Culture

James Cameron's 3-D Chat

Avatar, James Cameron’s 3-D feature film experiment, doesn’t come out until summer 2009, but the director is already boasting about the relatively new format. Variety talked to the director about 3-D film making and got some interesting insights into why the Titanic director is so obsessed with the third dimension After the jump some choice […]

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Avatar, James Cameron's 3-D feature film experiment, doesn't come out until summer 2009, but the director is already boasting about the relatively new format. *Variety *talked to the director about 3-D film making and got some interesting insights into why the Titanic director is so obsessed with the third dimension After the jump some choice quotes.

On what 3-D will add to storytelling:

I believe that Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth
24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they're not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory...It's all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion. Especially in the types of films which have been my specialty to date, the fantasy experience is served best by a sense of detail and textural reality supporting the narrative moment by moment...When you see a scene in
3-D, that sense of reality is supercharged. The visual cortex is being cued, at a subliminal but pervasive level, that what is being seen is real.

Dr. Cameron's hypothesis on how we process 3-D:

I
believe that a functional-MRI study of brain activity would show that more neurons are actively engaged in processing a 3-D movie than the same film seen in 2-D.

When does 3-D work? All the time, if done right:

When most people think of 3-D films, they think first of the gimmick shots -- objects or characters flying, floating or poking out into the audience. In fact, in a good stereo movie, these shots should be the exception rather than the rule. Watching a stereo movie is looking into an alternate reality through a window. It is intuitive to the film industry that this immersive quality is perfect for action, fantasy, and animation. What's less obvious is that the enhanced sense of presence and realism works in all types of scenes, even intimate dramatic moments. Which is not to say that all
films should be made in 3-D, because the returns may not warrant the costs in many cases, but certainly there should be no creative reason why any film could not be shot in 3-D and benefit from it.

Cameron 3-D trailblazer?

When I started down the path of developing the 3-D cameras with Vince Pace in 2000, we were looking for an alternative to the massive film-based cameras I'd used in the past. Two years later, while deep in stereo technology development and production, I had an epiphany: that the digital projectors being proposed to replace 35mm film, could support
3-D perfectly, because of their high frame rates.

On the, as of now, 2-D DVD market:

A 3-D film when screened in 2-D, on a screen of any size, should still deliver. The 3-D should always be thought of as a turbocharger, an enhancer, to a work whose raison d'etre is vested in its story, its characters, its style, etc.

On filming in 3-D:

On Avatar, I have not consciously composed my shots differently for 3-D. I am just using the same style I always do. In fact, after the first couple of weeks, I stopped looking at the shots in 3-D while I was working, even though the digital cameras allow real-time stereo viewing. I had someone else checking them for good stereo as we were shooting, in a small theater we set up near the stage for that purpose.
I would get real-time feedback from my "golden-eyes" team in the theater, if a shot needed to be adjusted to increase or decrease the stereospace.

Having said that, I am not above milking a good 3-D
moment, as long as it doesn't interrupt the narrative flow. And there are a couple of minor adjustments that need to be made to lighting and camera placement to create a smooth and unobtrusive stereo experience.
But once you learn these few tricks, you stop thinking much about them.

3-D tricks and tips:

I think it's a myth that you want deep focus in 3-D shots. I find the opposite is true...With 3-D, the director needs to lead the audience's eye, not let it roam around the screen to areas which are not converged. So all the usual cinematic techniques of selective focus, separation lighting, composition, etc., that one would use in a
2-D film to direct the eye to the subject of interest, still apply, and are perhaps even more important...

...I made it my mission to keep the 3-D out of the actors' consciousness completely. Most of them forgot we were shooting 3-D, because we did playback on set at a 2-D monitor.

3-D everything:

Every time I watch a movie lately, from 300 to Atonement, I think how wonderful it would have been if shot in 3-D.

Variety's Q&A has much, much, much more with Cameron including some serious geek-outs on digital projection, frame rates, and the 3-D post-production pipeline.

Image: FirstShowing.net

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