3D film
3D films are motion pictures made to give an illusion of three-dimensional solidity, usually with the help of special glasses worn by viewers. 3D films were prominently featured in the 1950s in American cinema and later experienced a worldwide resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s driven by IMAX high-end theaters and Disney-themed venues. 3D films became increasingly successful throughout the 2000s, peaking with the success of 3D presentations of Avatar in December 2009, after which 3D films again decreased in popularity. Certain directors have also taken more experimental approaches to 3D filmmaking, most notably celebrated auteur Jean-Luc Godard in his film Goodbye to Language.
History
Before film
The basic components of 3D film were introduced separately between 1833 and 1839. Stroboscopic animation was developed by Joseph Plateau in 1832 and published in 1833 in the form of a stroboscopic disc, which he later called the fantascope and became better known as the phénakisticope. Around the very same time, Charles Wheatstone developed the stereoscope, but he did not really make it public before June 1838. The first practical forms of photography were introduced in January 1839 by Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot. A combination of these elements into animated stereoscopic photography may have been conceived early on, but for decades it did not become possible to capture motion in real-time photographic recordings due to the long exposure times necessary for the light-sensitive emulsions that were used.Charles Wheatstone got inventor Henry Fox Talbot to produce some calotype pairs for the stereoscope and received the first results in October 1840. Only a few more experimental stereoscopic photographs were made before David Brewster introduced his stereoscope with lenses in 1849. Wheatstone also approached Joseph Plateau with the suggestion to combine the stereoscope with the fantascope. In 1849, Plateau published about this concept in an article about several improvements made to his fantascope and suggested a stop-motion technique that would involve a series of photographs of purpose-made plaster statuettes in different poses. The idea reached Jules Duboscq, an instrument maker who already marketed Plateau's Fantascope as well as the stereoscopes of Wheatstone and Brewster. In November 1852, Duboscq added the concept of his "Stéréoscope-fantascope, ou Bïoscope" to his stereoscope patent. Production of images proved very difficult, since the photographic sequence had to be carefully constructed from separate still images. The bioscope was no success, and the only extant disc, without apparatus, is found in the Joseph Plateau collection of the University of Ghent. The disc contains 12 albumen image pairs of a machine in motion.
Most of the other early attempts to create motion pictures also aimed to include the stereoscopic effect.
In November 1851, Antoine Claudet claimed to have created a stereoscope that showed people in motion. The device initially only showed two phases, but during the next two years, Claudet worked on a camera that would record stereoscopic pairs for four different poses. Claudet found that the stereoscopic effect did not work properly in this device, but believed the illusion of motion was successful.
In 1855, Johann Nepomuk Czermak published an article about his Stereophoroskop. His first idea to create 3D animation involved sticking pins in a stroboscopic disc to create a sequence that would show one pin moving further into the cardboard and back. He also designed a device that would feed the image pairs from two stroboscopic discs into one lenticular stereoscope and a vertical predecessor of the zoetrope.
On February 27, 1860, Peter Hubert Desvignes received British patent no. 537 for 28 monocular and stereoscopic variations of cylindrical stroboscopic devices. This included a version that used an endless band of pictures running between two spools that was intermittently lit by an electric spark. Desvignes' Mimoscope, received an Honourable Mention "for ingenuity of construction" at the 1862 International Exhibition in London. It could "exhibit drawings, models, single or stereoscopic photographs, so as to animate animal movements, or that of machinery, showing various other illusions." Desvignes "employed models, insects and other objects, instead of pictures, with perfect success." The horizontal slits allowed a much improved view, with both eyes, of the opposite pictures.
In 1861, American engineer Coleman Sellers II received US patent No. 35,317 for the kinematoscope, a device that exhibited "stereoscopic pictures as to make them represent objects in motion". In his application he stated: "This has frequently been done with plane pictures but
has never been, with stereoscopic pictures". He used three sets of stereoscopic photographs in a sequence with some duplicates to regulate the flow of a simple repetitive motion, but also described a system for very large series of pictures of complicated motion.
On August 11, 1877, the Daily Alta newspaper announced a project by Eadward Muybridge and Leland Stanford to produce sequences of photographs of a running horse with 12 stereoscopic cameras. Muybridge had much experience with stereo photography and had already made instantaneous pictures of Stanford's horse Occident running at full speed. He eventually managed to shoot the proposed sequences of running horses in June 1878 with stereoscopic cameras. The published result and animated versions for his zoopraxiscope were not stereoscopic, but in 1898 Muybridge claimed that he had viewed the pictures in two synchronized zoetropes with Wheatstone's reflecting stereoscope as a "very satisfactory reproduction of an apparently solid miniature horse trotting and of another galloping".
