[film] Coraline, 3D

[tamaranth]

Coraline (IMDB)
The 3D in this is astounding: from the opening credits, lace-edged, with text rippling gently over shiny scissor-hands, it was truly immersive. Little details like the patterns of dust on a car windscreen make this film more real than many live-action epics. 3D has come a long way since the first one I saw, which I think might've been Friday 13th III: all I remember from that is icky things hurtling fuzzily towards me out of the screen. The 3D effects in Coraline beat Beowulf hands-down, too.

I liked the amendments to the plot: it made sense for Coraline to have a friend of her own age to talk to and explore ideas with, instead of relying on internal dialogue. French and Saunders deserve a mention for being so strongly characterful as Miss Forcible and Miss Spink. And the cat rocks.

It's a dark story: I would have been terrified by this as a child, and there were some scenes that made me shiver. Certainly not for younger children, or anyone prone to nightmares: but it brings out the humour as well as the horror of Gaiman's original novel.

How long til we get 3D DVD technology, huh? Huh?

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

You can have 3d film at home now off a computer, with a screen that doesn't require glasses. But it is very expensive (it's mostly working towards professional applications. And the screens are quite small.

40" screens, with a viewing position that's flexible enough for a family, at a price that people will pay? At least a decade I think. And what we've seen every other time with 3D is that it comes along, is a craze for a bit, and then goes away again -- this is the fifth such craze and we were overdue for one. (The others were the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, 1950s).

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

It may have made sense for her to have a friend, but I gather that it fatally weakened the principle of self-reliance that drove the book.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Hmm, she was still pretty self-reliant -- Whybe didn't really do much in terms of rescue or support, more a case of a sounding-board for what was originally internal.

On the 3D side

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I really did think this was a case where the 3D did add to the effect. I've not seen a live-action 3D film, so can't tell whether it'll still work on those (though I'm deeply unimpressed by the Jonas Brothers trailer).

There's current computer monitor technology that uses glasses, but is different from the cinema. The REAL-D cinema projectors use circular polarisation to achieve their effect: they project alternate frames with one and then the other polarisation, and your glasses have their lenses oriented to one polarisation each. Because monitors use transmissive technology rather than reflective, they can't do this, not without putting a much larger filter over the entire screen. (Or by having twice as many pixels, each with a tiny permanent filter.)

So they use a different solution: your glasses alternate opaque the left and then the right lens, at high frequency, and sync'ed to the screen frequency. You can get games that do this. The advantage of this is that you can use a generic LCD monitor: it's the video card that does the heavy lifting.

For 3D DVD, I suspect we'll need something similar.

(Alison's description is of a different solution, one that I don't see happening in the medium term.)