Stereo3D - creative boon or desperate financial ploy?

Can/Will Stereoscopic 3D reinvigorate interest in deep-focus staging and a greater utilization of the spatiality of cinema? And Is Stereoscopic 3D 'all that and a bag of chips?' Or is it doomed to die?

These were the questions recently posed on my blog by a reader posed in response to a lengthy discussion on deep-focus vs rack-focus cinema techniques and my perspective of the later being vastly over-used. The reader, Dani, speculated that Stereo3D may prompt a revisiting of less common deep-focus techniques.

My response to that first question would be a fairly resounding yes. I think the very nature of Stereoscopic 3D forces directors and DoP's to think immediately of Staging and Spatial arrangement first and foremost rather than Framing. The nature of what Stereo3D can do puts onus on arrangement in Space rather than arrangement in Frame. Stereo3D innately demands deep-focus as going ultra shallow with blur is effectively composing in 2-dimensional planes rather than deep spaces. So a DoP shooting Stereo3D with ultrafast primes with wide open apertures is totally defeating the purpose of having Stereo3D in the first place.

Now, as for the second question. It would be too easy for me to say that i generally think Stereo3D is a crock of shit that no one is really interested in and which the mass general public is, at best, ambivalent about. But I'll avoid such provocation and instead entertain a perspective on WHY parts of the film industry are so gung-ho on 3D....?

Lets face it, Hollywood studios are Terrified.

Movie theatre ticket sales are slumping. It's getting harder for the studios to convince people to leave their homes to go to the movies. The reason..? Well aside from cultural phenomenon factors I think there two more tangible elements.  Home theatre systems are getting cheaper and better and so the enticement of the 'big screen' experience is just not as alluring as once was. When our home TV's were small, 4:3 with convex glass and limited colour and resolution, there was a great 'viewing quality' attractor with going to the cinema - an experience you couldnt get at home. But when you've got a 40-50" flat-screen LCD on the wall (let alone a home projector) with a multi channel surround sound system playing from BluRay in HD and a VERY COMFY couch; the movie theatre just doesn't have the pull it once did. Frankly I for one would generally  rather watch a movie on my home  than the  theatre. I can stop whenever i like for a piss-break. I can rewind if I miss a line of dialogue and I can have my friends over and have a better communal experience.

Then we add on top of this the dreaded DownLoad culture...! Shock Horror!

Legalities aside, the much bigger problem for the studios is that they are trying to convince viewers to conform their watching to When and Where the studios say they can in a culture where the viewer otherwise has complete control over how and when they watch just about anything. 4000 years of human history and warfare has told us that people dont like being told what to do and being dictated to.

There was a shift a decade ago when studios started treating Theatrical Releases at the Movie Theatre as simply a 'marketing exercise' to drive DVD sales post theatre run. That trend still stands and indeed some big mainstream films actually draw the money to pay for theatrical release prints directly out of the marketing budget for the film. This alone tells you the brave new world we live in. A world the studios are terrified of...

And this brings us to Stereo3D. Why are the studios pushing Stereo3D so hard? Why are they talking it up? Why are they giving huge financial incentives to hardware and software companies to develop Stereo3d technologies...? Because You HAVE to go to the Movie Theatre to see it. I cant download a Stereo3D version to watch at home. I have to go to the movie theatre and buy a traditional ticket to see Stereo3D.

So the major studios are pushing hard on Stereo3D because it is a way to preserve the traditional hierarchical financial structure of the film industry. In maintains the old-school distribution pyramid that trickles down from Theatrical release, through DVD and onto Broadcast in a strict linear privilege. Rather than change the way they operate they are pushing a technology simply to reinforce the status quo they are most comfortable with.

So... I could argue that Stereo3D is a viewing experience the bulk of the world's movie goers simply dont give a flying rats arse about. Or I could argue that my experience is, as with many others, that Stereo3D is hard to watch, makes my eyes tired and sore and so will be avoided by many on physiological grounds. But, i wont argue either of these because I dont have to. 

