A note on three dimensions

I was going to mention this in my blog on Avatar, but I got onto other things. I do not think cinematographers and editors have fully thought three dimensions through. It is not sufficient to simply film and cut the piece as if for two dimensions, but shoot each frame in three dimensions.

Psychologically there are two key things which have to be considered.

1) Everything has to be shot in deep focus. It is no longer possible for the director to have the subject of the fram in focus and everything else classically blurred. Especially if there is something in the foreground which is out of focus, our eyes automatically try to focus on it. So we look at it - and it's out of focus. This isn't right, our brain says. We are looking at a three dimensional object and yet we simply cannot get any focus on what we want. Our focus is still in the plane of the subject the director wants us to be looking at - we end up trying to look at the blurry image even harder, with the brain willing the eyes to bring it into focus, and the eyes contorting as they try to find some way of bringing the image into focus. Meanwhile we have lost what is going on in the scene.
So directors have to revert to the ways of classic Hollywood and use deep focus. The audience will then be able to see every part of the scene as though they were actually there, and the job of the director is then - by lighting, action, dialogue and composition - to draw us to the point in the shot where we are supposed to be looking.

2) It takes much longer for our eyes to adjust to a 3D cut than to a simple 2D cut. The moment we cut we have changed position on the room and this becomes far more intrusive psychologically than the similar effect in 2D. (In fact I have had a mild headache during and after the three 3D films I have seen.) The answer here is to use less cuts. In action sequences, we are used to cut-cut-cut-cut-cut, but that simply makes the audience dizzy and disorientated in three-dmensions. Urgency can be added by camera movements and by the performance, but it takes (I estimate) about a second in three dimensions for the brain to adjust after a cut. If we are cutting every second, we have no sooner worked out where we are than we are somewhere else and we have huge trouble actually seeing what is happening in the shots.

Perhaps I am over-exaggerating the case, but I do think a radical rethink of both cinematography and editing is necessary with the advent of three dimensions. We have to return to human psychology and see what works and what doesn't. Murch expressed amazement in his book that the cut works at all. It is such a violation of reality to transpose the viewer geographically in a fraction of a second. Somehow it works in two dimensions. Maybe we are less tolerant of the cut in three dimensions.