One Less Dimension Please

Yeah. I hate 3D. This may be due that I have 20/10 in the right and 20/15 in the left, or that it’s just awful. Either I’m amazing or the world is terrible. I know! Why not both?

3D will always be unusable. This is not just because of technological problems like needing three times the light using the same projectors (that’s why those movies are dark), or separating the left and right channel while keeping both eyes open. Even if the technology was perfect, it still wouldn’t work.

This occurred to me, oddly, during Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. Oddly that my brain survived I suppose. But as the camera would rack and do its ugly dance, I realized that the camera was determining the distance, and not the eye.

See, your eyes always see things the same size. Put simply, they don’t have zoom. So when something is 3 meters away, your eyes will always angle the same amount of cross-eyed-ness to see it, slightly more when it’s farther, slightly less when it’s closer. Not true with 3D, where the camera determines that angle (this is how much the two images shifts when projected – if you take your glasses off, and the image seems super weird and double, that’s supposed to be far away, if clear, it’s supposed to close).

So, when the camera does a medium shot, our eyes cross a bit, and our brain registers it 4 feet away. That’s fine, but it also applies in a long shot and ultra close, that 4 inches = 4 feet = 400 feet. It can never work.

The simple answer is this: if you can’t create the illusion of depth on the flat, using a medium (film) considerably more forgiving than the one Mr. Leonardi DiVinci used, get another job. And stop giving me headaches.