3-D Revolution

The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

Ray Zone

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813140704
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In 2009, Avatar, a 3-D movie directed by James Cameron, became the most successful motion picture of all time, a technological breakthrough that has grossed more than $2.5 billion worldwide. Its seamless computer-generated imagery and live action stereo photography effectively defined the importance of 3-D to the future of cinema, as well as all other currently evolving digital displays. Though stereoscopic cinema began in the early nineteenth century and exploded in the 1950s in Hollywood, its present status as an enduring genre was confirmed by Avatar's success.

3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema traces the rise of modern 3-D technology from Arch Oboler's Bwana Devil (1952), which launched the 50s 3-D boom in Hollywood, to the rapidly-modernizing 3-D industry today. Ray Zone takes a comprehensive approach that not only examines the technology of the films, but also investigates the business, culture, and art of their production. Influencing new generations of filmmakers for decades, the evolution of 3-D cinema technology continues to fill our theaters with summer blockbusters and holiday megahits.

Part III

Digital 3-D Cinema, 2005–2009

21

Two Anaglyph Movies

High-Tech Tools Revive a Classic Format with Spy Kids 3-D

Some people just don’t like anaglyph. Viewing the world through complementary-colored glasses, red and cyan, is just too much retinal bombardment for them. But the anaglyph continues to fascinate filmmakers and artists as a viable way to display stereographic imagery. Director Robert Rodriguez, creator of the popular Spy Kids movie franchise, was a case in point.

For the third installment in his popular Spy Kids series, titled Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, which opened on 3,300 screens July 25, 2003, Rodriguez made extensive use of polychromatic anaglyph, introducing a fuller palette of color into the two-color stereographic process. Rodriguez had done his homework and made an entertaining and easily viewable film that was about 75 percent color anaglyph. The audience was directly told when to take the glasses off or put them on by on-screen instructions and the actions of the characters.

When the high-tech bad guy, the Toymaker (Sylvester Stallone), traps Carmen Gomez (Alexa Vega) in a new computer game called Game Over, her younger brother, Junie (Daryl Sabara), dons his 3-D glasses and comes to the rescue. With the assistance of his grandfather, played by Ricardo Montalban, Junie enters the computer-generated world of Game Over and faces a series of dimensional duels and tests to save his sister.

Green-screen filming of the actors was done at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas, using the new Reality Camera System built by James Cameron and Vince Pace and used previously for stereoscopic capture of footage for Ghosts of the Abyss. The Reality Camera System uses two Sony High Definition cameras and dual Fujinon lenses with a 69mm interocular with convergence that can be driven independently or slaved to focus, iris, and zoom controls. A separate dual-camera unit with a beam splitter was also used to shoot footage with smaller interocular distances going down to zero.

The live-action stereoscopic footage was composited into the computer-generated world of Game Over. This kind of control over the stereoscopic imagery allowed Rodriguez to make what he called “good, old-fashioned anaglyph,”¹ to minimize on-screen parallax where necessary, to control colors, and to continually place the stereo window in an optimum position for the most comfortable viewing. As a result, Spy Kids 3-D represented a definite step forward for anaglyphic motion pictures.

A Little Red/Blue History

Anaglyphic motion pictures have a varied and intermittent history that goes back to the nickelodeon era of cinema, when filmmakers and audiences were first discovering the storytelling capabilities of the new technological art. The projection of anaglyph images using complementary colors was first attempted and described by Wilhelm Rollman in Germany in 1853. In 1891, Louis Ducos du Hauron of France patented and named the system (“anaglyph”), and it was used at that time both for printing and projecting lantern slide shows.

The first presentation of anaglyph motion pictures in the United States took place on June 10, 1915, at the Astor Theater in New York with anaglyphic sequences in the film Jim the Penman, photographed by Edwin S. Porter with the assistance of William E. Waddell. Two anaglyphic travelogues, Niagara Falls and Rural America, were also on the program. It seems likely that Porter and Waddell used a twin interlock projector system with two black-and-white filmstrips projected through red and green filters. The audience wore anaglyph spectacles to view the films.

