3-D or not 3-D

I just read an interesting blog post entitled The Myth of 3-D Immersion. Evidently, this particular blog post is a follow-up to another one which received so much response (overwhelmingly negative, I gather) that the author felt compelled to come back for more.

Now, I'm a sound person, and have my own bias on movies which is unashamedly audio-centric. I believe an audience will tolerate weak visuals, bad lighting, poor shot composition, etc, far more than they will sit through bad audio. If they can't understand the dialog, or if they have to really concentrate to hear the words over the background noise, it's over. If the lead actor's fill light is too low and makes the hero look like a jackal, they'll keep watching (and listening).

So, that's my bias. It should come as no surprise that I view 3-D in movies as far less important than a good surround sound mix. Done well, 3-D can enhance my enjoyment of a movie, but it won't make a good movie great and it won't make a bad mix sound good. (On the other hand, a really good mix can make a good movie great for me because it puts me in their world and I respect that even if I didn't especially like their world.) Done poorly, 3-D is just annoying and distracting. (Of course, surround sound done poorly can be annoying and distracting, too. I think of the early days of 5.1 mixing when they just felt compelled to place sounds behind your right shoulder just because they could. Generally, making the audience look away from the screen is a pretty good way to pull them out of their suspension of disbelief.)

Anyway, the core point of this blog I was reading which inspired all of this you're reading is this:

The introduction of 3-D technology can't be compared to that of sound, or color, or even stereo, as people like to do. And for a simple reason. We use these technologies to show more, to extend what can be depicted. These technologies enable us to increase the amount of information we can represent or put to work in film. And this is the stuff of story-telling.

And that thought leads to the paragraph which really inspired me to write this post:

Recall Marlon Brando's famous line, as Terry Malloy, in On the Waterfront, "I could have been a contendah!" You recall his facial expression, posture and movements, the line itself, the feeling with which it is delivered, but you also recall Brando's voice. You need sound to display the voice; you need sound for voice to be one of the elements in the composition making up the whole. Color similarly extends the working pallet of the director and so extends what can be presented to an audience.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes on the subject of sound in movies: "half of what you see is what you hear." (Attributed to many, many film-makers, perhaps most famously to George Lucas, although it was probably said by Francis Ford Coppola first.) Now imagine if you could hear Brando saying something, but couldn't really make out the words because the microphone was pointed the wrong way or the scene had been shot in an actual moving car or the music had been mixed too loud. First, turn the sound off on your computer. Now watch it without sound.



Kinda dull scene, no? Go ahead, I know you want to, watch it again with the sound on. Better, isn't it?

I can imagine the scene colorized and I don't like it. I can imagine it shot in color and it would probably be just as powerful, but not necessarily any more than it is now. I can't really imagine conceiving of that scene in 3-D, but when I try, I don't see how it does anything but distract me from the scene. So I have to agree, sound was a more important advance in movie-making technology than 3-D.

What does get really interesting to me is thinking about how sound can play with 3-D in interesting ways. We've had something like 3-D audio for my entire career (in 1977, Star Wars was the first movie to use Dolby Surround, Jurassic Park in 1993 launched 5.1 audio in theaters, I started working in audio post in 1995), so I've been spending my whole career working with how to place the audience into a three dimensional space. I haven't worked on a 3-D project yet, though, and I'm looking forward to discovering how those two different 3-D spaces can interact and compliment one another.