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Until very recently 3D films were regarded by most people, even those in the industry, as a gimmick. But we are approaching what many will regard as the film industry’s third attempt at going 3D.

Here’s a little history of the development of 3D, and where it’s at now…

The first two big boom periods of this technology were in the 1950s and 1980s. The 1950s brought the growth of home television and the film industry decided to fight back by producing films using the 3D process as a cinematic device in order to help bring people out of their homes and back into the theatres. By giving the public an experience they couldn’t get at home it helped the industry ride the recession for long enough until the television experience began to lose its initial appeal and ticket sales got back to normal.

Then in 1980s and the advent of home videos, the industry had to retaliate again. This time however it was the cinemas to be most affected and though there was never any development in the 3D process, the gimmick kept the cinemas afloat until people flooded back to see films in all their cinematic glory again.

Though most will probably think the 3D process is a very recent discovery, the process was actually invented shortly after the first motion picture cameras were invented in the 1890’s. This was a crude process in comparison to today’s modern standards, but it still gave the illusion of a three dimensional image.

This original type of 3-D (Stereoscopic) filmmaking used the anaglyph technique and was used during the 1950s and 1980s. A few other processes were tried but until recently this method was the most commonly used as it was the cheapest way of getting it to the masses. It didn’t require any changes to cinemas screens or projectors, and you could even watch it at home on a television.
People would have to wear these funny glasses that tinted the film into various colours and often left people with headaches or nausea.

Brian Gilmore helpfully models anaglyphic glasses!

This was never really a successful process, especially in regards to watching entire feature films, as people could not really handle the strain the images created on their eyes over such a long period.

The more modern type of 3D film uses a polarization filter technique that requires you to wear polarized glasses. This is a much better process that doesn’t interfere with the colour of the image as much, and more importantly it’s much easier to view and the viewer’s eyes aren’t strained as much.

New Polarised Glasses

However, there are some downsides for the viewer. The polarization process that creates the illusion of 3D results in a darker image on the screen, making films less vibrant.

And some filmgoers – those with monocular vision, for instance – cannot perceive the added dimension. (Ironically, The House Of Wax 3D’s director Andre De Toth, was one of them.) The polarisation process also requires cinemas to update their screens and projectors which cost a lot of money.

But with more than 30 3D films in the Hollywood pipeline, including Pixar’s Up, Toy Story 1-3 and Disney’s Tron 2.0, it will be increasingly hard to escape the transition into the third dimension.

Olly Richards, the news editor of Empire film magazine believes the only problem at the moment is the speed of uptake by British cinemas. “There are limitations to 3D, in that the screening capabilities haven’t quite caught up with what can be done filming-wise, but that’s because it’s relatively young technology,” explains Richards. “If you have directors like Spielberg, Jackson and Cameron, who are arguably the three biggest directors in the world, doing it, everyone else is going to start catching on. If those films prove to be hits, then 3D could well become the norm within the next decade.”

Enticing people back to the cinema with 3D blockbusters is one thing, but are multi-dimensional films likely to become the norm anytime soon?

Steve Schklair of 3ality Digital, the film company that created U2 3D says, “any film can be shot in 3D so it becomes a creative question – is it worth making every film 3D? We shot some dialogue scenes recently that were much more interesting in 3D because we could accentuate the intimacy of the characters having the dialogue or the distance between them. It used to be that 3D was only good for big-budget action-adventure movies but I don’t agree with that. In almost every case, it’s a more interesting way to look at a movie if the depth is used by a film-maker who knows what they’re doing.”

Toy Story 3

I can see why the industry is really pushing these 3D films as it is the best way to combat the ever growing trend of piracy.

“Ninety per cent [of piracy] is due to someone taking a camera into a movie theatre,” Jeffery Katzenberg, president of DreamWorks Animation told CNN. “You can’t camcorder 3D. So the by-product of this is that it will have some serious implications about that.”

Olly Richards says that, “home cinema has become so successful because televisions can be as big as you want, stereo sound is fantastic and HD-DVD film quality is as good as you can see in the cinema, so there needs to be something new that the cinema can offer that home viewing can’t. 3D could be that thing.”

Pixar's Up

However one major issue that is going on with this crossover period is that the cinemas are charging the customers for the glasses to watch these films. This is an absolute ridiculous fee due to the fact you have no other option watching the film but with the glasses. It is like going into a coffee shop but being charged extra to have a cup to put your coffee in!

Digital distribution of movies has the potential to save money for film distributors. A single film print can cost around $1200 (or $30,000 for a 1-time print of an 80-minute feature), so making 4,000 prints for a wide-release movie might cost $5 million. In contrast, at the maximum 250 megabit-per-second data rate (as defined by DCI for digital cinema), a typical feature-length movie could fit comfortably on an off the shelf 300 GB hard drive—which sell for as little as $70 and can even be returned to the distributor for reuse after a movie’s run. With several hundred movies distributed every year, industry savings could potentially reach $1 billion or more. This means that though they may have to cough up for the cinema upgrading at first they save in the long term.

With more and more cinema going digital every year I can see this third wave of 3D films continuing long into the future. But this is not just because of the backing of financers but because of the majority of the creative geniuses who make films today are backing it. Therefore this time round the 3D won’t be just a cheap gimmick. The directors know that story is key and that by making the images 3D it can immerse the audience into the film’s characters and world much more than ever before.