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To a theater near you
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Published: December 30, 2009
Like everybody else in the world, my wife and I went to see the blockbuster film, "Avatar," during the Christmas holiday. As connoisseurs of movie trailer trash, we'd suspected something substantial might lurk beneath the mountain of hype; we were not disappointed. Calling "Avatar" a "Star Wars" for our time might not be too wide of the mark.
Coming out of the theater, I was still dazzled by the lavish color. It was what Disney's "Fantasia" must have looked like to pre-World War II movie-goers who had only seen black-and-white flicks. And I was really impressed by the amount of biology homework the producers had done to make the alien flora plausible. The fauna didn't fare as well, never getting beyond the drooling, dental-intensive critters "Alien" introduced long ago.
I fell to musing on how very satisfying the film had been from a purely impressionist point of view. It was delightful to the eye in the same way one's very first experience, as a small child, of a kaleidoscope must have been. The colors and shapes and motion brought awe and delight in themselves -- even if there had been no plot or character development, and both those were adequate in "Avatar" for the sci-fi genre.
This train of thought got me to wondering how Hollywood will follow-up the act. As a retired futurist, I'd never fall into the "they've gone about as far as they can" go trap. But they've gone far enough to suggest that, when Hollywood does eventually "hit the wall," that wall could turn out to be the audience's capacity to register visual beauty, not the film industry's ability to create it.
We saw the 3-D version of "Avatar." As a life-long devotee of still 3-D photography, I take particular delight in the new generation of stereo movies. But the electronic projection technology that makes them possible comes at a price for the avid movie-goer. It will be a while before electronic projection can be as bright or clear or sharp as searing white light focused through fine celluloid film. Simon and Garfunkle's prescient plea notwithstanding—"mama, don't take my Kodachrome away" -- it has gone away and it's sorely missed.
The trade-off is that 3-D is much easier to produce in a digital world. When they came out in the 1950's, 3-D movies had to be scarier to the projectionist than to the audience. Two projectors, one for the right eye's image and one for the left, had to be pointed just so or the effect would not work. They had to be kept synchronized too. If the left eye movie got a few frames ahead of or behind the right, there could be unpleasant consequences for the viewer.
That meant, if the film broke, the projectionist had to find the same spliced-out frames in the unbroken film and remove them as well. Twice as many film cans had to make their way from theater to theater.
Twin films could be avoided by putting both tracks on one film, expanding each half and then superimposing the two with complex optics. But that was no free lunch. The optics weren't cheap and the resolution was only half as sharp. And, only half as much light hit the screen. A dim movie is hard to sit through.
Eventually the 3-D gimmick just wasn't worth the trouble.
Digital production fixes all that. The left and right eye video channels are on one medium, impossible to get out of sync. Data transmission may supplant traveling film cans. And you may be subjected to TV commercials you left home to avoid -- unless you time your arrival at the movie house just right.
But there is a plus to digital 3-D movies, and it trumps all those negatives. Artists who do their work on computers now have a medium to express their vision that is as far beyond flat screen video as the Sistine ceiling was beyond charcoal sketches on French cave walls.
Now stereo animators can manipulate programmatically how far and how fast stuff pops out of the screen at you or how deep that spooky well appears to be.
To me, as a 3-D life-long fan, there is all the difference in the world between the approaches of the different animation studios using the new medium. Disney has the others beat hands down, I think.
One of the most impressive feats of the "Avatar" team is their ability to meld animation and live action so seamlessly that it's unnoticeable and never distracts.
What does distract, for a celluloid movie classicist like me, is the low image resolution. It's like trying to work on a PC computer when you're used to a Mac.
But as sure as digital cameras have improved their resolution by a factor of ten and High Definition has reinvented television, digital movies are fated to sharpen-up eventually.
They will brighten-up too; projection can't compare with illuminated LED pixel images like those on the new billboards. That doesn't come cheap, so it may not come fast. But come it will -- to a theater near you.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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