My predication is not that Stereo3D will disappear (quite the contrary, i think it will persist in various forms for some time to come) but that it will fundamentally FAIL to do what the Hollywood studios desire so desperately for it to achieve - Get people back into the movie theatres en-masse again. It will fail this overt objective through a) audience apathy and b) because it is simply a matter of time before technology advances and I can watch Stereo3D movie in my home theatre from a file I illegally downloaded (not that i would ever do that ;) Even 2 years ago i tested a prototype laptop computer that could make a Stereo3D image WITHOUT glasses; you just had to sit dead-square in front of it. It wont be long before that becomes mainstream (if people want it)

Thus I draw the conclusion that it doesn't matter how good Stereo3D is, or how great it looks, it will Fail to do what the studios desperately want it to do. And when it does, they will give up on it and desperately scurry for soemthign else to plug their sinking boat. And because I think audience desire for Stereo3D will always be fringe and marginal rather than mainstream, development of hardware and software for Stereo3D will subsequently cease or slow once the studios let it go.

As a case in point of the culture of apathy I believe exists around Stereo3D (from those outside of the big studio set at least) I can say that I teach a hundred rabidly enthusiastic, drenched in movies, gung-ho film school  brats who eat breath and sleep cinema technology. Are they milling over the internet reading about Avatar and Stereo3D? Are they endlessly talking about Stereo3D between classes? Are they excitedly musing on how they would use Stereo3D when they should be working on their HDV short films? NOPE..! They just dont care.... They really dont. They talk endlessly of video games, 3D animation, CGI, RED camera, 4k, Steadicams but Stereo3D is just NOT on their mind. Some might argue that this will change once they see Avatar.... But im not so sure. This is the next generation of filmmakers, all in their 20's, and right now  they just dont care about Stereo3D. And if they dont care do we really think the general public is going to care enough to leave their comfy couches...?

The 'film look' is a Crock, Shallow depth-of-field is Banal and Rack focus is Lazy. Would all you indie filmmakers please Get Over It..!

Allow me to be deliberatelyprovocative....

How a Movie looks is a very important thing. The visual aesthetics of a movie profoundly shape the experience of watching it. Few would argue with this position.

Aesthetics, by definition, is the study of ways of seeing and of perceiving. When we consider the aesthetics of cinema we are considering how a movie looks and is perceived. To the filmmaker - concerned with making, building, constructing a film rather than just experiencing it - aesthetics are tangibly the techniques they employ to depict the world of their cinematic creation.

So far, this is all pretty obvious and straight forward. But something we must consider is this idea of 'Technique' and the choices at the filmmaker's disposal - What are they? How are they used? What do they mean?

Any visual technique used by a filmmaker is simply a tool leveraged for an aesthetic story-telling purpose. Quick-cutting or long-takes, close-ups or wide shots, colour or black and white, dollys or pans, so on and so on... The effectiveness, impact and worth of any given technique a filmmaker employs is derived from its suitability to the context of the film. In simple terms, does the technique match the story?

Filmmaking is above all else a process of problem solving and the techniques employed are simply the solution to those problems - be they narrative, emotive, technical or creative. For example;
PROBLEM - The audience need to feel a part of the action, that they share the danger the characters face.
SOLUTION - Shoot hand-held and shaky, ducking and weaving the camera with the action

All this seems well and good and leaves open infinite possibilities for creative aesthetic solutions. Great films are made when directors find innovative, fresh and exciting aesthetics to solve creative problems.

But if we except this premise then we must face up to a distinct problem. If a single aesthetic choice becomes so dominant and common and ubiquitous across all genre's of filmmaking, regardless of the creative problems posed by individual films, then it ceases to be grounded technique - it becomes stale, meaningless, banal, a default position rather than a creative choice.

In the 21st century I would attest that Shallow Focus and Rack Focus aesthetics have lost all meaning as useful creative problem solving techniques and instead have become banal, unimaginative staples of cinema. And it prompts us to ask loudly.... "What the hell happened to Deep Focus?"



