Third dimension in theatres

The studios and exhibitors see 3-D as a lure to keep people coming to theaters instead of watching movies at home on their big-screen TVs. 8216;8216;With rising production costs and especially marketing costs from the studios, we needed a way to help eventise our most important productions,8217;8217; said Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros. Pictures.

In the 1950s, studios fearing the encroachment of television grabbed polarised glasses and embraced 3-D technology. The inaugural 3-D movie, Bwana Devil was such a rousing hit that other studios began creating their own 3-D films. Although early 3-D enjoyed some commercial success, projection and photographic errors, together with filmmakers8217; impulse to thrust spears into the audience8217;s eyes, caused people to leave the theatre with headaches or sick stomachs.

New digital projectors make today8217;s 3-D movies less likely to induce queasiness. Warner Bros. was the first big studio to experiment with new 3-D technology in a major release. Its 2004 Polar Express in Imax 3-D triggered a stereoscopic revival. Robert Zemeckis8217; experiment propelled a flood of 3-D projects.

Contemporary filmmakers have learned a few lessons from the excesses of early 3-D 8212; to use restraint, rather than 8220;poking a candelabra into your eyes for an hour or an half8217;8217;. Otherwise, the audience suffers eye fatigue. Monster House employs 3-D to amplify the film8217;s spooky atmospherics. In one scene, the main character, a boy named DJ, scales the steep tower of a wrecking crane, and the 3-D heightens the sense of vertigo.

Similarly, Superman director Bryan Singer chose, largely for technical reasons, to limit IMAX 3-D to those moments when the Man of Steel dons the cape. So when Clark Kent takes off his glasses, audience members put theirs on. In one flashback to Clark Kent8217;s days as a teenager on a farm in Smallville, he bounds higher and higher through the corn stalks 8212; ultimately crashing through the roof of a barn and stopping inches above the hay-strewn floor. The top of his head was in the center of the screen. 8216;8216;The corn stalks are right there in your head,8217;8217; said Singer.

Dawn C. Chmielewski

8226; To create the illusion of 3-dimensional depth, the IMAX 3D process uses two camera lenses to represent the left and right eyes. By recording on two separate rolls of film for the left and right eyes, and then projecting them simultaneously, we can be tricked into seeing a 3D image on a 2D screen.

There are two methods to creating the 3D illusion in the theatre. The first involves polarisation8212;or letting light in only one direction. During projection, the left and right eye images are polarised perpendicular to one another as they are projected onto the IMAX screen. By wearing special eyeglasses with lenses polarised in their respective directions to match the projection, the left eye image can be viewed only by the left eye since the polarisation of the left lens will cancel out that of the right eye projection.