On Murch on 3D
It seems everyone who has ever set foot in a movie theater has an opinion on Walter Murch’s opinion of stereoscopic cinema that was quoted in Roger Ebert’s blog. I’m not interested in going toe to toe with Murch. He’s articulate, brilliant, and famous – and he hates 3D movies. I’m not nearly as articulate or brilliant, and I’ll never be famous – but I like 3D movies.
So what? Some people like them and some don’t. And some people get headaches watching them. No one spends more time thinking about, writing about, and talking about editing and how people see those edits than Walter Murch. I had been a professional editor for several years before I read Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye, and it was only then that I fully understood why cuts work. (Murch reasons that through blinking the brain “cuts” our visual stream into segments. Thus we actually think in cuts, so cutting is a natural way to present a series of clips.)
It’s a bit of a leap to equate blinking when we turn our head 15 or 20 degrees with a cut in the action that takes us from New York to London in 1/24th of a second, but the brain is adaptable. It makes it work. Murch’s theory on blinking and cuts has literally changed the way I look at the world.
That profound reasoning is what makes his current theory on 3D cinema’s shortcomings fail my sniff test.
The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.
But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.
Not really. Murch is only half right. Focusing is a physical act, but convergence is a brain trick — just like reframing by blinking. Think of that eye test where you move the pencil closer to your face until you can no longer see a single pencil. You’re not physically crossing your eyes to converge on the pencil until it’s just inches from your face. Convergence isn’t physically challenging after a few feet. So you’re not doing any physical work with your eyes that competes with its attempts at focusing when sitting 30 feet from the screen.
Getting the brain to adapt to weird visual cues isn’t all that difficult. Back in 1896, George Stratton ran that famous experiment testing perceptual adaptation where subjects wore glasses that inverted the image sent to the eyes, making the world appear upside down. In some surprisingly short amount of time, the subjects’ brains compensated so that the world appeared right again. The whole 600 million years of focus and convergence theory doesn’t hold up.
Murch also complains of the strobing of 3D images.
I edited one 3D film back in the 1980′s — “Captain Eo” — and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.
He’s right, but it’s nothing directors and editors haven’t faced before. I remember making the transition from SD to HD and noting that camera moves needed to be slowed down. Different visual problem, same solution. Along a similar vein, as a television editor going to the cinema after a day in the cutting room could be torturous. After a day of closely watching the world go by at 30 fps, a 24 fps film looks downright staccato — for the first 10 minutes. And then the brain adapts.
Just a couple of weeks ago I was in LA visiting some cutting rooms working in 3D. DPs’ and directors’ approaches to stereoscopic shooting have evolved — so much of that edginess has been softened. Lighting and angles have evolved as well. And just as we learned with Avatar, some of the best 3D is subtle 3D.
Though the jury is still out on 3D cinema, 3D television shows promise. Anyone who frequents live sporting events is disappointed in the flatness of traditional 2D broadcasts at home. At the stadium I know where the ball is going to land. I have depth perception. On TV I need to rely on Joe Buck to tell me where it’s going. 3D changes that — the viewer can see the play unfold, and Joe Buck can say less – that alone makes the case for 3D. As previously noted here, the Economist published a very good article on the topic nine months ago that still holds.
Murch may very well be right. 3D might fizzle, but we won’t need to look back 600 million years for the reason. It would more likely be the $3 per ticket premium that buries it.
Rebirth of the newspaper?
Rupert “I bought MySpace just in time for it to tank” Murdoch didn’t seem to get the new media thing… until today. The Daily, the first iPad-only newspaper launched to great fanfare. At first blush Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch make Felix and Oscar look like identical twins, but they certainly have at least one thing in common. They know how to passionately engage millions of people at a time and make a lot of money doing so.
If the Web has been listed as the cause of death for numerous dailies and magazines, the App might be named godfather of the reborn e-pubs. While people remain largely unwilling to pay for content on viewed on the PC, the iPad and Kindle prove they are willing to pay for content on the tablet. I call it the corn flakes effect. I always paid a few bucks a week to read the morning paper at the breakfast table. I’d pay a few more bucks a month for magazines to read in bed. And I’d overpay at the airport for virtually anything to read on an airplane so I wouldn’t be stuck watching some neutered cut down version of a movie that tanked at the box office.
CNN covered the announcement nicely, acknowledging that as the iPad’s share of eyeball expanded into television’s territory.
Another report last month from ReadItLater, a web service that follows web trends, found that the time spent reading on the iPad is even crossing into primetime TV hours.
It reported that maximum iPad text consumption occurs from 7pm to 11pm, a slot traditionally allocated to reclining on the couch and watching TV.
Likely CNN is assuming it’s at the expense of Two and a Half Men, not Anderson Cooper. Even the Times gushed about the Daily’s user experience… in its own catty way.
The Daily, according to people who have seen it, is aesthetically — if not intellectually — compelling, incorporating sound, sight and motion in new ways.
“It’s got an amazing look and feel,” said Mike Vorhaus, the president of the media consulting firm Magid Advisors, who had been shown The Daily in advance and who compared it to a glossy magazine.
Of course CNN was able to dig up the requisite Luddite for its coverage.
“While anything that Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs do in collaboration is bound to be unique, we have to be mindful of the fact that the tablet is just in its infancy stage — it’s like the early days of the printed press,” said Barry McIlheney, chief executive of the UK based Professional Publishers Association.
He believes that newspapers are easy to replace because their format is adaptable to the screen but reading longer passages of texts with images are not.
Apparently Mr. McIlheney hasn’t yet caught the Economist on the iPad. The experience of reading it on the iPad is more pleasant than on paper, and all the additional online content is only a click or two away.
Before we start encouraging kids to enroll in journalism school again, we should temper our optimism for the future of the old fish wrapper. Just this week Apple announced it’s clamping down on content sellers who evade the App Store and Apple’s 30% vig. This whole thing could lose steam quickly If Apple and the content creators can’t arrive at a win-win. The iPod always worked with non-iTunes content, in a competing format no less. If Apple blocks Amazon, Sony, Conde Nast, and others from getting their content onto the iPad, the whole platform will suffer.