Thomas Edison demonstrated his phonograph on November 29, 1877, after previous announcements of the device for recording and replaying sound had been published earlier in the year. An article in Scientific American concluded, "It is already possible, by ingenious optical contrivances, to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience. Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices, and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further". Wordsworth Donisthorpe announced in the January 24, 1878, edition of Nature that he would advance that conception: "By combining the phonograph with the kinesigraph, I will undertake not only to produce a talking picture of Mr. Gladstone, which, with motionless lips and unchanged expression, shall positively recite his latest anti-Turkish speech in his own voice and tone. Not only this, but the life size photograph itself shall move and gesticulate precisely as he did when making the speech, the words and gestures corresponding as in real life." Dr. Phipson, a correspondent for British news in a French photography magazine, relayed the concept but renamed the device "Kinétiscope" to reflect the viewing purpose rather than the recording option. This was picked up in the United States and discussed in an interview with Edison later in the year. Neither Donisthorpe's or Edison's later moving picture results were stereoscopic.
Early patents and tests
In the late 1890s, British film pioneer William Friese-Greene filed a patent for a 3D film process. In his patent, two films were projected side by side on screen. The viewer looked through a stereoscope to converge the two images. Because of the obtrusive mechanics behind this method, theatrical use was not practical.Frederic Eugene Ives patented his stereo camera rig in 1900. The camera had two lenses coupled together inches apart.
On June 10, 1915, Edwin S. Porter and William E. Waddell presented tests to an audience at the Astor Theater in New York City. In red-green anaglyph, the audience was presented three reels of tests, which included rural scenes, test shots of Marie Doro, a segment of John Mason playing a number of passages from Jim the Penman, Oriental dancers, and a reel of footage of Niagara Falls. However, according to Adolph Zukor in his 1953 autobiography The Public Is Never Wrong: My 50 Years in the Motion Picture Industry, nothing was produced in this process after these tests.
1909–1915: Alabastra and Kinoplastikon
By 1909, the German film market suffered much from overproduction and too much competition. German film tycoon Oskar Messter had initially gained much financial success with the Tonbild synchronized sound films of his Biophon system since 1903, but the films were losing money by the end of the decade and Messter would stop Tonbild production in 1913. Producers and exhibitors were looking into new film attractions and invested for instance in colorful imagery. The development of stereoscopic cinema seemed a logical step to lure visitors back into the movie theaters.In 1909, German civil engineer August Engelsmann patented a process that projected filmed performances within a physical decor on an actual stage. Soon after, Messter obtained patents for a very similar process, probably by agreement with Engelsmann, and started marketing it as "Alabastra". Performers were brightly dressed and brightly lit while filmed against a black background, mostly miming their singing or musical skills or dancing to the circa four-minute pre-recorded phonographs. The film recordings would be projected from below, to appear as circa 30 inch figures on a glass pane in front of a small stage, in a setup very similar to the Pepper's ghost illusion that offered a popular stage trick technique since the 1860s. The glass pane was not visible to the audience and the projected figures seemed able to move around freely across the stage in their virtual tangible and lifelike appearance. The brightness of the figures was necessary to avoid see-through spots and made them resemble alabaster sculptures. To adapt to this appearance, several films featured Pierrot or other white clowns, while some films were probably hand-coloured. Although Alabastra was well received by the press, Messter produced few titles, hardly promoted them and abandoned it altogether a few years later. He believed the system to be uneconomical due to its need for special theatres instead of the widely available movie screens, and he did not like that it seemed only suitable for stage productions and not for "natural" films. Nonetheless, there were numerous imitators in Germany and Messter and Engelsmann still teamed with American businessman Frank Joseph Godsol set up a short-lived variant named "Fantomo" in 1914.
Rather in agreement with Messter or not, Karl Juhasz and Franz Haushofer opened a Kinoplastikon theatre in Vienna in 1911. Their patented system was very similar to Alabaster, but projected life-size figures from the wings of the stage. With much higher ticket prices than standard cinema, it was targeted at middle-class audiences to fill the gap between low-brow films and high-class theatre. Audiences reacted enthusiastically and by 1913 there reportedly were 250 theatres outside Austria, in France, Italy, United Kingdom, Russia and North America. However, the first Kinoplastikon in Paris started in January 1914 and the premiere in New York took place in the Hippodrome in March 1915. In 1913, Walter R. Booth directed 10 films for the U.K. Kinoplastikon, presumably in collaboration with Cecil Hepworth. Theodore Brown, the licensee in the U.K. also patented a variant with front and back projection and reflected decor, and Goldsoll applied for a very similar patent only 10 days later. Further development and exploitation was probably haltered by World War I.
Alabastra and Kinoplastikon were often advertised as stereoscopic and screenless. Although in reality the effect was heavily dependent on glass screen projection and the films were not stereoscopic, the shows seemed truly three-dimensional as the figures were clearly separate from the background and virtually appeared inside the real, three-dimensional stage area without any visible screen.
Eventually, longer films with story arcs proved to be the way out of the crisis in the movie market and supplanted the previously popular short films that mostly aimed to amuse people with tricks, gags or other brief variety and novelty attractions. Sound film, stereoscopic film and other novel techniques were relatively cumbersome to combine with multiple reels and were abandoned for a while.