When Technicolor introduced their two-color cemented film positive process in 1921, Frederic Ives and Jacob Leventhal, under the Educational Pictures banner, produced a number of short films in their single-strip process, which they named Plastigrams, the title of their first production. Other anaglyphic shorts, Zowie, Luna-cy, Ouch!, and The Runaway Taxi, were released by Ives and Leventhal in 1925 through Pathé studios. An enterprising producer, Harry K. Fairall, demonstrated an anaglyphic feature, The Power of Love, in 1922 in Los Angeles.²

“The problems involved in producing anaglyphs in natural colours have claimed the attention of many workers,” wrote Leslie P. Dudley in 1951, “and various processes for the production of so-called polychromatic anaglyphs have been proposed from time to time.”³

In his book 3-D Movies, R. M. Hayes cites as the first polychromatic anaglyph motion picture a 1969 adult film called Swingtail. Los Angeles–based producer Steve Gibson’s Deep Vision company, with the talents of 3-D cinematographer Arnold Herr, also produced seven adult films in polychromatic anaglyph, including The Playmates (1973), Black Lolita (1975), and Disco Dolls in Hot Skin (1978).

These polychromatic anaglyph features were filmed with a beam splitter and color filters directly onto a single strip of Eastman Kodak color stock. The disadvantage of the system is that no adjustment to parallax is possible after principal photography. For the color anaglyph finale of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), the stereoscopic photography was done with the single-strip Stereovision process and then optically printed to anaglyph composite.

Freddy’s Dead was a good example of how not to art-direct a color anaglyph movie. Freddy’s sweater, for example, consisted of alternating bands of bright red and green stripes. The retinal rivalry that bright red, blue, and green induces in the anaglyph is a deficiency that Robert Rodriguez assiduously avoided in Spy Kids 3-D. The color palette consists of gunmetal gray and purple backgrounds, highly metallic surfaces, and primary colors that are minimally used. Yellow, purple, light orange, and green carry most of the color design and help minimize the color flicker through the red/blue glasses.

An additional achievement of Rodriguez’s polychromatic anaglyph color design is to stage the action of the actors continuously at the stereo window, where minimal color fringing and ghosting are evident. The anaglyph sequences in Spy Kids 3-D could even be watched without the glasses with little distraction. This was a real achievement for anaglyphic motion pictures, which historically have had excessive ghosting and exaggerated parallax that is painful to view.

Stereographic Storytelling

Although film critic Roger Ebert remains “unconvinced that 3-D is necessary in cinematic storytelling,”⁴ Spy Kids 3-D, with a story set in cyberspace, creates a natural fit between the narrative and the anaglyphic format. For the audience, as well as for the characters in the story, entry into stereoscopic cyberspace is made possible by wearing the red/blue glasses.

A 1961 black-and-white horror film, The Mask, directed by Julian Roffman, featured a similar imaginative use of the anaglyph with three different segments that depicted the subconscious minds of characters in the film. The hypnotic voice of a psychoanalyst in The Mask commanded the audience to “put on the mask now” to view hallucinatory anaglyphic segments. As with The Mask, Spy Kids 3-D makes use of the anaglyphic glasses as a metaphoric portal to another world of experience.

It’s a challenge for 3-D filmmakers to coherently justify the use of stereopsis within the context of a narrative. “It is a mistake,” said Ebert, “when the medium distracts from the message.” Quite often, the use of off-the-screen effects and the sheer sensory distraction of 3-D do little to enhance the story. Spy Kids 3-D, however, set within an active arena of cyberspace with floating platforms, outsize weapons, and hovercraft motorcycles, uses the stereoscopic parameter as a seamless part of the kinetic narrative.

The Medium and the Message

The classic ride film is invoked in a brief surfing segment, where the young spies glide down hot lava judiciously colored yellow and black with the merest traces of red. A glissando of surf guitar music is heard in this segment. Another classic homage is invoked when a giant custard pie is flung at a youthful combatant. The many off-the-screen effects take place logically within the main actions of the film, which includes plenty of jousting, racing, and hurling objects flying randomly in the zero gravity of immersive cyberspace.

