 |
| Picture: Sigourney Weaver New York premiere of 'The Ides of March' at the Ziegfeld Theater - Arrivals New York City, USA |
First, let me touch on Sigourney Weaver’s thoughts. She is of the opinion that, “…2D is going to be like black and white soon because 3D is the natural way that people encounter life, so it's a revolution the way that Greco-Roman sculpture was after hieroglyphics.”1 She went on to say that she thought that it would be some time before 3D may be achieved consistently in a way that seamlessly connects the audience to the world of the story. This relates back to the idea that it will take a few years for storytellers to learn the most effective storytelling tools or rules in order to convey a story in 3D. Weaver also said that the objective of any storyteller is, “to immerse you in a world, not to trick you or entertain you."1 In the end, it is about the story and we have to learn how to best use 3D to serve the craft of storytelling.
Two storytelling techniques that struck me from the reading were 1) the use of Depth of Field along the Z-axis in “Citizen Kane” and 2) the use of the Planes of Action along the Z-axis in “Dolores Claiborne”. Orson Welles used the Depth of Field to convey Kanes’ emotionally diminishing position by having Kane walk away from his guardian along the Z-axis to visually depict his diminishing size as his guardian is given the power position over him much in the same way that a small child is dependent on a parent who gives them an allowance. Thus the use of relative size along the Z-axis can be used to visually depict a character's control and power in a scene. In “Dolores Claiborne” the Planes of Action are used to depict the past in the far positive parallax while the mid-ground and negative parallax are used to depict the present. This is a filmic technique that I had never considered as a way to convey story and I see how it could be an effective storytelling devise in 3D.
Well, those are my thoughts for the week. I hope that you find my musings insightful as we continue to discover the rules and tools of 3D Storytelling.
Cheers-
Russell McGee
1 Contactmusic.com, Sigourney Weaver - Sigourney Weaver: 'All Films Will Eventually Be 3D', WWW Document, http://www.contactmusic.com/news/sigourney-weaver-all-films-will-eventually-be-3d_1285527
Good cites from the readings. We have to remember that the movies that Van Sijll explores were not shot stereoscopically, so we can place the scenic Volume wherever we want along the z-axis. We can also imagine how much IX (inter-axial) we'd dial in to determine the depth of the Volume recorded. The only things we have to go on from the book are the monoscopic stills, so we don't even get all of the 2D depth queues (we don't get motion parallax from stills).
ReplyDeleteSo, on the one hand there is so much information missing when assessing the true depth of the scene. On the other hand we have a tremendous amount of freedom to decide how the scene could be shown stereoscopically.