Let me step back a bit from this verbose statement and provide some clarity on the trajectory that leads me to this point. In the early days of cinema film stocks were slow and so apertures had to be wide open in the hope of obtaining decent exposure. With wide open apertures you get very shallow depth of field - a short stretch of space where the subject is in focus that renders anything in the fore or back ground blurred.

In the 40's companies such as Kodak and Agfa developed better chemical processes and faster film stocks. With faster film stocks apertures dont need to open so wide for exposure and thus depth of field can be extended. Deep-Focus cinema was born; an image aesthetic where subjects at varying focal-lengths from the camera can be equally sharp; both foreground and background in focus. Cinema changed dramatically as a new set of problem solving aesthetic techniques were opened up for filmmakers; new opportunities and possibilities for how a film could look. Shallow Focus and its offspring Rack Focus (where the lens is manipulated in-shot to shift focus from one subject to another) became not the staple of how films looked and worked visually but rather options of choice that a filmmaker may chose to use, or not use, depending on the needs and context of the film.



Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, and the superb camera work of Gregg Toland, stands as a penultimate example of the power of deep-focus and spawned the host of new thinking about cinema aesthetics that was embodied by the French New Wave and scholarly journals such as Cahiers du Cinema.



But the cinematic party of aesthetic choice, possibility and variety seemed to be cut short as deep-focus became the victim of the Video and Digital Revolutions.

Let me explain...

Video technology - the ability to capture a moving image electronically rather than chemically - came along in the 70's and 80's. For the most part such technology was seen as having a great many benefits but one of them was Not visual fidelity. The technology still had many years to go (and an evolution from analogue to digital) before it may be considered visually equal. The simplistic result of this was that Video Cameras at this time were made, in large part, not to directly compete with film cameras for conservatively traditional cinema roles but to serve different purposes. As such they were largely small cameras with small sensors. There is of course a direct mathematical correlation between the size of the sensor (the imaging plane) and the depth of field rendered. Small sensor = deep depth of field. Large sensor = shallow depth of field. Video technology, by nature of both its technological limitations and cultural position within media industry contexts, was innately deep-focus.

What must remembered about cinema aesthetics is that they are deeply connected to cultural responses. Take for example the modern age of mobile phones and mass popular YouTube uploading. We have become so used to seeing nightly TV news filled with amateur footage that is shaky, pixelated and out of focus depicting immediate and current events in a veritae style that there is a prevailing cultural construct that directly associates such Shaky / Out of focus / Pixelated images with 'Truth' and 'Actuality'. It's for this reason that modern TV news proactively requests amateur footage from its viewers despite it being only a few years ago that airing such footage would have been considered beneath 'Broadcast Quality Standards'. Similarly TV networks the world over have been known to compress and deliberately degrade images of natural disasters and war zones in order to make it seem more 'authentic'.

This same cultural construct response was forced upon deep focus by the video revolution of the 70's and 80's. What was ingrained into the popular visual language was that 'deep focus' equated to video and so, in the minds of viewers, primarily to documentary, news reporting, amateur footage, cheap production and pornography. Conversely that 'shallow focus' equated to 'film' and high budget, narrative cinema, high-art.

This shift in the popular cultural 'reading' of moving image aesthetics and the separation of High and Low cinematic art on the basis of Deep or Shallow focus has been a blight and a curse on filmmaking ever since.

In the digital age, amid the famed 'digital revolution', we at last moved towards a parity of visual fidelity between celluloid and digital but have been simultaneously afflicted with a prevailing bogus desire to constrict the aesthetics of digital to the legacy hang-ups of film.

Sadly the prime concern of digital indie filmmakers over the past decade has not been the new aesthetic possibilities afforded them by digital technologies but rather an almost singular focus on the cost saving and pragmatic elements of digital. As such, the much lauded desire of digital filmmaking has been to, on one hand, shoot cheap but, on the other, have it look like 'Film'.

Now, despite the thousands of website articles, posts, forum treatises and essays dedicated to the mission of how to get the 'Film Look' it is arguable that a useful definition with any clarity on exactly what constitutes the 'Film look' is near impossible to come by. Frame Rate, Progressive scan, Grain, Flicker, Weave, Dynamic Range, Gamma curve - these are all the traits often cited as the 'film look' but together they constitute such a broad palette of hazy and in-tangible possibilities that distilling them into a particular set of aesthetic traits is a highly ephemeral process.

