3D Film Innovation Consortium
Globe and Mail by GUY DIXON. Friday, Jun. 10, 2011
An image from U2 3D, directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington.
Remember the heady days of 2009, when James Cameron’s 3-D movie Avatar hit the jackpot to become the highest-grossing film of all time? Along with Coraline and Up, the film convinced the industry that 3-D was the next big thing, whether for feature films or home television.
But a credibility gap has emerged about 3-D’s potential to be the ultimate box-office draw.
Doubters see a wake-up call for Hollywood in the relatively soft demand among North America audiences to pay extra to see the 3-D version of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. And then there’s the lighthearted backlash: Amazon.com now sells 2-D glasses, which intentionally eliminate the 3-D effect for those “tired of paying for 3-D movies and getting nothing but a headache.”
So is the shine really off 3-D? Catherine Owens directed 2008’s U2 3D, which sought to convey the grandness of a U2 concert on film and was billed as the first live-action digital 3-D film. She has since become one of the few directors known internationally as a 3-D specialist. (“Once you’ve worked in 3-D, it’s very hard to let go,” she says.) She will be among the guest speakers, along with German director Wim Wenders, himself a fan of 3-D filmmaking, at the International Stereoscopic 3D Conference being held at Toronto’s York University from Saturday to Tuesday.
“There are the people who want the instant, perfect result, and they live in the naysayer camp. If it doesn’t come out perfectly, they think it’s never going to work,” Owens says. “And then there are the technical people who are developing this unbelievable future for image makers, and I’m siding with the technical people.”
Owens has a slightly different perspective on 3-D cinema, having come from a fine-art painting and installation background, rather than filmmaking. The Irish artist worked for many years as a stage designer with U2, adding visuals to the band’s stage presentation, including the elaborately decorated and lit Trabant cars for the band’s Zoo TV tour.
“Where 3-D has fallen down is that there has been a kind of rush to make content,” Owens notes. Too many in the business, Owens says, still see 3-D as merely an extension of ordinary filmmaking: “But the truth is that when you’re making film in 3-D, you’re capturing data in extraordinary ways, in as many ways as the director wants. So, it’s a very different set of rules.”
She uses the example of the rise of interactive media, which of course created an entirely new template to manipulate a story, and says that there needs to be the same degree of immersion of filmmakers in 3-D in order for it to work.
The vast potential of 3-D has attracted auteurs one would never associate with the kind of gimmicky corniness 3-D once provided to movies such as Creature from the Black Lagoon or Jaws 3-D. Wenders, who directed the 3-D documentary Pina about German choreographer Pina Bausch, has said the format “will open up a big window for documentary filmmakers.” Werner Herzog recently explored the paintings of cavemen in southern France with his 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Ang Lee has been hired to direct the much-delayed 3-D film adaptation of Canadian Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi.
“It could very well be that 3-D started on the wrong leg, because it only appeared … in the form of animation and big spectaculars,” Wenders told Agence France-Presse in an interview. “A lot of people think that’s [all] it can do. But I think in the future, it’ll be the ideal tool for documentary filmmakers … maybe in the same way that 10 or 15 years ago digital technology helped to reanimate the documentary genre.”
So, what’s happening, Owens notes, is a very fast shift from 3-D being solely a tool for blockbuster filmmaking, to something available to lower-budget and documentary filmmakers.
Inevitably, this is being led by the rush among electronics companies for the professional and the “prosumer” 3-D market. The National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas earlier this year, Owens notes, was heavily dominated by companies introducing new 3-D equipment. “3-D is coming across every medium over the next five to 10 years. You’ll be looking at your iPhone and iPad and any other kind of gear that you have, you will be looking at that in 3-D,” she says.
Owens has not abandoned grand spectacles in 3-D, however. She’s currently in post-production for a film on the massive Kumbh Mela festival in India, which attracts tens of millions of devout Hindus each year. Then again, likely on a much smaller scale, she also plans to adapt an Oscar Wilde short story in 3-D.
“People who are going to be making groundbreaking, extraordinary 3-D are going to be people who are thinking how an artist would think. And that is, how do you create the poem?” Owens says. The inspiration, she adds, doesn’t reside in box-office figures.
