THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 2

Silver screens, if they are well made and installed, can have minimal hot-spotting, but they still have what I call shading.  I make a distinction between hot-spotting and shading.  Although they may come about from the same reflective characteristics of the screen, shading has to do with an asymmetrical change in brightness across the screen and is typically dependent upon where you are sitting.  Shading happens quite noticeably when sitting in the worst seat in the house, say in the front row way on the extreme left or the right. In fact, the worst seats in the house for viewing a 2-D movie on a matte screen become even worse when viewing a polarized light stereoscopic movie on a silver screen from a bad seat. 

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 1

Ah the silver screen: searchlights scanning the Hollywood sky, glamorous premiers, gorgeous actresses….  The silver screen is a term that has denoted the glamour and excitement of Hollywood since Chaplin twirled his cane. While to some it is the most visible sign of hope for the cinema for others it is a dreaded surface upon which to project those old standby 2D movies.  But there’s so much more to it than glamour – there’s dreadful science.  It’s a technology that ought to command the industry’s keenest minds, because, after all, that’s where a hundred and fifty million bucks wind up as a vibrating veneer of a hundred billion photons reflected into the eyes of tens of millions of photon consumers. That’s one big point in favor of the film industry – they have not dehumanized the customer to the point where he or she is called a consumer.  The customers are still the audience, people with feelings rather than human maws born to consume piles of chazarai labeled made in Chinese. 

SIDE-BY-SIDE FOREVER

Lately there has been a lot of interest in two formats for stereoscopic multiplexing:  The above-and-below, resurrected by Technicolor for theatrical projection using film, and the side-by-side for multiplexing left and right images for television.  Here’s some background from a personal perspective. 

OVER-AND-UNDER AND OUT

In the early 1980s, when I founded StereoGraphics Corporation, the first bit of revenue income we had came from a venture with Chris Condon of StereoVision International.  Chris was a pioneer in the projection of stereoscopic movies using a single 35mm projector.  He founded the company Century Precision Optics, which is now a part of Schneider; but he moved on from there, sold it, and created StereoVision International because he had a big hit with the ‘70s movie The Stewardesses.  The success of that film set him to work on perfecting a single film approach to stereoscopic projection and photographic techniques.  He settled on the above-and-below (also called over and under or over/under) format based on two two-perforation high subframes with the Scope 2.4:1 aspect ratio occupying the area of the academy aperture. 

THE DIGITAL RELIGION

The announcement by Technicolor of a film-based 3D system, which would cost exhibitors comparatively little money to install, was provocative to say the least.

Reality and Illusion

To paraphrase Einstein:  Space is what keeps everything from happening at the same place, and stereoscopic imaging helps us visualize space.  The concept of space, or distance, is so fundamental, that a tentative understanding of our perception of it has taken the human race centuries. Stereoscopic imaging heightens our perception of space and it is so fundamental to our existence that any idea that the stereoscopic cinema is a passing fad is ridiculous.

Stereoscopic Movies: Conventional Wisdom

People are now learning how to look at stereoscopic moving images just as there was a time, a century ago, when people learned how to look at movies.  I’ve read that when motion pictures were first projected, if the composition didn’t include the entire actor – say they were cut off at the knees – people were taken aback by the effect, thinking that this was an image of an amputee. It took a bit of time to get away from composing a shot to look like the entire theater stage. There are stories about the Lumières projecting a movie of a locomotive headed towards the camera with the audience fleeing the projection in terror. 

Glossary

In any discipline, nomenclature turns out to be of obvious importance.  It’s crucial for all the people who are doing the thing to agree on the same set of definitions.  Without that, it’s impossible to communicate – or it’s impossible to communicate without ambiguity. 

Thank you, Puff the Magic Dragon

Puff, the Magic Dragon, has been my friend for more than 50 years.  It was in the spring of 1959 that I wrote the poem that became the song Puff, the Magic Dragon.  I was a freshman at Cornell.  I had been at the library at Willard Straight Hall, the Student Union building, and I’d read a sentimental poem about a dragon by Ogden Nash.  As I walked down State Street to the apartment of Peter Yarrow – who became the “Peter” of Peter, Paul and Mary, and who set my poem to music – I thought to myself, “I can do better than Ogden Nash’s poem about a dragon.”  Maybe I did.

Magic Murray

On a rainy day in February I drove way out on Tujunga Boulevard to Disney’s theme park cavernous construction facility.  It’s a place where they build props and stuff for the parks, and also test projection systems and rides.  The purpose of heading there was to see a 70mm print of one of the most important stereoscopic movies in history:  Murray Lerner’s Magic Journeys. It was in 1982 that Disney introduced a high production value stereoscopic movie to its theme parks. The movie, shot on 65mm (which is printed on 70mm), was shown in a dual-projection setup.  Not revolutionary technology — it is the same thing that was done for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park in New York – a place I used to ride my bike in when I was a kid in Flushing.