May I suggest this.... The ?film look? is bullshit; a product of marketing representation and the digestible distillation of an association with a particular mode of viewing. The 'film look' is a cultural rather than aesthetic understanding; one drawn from our legacy of personal cinematic experiences in the movie theatre watching a projected image - Nostalgia not Aesthetics.. Thus, when it comes to making 'films' in the digital age for ourselves our base instincts are to want our films to evoke those same nostalgic memory associations we have with celluloid. This we translate as the aesthetic of film, the 'film look', but in truth it's much more about cultural and personal association.

Through all this, the ramifications of this for digital indie filmmakers have been profound. In working with Digital Video but desiring a 'film look' - that is near impossible to quantify - their efforts were skewed and corrupted. For so many digital indie filmmakers over the past 15 years their functional definition of the 'film look' was primarily whatever aesthetic characteristics were the opposite of what was innate to small-format video. Most specifically Shallow Focus.

Because deep-focus is the default position of many small format digital cameras, owing largely to small sensors as imaging planes, the prevailing aesthetic desire of indie filmmakers was to invest their films with the opposite - to enforce shallow-focus as a way of connecting with a popular culture mindset that connects Shallow Focus with 'high-budget cinema' and Deep Focus with 'low-budget' video.

As a result we have a whole generation of filmmakers who measure their aesthetic mark by how shallow their focus can be and how often they can Rack-Focus their shots. They are a generation who have been obsessed with rack-focusing rather than staging to move the viewer around the cinematic space; using the camera lens to depict space in flat 2D planes rather than a 3-diemnsion staging of space itself.

We've spent so much of the digital revolution fussing over how to make digital look like film that we've neglected the subtle art of arranging space itself, forgotten how to focus the eye Spatially rather than the far more clumsy and overt mechanics of doing it Optically. Most importantly we've forgotten that the viewer is a sentient and intelligent being, more than capable of deciphering, analyzing, speculating on and articulating the visual information they take in.

Let me offer a verbose rebuke of Shallow Focus and Rack-Focus by way of being provocative.

Shallow focus and Rack-Focus is lazy. A ham-fisted and overtly slothful technique with little impetus other than to lead your viewer around by the nose, to force them to look exactly where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. As a tool, like all other cinematic tools at the filmmakers disposal, it can and may be very useful. But as a staple and default way to depict moving images it is as articulate as a house brick.

Shallow focus and Rack Focus  is the cinema equivalent of spoon-feeding the audience one small digestible and banal visual morsel at a time. Handing to them a deliberately unsophisticated and unchallenging image platter. It is the camera equivalent of writing only in capital letters and short sentences for fear your reader/viewer may not understand precisely and exactly what you want them to understand. "Look here", "see this", "turn now" - no distractions, no surprises, no accidentals, no confusion, no uncertainty, just the domineering dictation of a moving-image experience on pre-determined flat 2-dimensional planes.  This is the essential internal logic of Shallow-Focus/Rack-Focus cinematography which, by nature of it's elimination through blur of any distractions outside of a singular focus, is an acutely dictatorial aesthetic. An aesthetic that leaves nothing to the viewers analytical mind and doesn't engage the viewer in a more complex visual contract. Rack-Focus refuses to  allow the viewer to decipher and assemble meanings for themselves and is a condescending and patronizing way present a cinematic image.

That said, the problem is not Shallow and Rack Focus unto themselves as techniques but rather that they are not seen and used as deft Tools and problem solving Options. Rather they act as blithe and banal default methods fueled by a misguided desire for an association with nostalgic 'high-art'.

Utilizing deeper focus allows for a complex play of light, space, distance, obstacles and subjects. The arrangement of the framed contents becomes paramount, the subjects proportions and relationships to each other the prime creative device. The construction of a cinematic space that is detailed and nuanced becomes the main canvas of the filmmaker. Shallow focus eliminates and takes these options away, it dissolves a great deal of the problem-solving and decision making process that is the art of the Director. In shallow focus the Director is not demanded to solve problems of space, is not compelled to ask questions of arrangement and position, is relieved of the requirement to convey proximity and relationships.



A post such as this may be very confronting for some indie filmmakers who have dedicated so much of their time to extolling the virtues of shallow depth-of-field and to toiling in their colour-grading system to mimic film-stock emulsion and gamma curves. But for those more enlightened readers who feel compelled to think outside of banal convention and consider how else things might be done, I encourage you to read David Bordwells superb book 'Figures Traced Light' which explores in exquisite detail the lost art of Cinematic Staging and Deep-Focus.



Likewise the two links below present some interesting reading in regard to the contentious history of deep-focus and its connection to movements such as the New Wave and the idea of 'reality'.

Do filmmakers deserve the last word? David Brodwell

Sharpening Deep Focus, by Joe Heumann and Charles H. Harpole

Why Capture the moment when you can Select it..?

Using a Movie camera for Stills is more significant than using a Still camera for Movies.

Why Capture the moment when you can Select it..? This seems to be the question some high-profile still photographers are asking themselves. Why work with a camera whose mechanics are based around the idea of 'capturing' a moment plucked from the air - a snapshot - when you can simply hit REC on a video camera, capture 24+ photos every second and then, at will, select and choose any of the captured moments you wish? Up until this point, the factor preventing this mindset was Resolution - the fact that still image resolutions are very high and moving image resolutions are very low. But the times they have a changed....

Reports from a recent Vanity Fair shoot is that famed Photographer Annie Leibovitz shot a session with Tina Fey not on the usual assortment of Canon and Nikon digital SLR's but rather with a RED ONE. The process..?
1) Press REC.
2) direct the subject in real-time to pose.
3) Press Stop.
4) Import the footage and from the 4k rushes pluck out the 'moments' you want from the 24+/sec you have availible.

And photogrpahy will never be the same....

Whilst an argument that the resolution of of RED at 4k is still not anywhere near the native resolution of high-end DSLR's (let alone Digital mid-Format) there are two things that must be remembered - 1) that with a 35k RED sensor on the way this argument has a short shelf-life. And 2) How much reoslution do you REALLY need for a magazine shoot and for website publishing. 4K from a  RAW image might struggle if you need to blow up to a large framed print or billboard but it  is certainly plenty for just about any print-publishing purpose.

Photography in this way becomes not a process of timing, reflex and moment-capturing but rather a distinctly different mechanic more akin to selection and image isolation.

Whilst much of the discussion about the convergence of Still and Motion image acquistion has focused on Still cameras shooting Moving images; I'm inclined to suggest that  moves - such as those by Canon with their 7D HD DSLR - to use a still camera to shoot movies are not anywhere near so significant as using a Movie camera to shoot Stills. The former simply changes the tool to do the same job whereas the later changes the entire cretaive process and premise of Photography itself.

At this link you can see some of the images captured for the Tina Fey shoot

And Here you can see some info about a similar shoot involving Bruce Willis

A functional defintion of cinema

What is a functional definition of cinema?

This may seem, on the surface, a easy endeavour but even within common usage of the term (let alone academic and scholarly discourses) there is great variation.

It is arguable that the word ‘cinema’ is most commonly used to refer to a physical place and location; the venue where films are shown – the ‘cinema theatre’. The ramifications for the use of Cinema as a locative noun position and frame other uses of the word into particular contexts both technical and cultural. By defining Cinema specifically as a place where films are shown then any broader application of the word is potentially consigned also to that specific location. Hence a definition of ‘cinema’ may be popularly accepted as ‘movies shown in a cinema’ - and this might be an easy enabler of common discussion, employing broadly accepted terms - but it is none the less highly problematic as it ties moving image works to a particular mode of viewing (and indeed a particular technical apparatus). When, in real terms, the proportion of ‘movies’ viewed by the populous in a cinema-theatre is but a tiny fraction of the total ‘movies’ they will view via other mechanisms (namely TV in the home or on-line) then the definition of cinema as a ‘place where movies are seen’ is a dysfunctional and an inaccurate descriptor. Similarly, in defining cinema by the apparatus of its delivery we also constrain it to particular forms of technology connected to that delivery. Hence, despite five decades of video technology, the term cinema still has a popular association with celluloid and projected 35mm film; a further small distinction used to separate a definition of cinema from other screen-based media such as TV.

To this we can add still other other variations of definition; in particular cultural constructs around cinema. Tied with the idea of cinema as a ‘place’ is the notion that cinema, as a term, has particular cultural connotations. That ‘going to the cinema’ is not just an act of visiting a particular venue but involves a deeper consciousness of occasion and spectacle. The implications for movie works viewed under the umbrella of such cultural constructs is to invest them with certain expectations which are beyond the content of the film itself. This gives rise to a common understanding of Cinema as an experience; a manner of experiencing a moving image beyond the movie itself. Popcorn, dark theatre, loud sound, big-screen, communal environment, Saturday night date and so on, are the hall-marks of a ‘cinema experience’ and a popular cultural association of the word ‘cinema’.

The third major association of the word ‘cinema’ is with a perceived notion of ‘quality’ and aesthetic. This perception gives rise to the common usage of the word ‘Cinematic’. In theory cinematic is simply an adjective derived from cinema; a means of describing something that is ‘of the cinema’ or connected to the cinema. But in more popular usage and understanding ‘cinematic’ is used to describe a particular quality of the work that lends itself to spectacle, scale and traits of the cinema theatre (ie large-screen, big sound, public crowd) as well as connotations of the works ability to generate immersion in the cinema experience. Here we may see a similar pattern to that established by the French New Wave critics in the 1950's and 60's who, whilst coining the term Mise en Scene desired to identify Mise en Scene as not a mode or paradigm for making a film but rather a particular quality that a film may or may not be in possession of. With this idea of ‘the cinematic’ as a discreet 'quality' we have a circumstance where a work of ‘cinema’ may play in a cinema-theatre but be judged as being a film that is not ‘cinematic’.

Certainly there are numerous other permutations but all three of these key variations on how the term ‘cinema’ may be interpreted, used and exploited are flawed. Whilst all three may find themselves accepted as given in common discourse they do not present a viable means of comprehension or of definition for cinema studies. Such definitions based on cultural constructs and specific technologies have no scope to evolve. It is possible, even easy, to imagine a future where the cinema-theatre has vanished (much as the Drive-In of old) and projected celluloid film has been totally replaced by digital technologies. In such a scenario the currently common defining elements of cinema as a ‘place’, a ‘cultural construct’ and a ‘means’ would be rendered defunct. Yet there would, no doubt, still be movies, still be ‘cinema’, just not as a location or a particular apparatus.

So, what this drives us to consider is what might be a viable and functional definition of ‘cinema’ that can account not only for current and past contexts, but which is not so tied to contemporary means and modes that it has no future functionality as cinema evolves? When considered in this manner the possibilities for a definition of cinema contract significantly to a distilled essence. Cinema is ‘the art of the moving image’. This acutely simple definition takes the two particular traits that are irrefutable for all cinema, both past and present, without tying it to any particular apparatus, institution or cultural context. Cinema is an Art because it is something wrought and constructed by a person (or group of people) that has no specific practical function; only to explore, engage, inform, entertain and edify. Likewise, cinema is a ‘moving image’ because this simple phrase alone sets cinema apart from its parents – theatre, photography and architecture. Whilst the means by which we watch cinema and the technology by which we display it may change and vary enormously, the fact that the image is moving will not.

Any other, broader or more specific definition of cinema just seems useless and un-helpful.

Internal perception - Game Probe

I have finally returned to the Game Probe series i began sometime ago that examines the impact and effect of computer game aesthetics as cinematic works. I have a backlog of games I have earmarked to be the focus of future episodes and have picked up the series with Mirror's Edge. This episode looks at the construction of a sense of bodily self, known as proprioception, within the game and the dynamics of visceral engagment.

You can see this episode below or view the whole series.