, the deaf back in the 1920s would not have had to wear headphones to get the same movie experience they always had (although I guess they may have been forced to pay extra, which must have grated.)
At the moment I stand by my prediction that the current rash of 3D films is a passing fad that people will get bored with. I think 3D will dwindle and only be used as an occasional enhancement for particular kinds of movie, rather than becoming the standard. I’ll happily come back in Jan 2013 and admit I was wrong if it hasn’t happened by then, though.
A couple of people have mentioned this view (“It’s a fad”) and I’ve yet to hear a reasonable rebuttal to the argument that there’s too much invested in it, by too many people, for it to be a fad.
Cinemas in places like New Zealand are not going to spend a fortune converting their theatres to support technology that’s “Just a fad” and is likely to be discontinued in the near future. Windmills, as Morbo once observed, do not work that way.
I think the reasonable rebuttal is that 3D only makes sense for a narrow subset of movies. Unlike color or sound, it’s hard to see the benefit of 3D technology for most films. For example, when the oscar nominations come out, I’d bet most of the movies nominated in major* categories would get little or no benefit from 3D.
*Let’s say Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress.
Ultimately this will be decided by the behaviour of the viewing public. Big screen TVs and home surround sound are the alternative to cinema. There’s already plenty of movies where I just decide to wait for the DVD, and if there’s no 2D cinema version of a movie where I don’t care about the 3D, that will be enough to make me skip it and wait.
I suspect that the novelty factor, and the pester power of kids combined with the predominance of 3D animations, is driving a lot of the revenue increase seen with 3D. None of that will last forever. They’ll churn out 3D everything while the kids still get a kick out of their 3D glasses, and non-arthouse cinemas will have to invest in the equipment or they won’t be able to compete. A lot of that 3D will be horribly put together. When (if?) people get tired of paying extra to be poked in the eye, the 3D revenue will fall away and we’ll see what happens then.
I can guarantee that if pay-per-view and DVD sales/rentals indicate that the public have lost interest in paying for 3D, it will all but disappear as it did in the past. That might not happen this time around since the tech is better and it IS possible to make it look almost seamless (Avatar), but I’m betting against it.
Yes. I am one of those unfortunates whose lack of stereoscopic vision precludes viewing 3D movies. (I can watch them, I suppose, but then I’m paying extra for dull, dark colors and the pleasure of two hours wearing glasses that don’t fit my freakishly ginormous head.) I’m too libertarian to make a habit of whining about it – but I dearly hope that the market responds in such a way that won’t shut me out of filmgoing entirely.
I note that film reviewers often complain about the tradeoffs, so I hold out hope.
The counter-rebuttal is that 3D is likely to be incorporated into film-making techniques (as colour or lack thereof and sound were). In time, the premium for 3D will likely be absorbed through inflation; so it’ll cost the same to go to a film regardless of whether it’s in 2D or 3D.
One of the key things I’m arguing is the international spread of 3D- it’s not just a couple of theatres in Hollywood or New York or London. Places like New Zealand- a small country on the other side of the planet- are switching over to 3D movies. That tells me this is more than a “fad”, because the theatres in those sorts of places just can’t afford to spend a fortune on something that’s not going to pay off for them.
Thank you - that is indeed what I said, and meant (I do acknowledge that it was phrased awkwardly however, so the misinterpretation is understandable).
As a counterpoint, I’ve encountered quite a lot of real-world disdain for 3D - I actually didn’t expect to see it so much here, for some reason.
(which is why I said that I estimate the number of people it shuts out will be greater than the proportion of people that would ever have been shut out by the introduction of colour or stereo sound).
This does not follow. You seem to be saying that 3D can’t be a fad because too many people have invested in it. But what determines whether something is a fad is how much staying power it has, not how much initial investment it requires. New Zealand theaters are guessing. They may be guessing right or they may be guessing wrong, but they are guessing. Spending money they can’t afford to lose in no way protects them against losing it.
The SDMB tends to be more technophilic than the Teeming Millions generally, and thus more inclined to give the latest developments the benefit of the doubt. The fact that the latest iteration of 3D cinema is getting mixed reviews from that starting point is thus a rather bad sign for all those theater owners who invested in it.
I think much of the same thing could be said for color. Would “The King’s Speech” really be a less effective movie if it was in black and white? If not why bother making it in color? As with color I also imagine there will be an extended period where 3D and 2D overlap.
Also as Martini Enfield suggested, as it becomes more mainstream innovative directors will make more stylistic use of the 3D effects. For example using it to give the audience a sense of space or confinement. I think Hitchcock would have made wonderful use of the new medium in such movies as Vertigo and The Birds. I also think the opening scene of the sound of music would also do well under 3D.
Coraline did this, when she went out into the “wilderness space” outside the “other home”, she walked through a forest that was flattened into only two or three Z-layers, like a diorama. This, to me, accomplished several things: it was a shout-out to the low-tech roots of the kinescopic genre of the movie; it attempted to instill a sense of otherworldy scariness about the place; and thinking more on it, it perhaps implies that the Beldame did not give much thought or detail to the spaces in her world outside the “other home”, so they are sort of flattened or incomplete
Yes, I think it would. Black and white is less relatable. I don’t think 3D effects facilitate a human connection to the characters on screen, which is what color does and why it’s good for virtually all movies.
Maybe I was just reading subtext in the arguments before, but now it seems to be the actual text.