At the end of Spy Kids 3-D, giant robots escape the world of the video game and break out into the reality of the Austin, Texas, state capitol building. The outsized robots, appearing monumental in scale and colored as a kind of faded brass, are impressive in 3-D. When they are destroyed by the family of superspies and come crashing down at the viewer from great heights, it’s a real stereoscopic climax, with dimensional jolts surpassing those seen previously in the film.

With its sweetly profamily message, a rating of PG, and its heart on its armored sleeve, Spy Kids 3-D is the first anaglyph film created for children since the MPAA ratings code was created in the late 1960s. One could be grateful to Robert Rodriguez for rescuing the polychromatic anaglyph motion picture from the shadowy precincts of the sex and horror genres.

Reviewing the Reviewers

Despite the widespread ignorance of journalists about stereoscopic cinema, Spy Kids 3-D received generally favorable press. A common prevalent misconception is that the 1950s 3-D films, inaugurated by Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil, were viewed by audiences with red/blue glasses instead of the polarizing glasses that they actually used. This error of fact was once again reiterated in an issue of the New York Times, just days before the release of the Rodriguez film.⁵ In his July 20, 2003, review of Spy Kids 3-D in the New York Times, Dave Kehr called the film “an enjoyable, noisy romp” but wrote that it had “been photographed in the relatively primitive analglyphic [sic] process.”

Roger Ebert, no friend of stereoscopic cinema, stated in his July 25, 2003, review in the Chicago Sun-Times that Spy Kids 3-D represented “not much of an advance.” Claudia Puig, however, writing in the July 25, 2003, issue of USA Today, observed that “rather than merely startling the audience by hurtling things toward it, Spy Kids creates a vivid fantasy world that is all the more alive in 3-D.” Two days earlier, the editors of USA Today had featured a full-page illustrated spread explaining the camera technology behind Spy Kids 3-D.

Megan Lehman, reviewer for the New York Post, wrote on July 25, 2003, “Combined with the eyestrain produced by the cheap cardboard 3-D glasses, the resulting vertigo is decidedly unpleasant.” The four-color Spy Kids paper glasses actually used red/blue filters with sufficient density to produce the necessary cancellation of colors to make the anaglyph process work well. In addition, the glasses feature a flexible band that goes around the head to ensure that they stay on during the film.

For some reason, these journalists think that the anaglyph glasses are cheap just because they’re made out of cardboard. The Spy Kids glasses are supplied folded and wrapped in food-grade cellophane so that they are untouched as supplied to audiences. Of course, many of the five- to ten-year-old kids emerging from the theater after the screening continue to wear their high-tech-looking anaglyph glasses, which are similar in design to the glasses the characters in the movie wear. For children, it was a ready means of identification with the Spy Kids themselves.

After a July 29, 2003, showing of Spy Kids at an AMC multiplex theater in San Gabriel, California, I asked two elderly gentlemen leaving the theater what they thought of the stereoscopic effects in Spy Kids. “It doesn’t work!” replied one of the seniors, obviously no fan of retinal bombardment. When I queried about twenty different children, aged five to ten, after the film, all of them attested to enjoying the 3-D effects. The open minds and supple eye muscles of children bode well for the future of anaglyph movies.

Modestly budgeted at $40 million, Spy Kids 3-D took in $32.5 million with a three-day gross over its opening weekend, which was a better opening than either of the first two movies in the Spy Kids franchise.

Digital versus Film

Numerous theaters playing Spy Kids 3-D were using the Texas Instruments DLP digital projection system. At the time, Rodriguez was persona non grata in Hollywood because he had stated for the record that he disliked film itself and would produce and exhibit all of his films digitally...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: The Epochs of 3-D
• I. The Era of Convergence, 1952–1985
• II. The Immersive Age, 1986–2005
• III. Digital 3-D Cinema, 2005–2009
• Epilogue: Now Is the Time
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index