Read Part One of 3D is a Gimmick, But That's OK!
Before I put my 3D rant to bed for good, I thought it was only fair to offer my final conclusions having seen Hugo again in 2D.
Firstly, I enjoyed the visual experience much more. I found I could concentrate more on what I was looking at, and found much more in the frame to look at than I had in 3D. This sounds counter intuitive, I know, but I can only think that I was not having to change the focus and depth of my vision with each cut, my eyes were able to dart over the frame and absorb much more.
The CGI actually seemed better in 2D. Early on, the shots of Paris, had looked like a model town to me. I suppose this has to do with something I touched on in my previous 3D article - that the way we perceive scale at distance has more to do with size cues (i.e. a person or car to compare the building against) than with stereoscopic vision. In order to make the city look 3D the relative parallax between the two points had to be so massive that you eyes would either be 30 feet apart, or four inches apart and looking at something tiny.
Where I would have expected there to be the greatest loss was in the close-ups of the faces. Hugo is a movie filled with wonderfully expressive faces, and Scorsese spoils us by filling the frame with them. In fact, I found it lost nothing.
Even one of the very late shots where Georges Méliès seems to come through the screen so he is standing in the auditorium lost very little thanks to the subtle contra-zoom.
Secondly, I found the pacing much slower than I had remembered. Usually, my experience is that the first viewing of a film, movie or television show feels longer than its running time would suggest, I have always put this down to my heightened concetration, just as people who are involved in or witness accidents describe “time slowing down”. On second viewing, I usually find a movie whips along. Therefore, I can only attribute the apparent slowness to the lack of 3D.
It is has been understood for a while that 3D movies cannot be edited the same as 2D movies. Or rather they can, but the strain rapid cuts puts on the audience when it has to change focus and perceived depth for each cut makes viewing an uncomfortable and tiring experience. One would think this is not such a problem for movie like Hugo which is largely devoid of showy action scenes, but there were several occasions where I found myself squirming in my chair thinking, “Cut already! I can’t bear the tension!” And yet the shot would continue to hold. Done for dramatic reasons, this can be a great way to make the audience feel uncomfortable. Holding a shot of an actor at an excruciating moment can make the audience feel what the character is feeling, but these pauses were on things such as library interiors, cogs turning, and so on. This is not to say that such shots cannot be very effective. In Unbreakable, M Night Shyamalan played out entire scenes in a single unbroken shot to great effect. But Hugo and Unbreakable are different movies. Where Unbreakable gloried in its sense of detachment, Hugo is all about a sense of connection.
When the (many) directors of The Wizard of Oz elected to shoot the Oz scenes in technicolour, they weren’t worried about being subtle with it. Almost all of Oz seems to celebrate the strong primary colours - the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City, the Ruby Slippers. No one seemed worried about being accused of gimmickry.
They did not select these more natural tones:
They took it for all it was worth:
Over forty years later, though, Martin Scrosese shot Raging Bull in black and white. In 2005, George Clooney went against received wisdom and shot Good Night and Good Luck in black and white, obviously as did Michel Hazanavicius in The Artist this year.
My point is all these films came down on one side of the fence or another. They either embraced or declined to use colour long after it ceased to be a financial decision.
I don't mind 3D. To see something shooting out of the screen towards you can be very exciting, But the shackled half-3D that respectable directors are using to avoid accusations of gimmickry seems to make is redundant. Use it or don't, but don't be half-arsed with it. I would even prefer using 3D for action and other suitable sequences, while reserving 2D for dialogue scenes. Setting everything beyond the screen feels like the dimensional equivalent of using CGI wireframes in place of the full render.
The final proof, to me, is in the evolution of motion picture technology itself. Stereoscopic photography and cinematography predate colour photography by a long way. But it was sound and colour that the filmmakers strove for, not 3D. Looking at this in a purely Darwinian sense, then, it tells me we are all more concerned with sound and colour than dimension. It is also telling that we see resurgence of 3D whenever cinema feels threatened - television in the 1960s, video in the 1980s, the internet in the 2000s. Perceived internet threat aside, it also feels like 3D is being used in place of CGI which, having been photo-realistic for three or four years now, will no longer pull people in on its own.
Maybe the solution is to start making motion pictures people want to see, rather than rely on feeding them images. Just a thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment