Well, It's One D Better, Isn't It?

As a coda to King's discussing the film Coraline, Colleen and I watched the movie yesterday. We both enjoyed it, me especially. After seeing so much recent movie fantasy skew epic, towards Tolkien or even C.S. Lewis, it's comforting to see such a dedicated treatment of fantasy of the Carrollean tradition: Stories that are personal and reflexive, placing the mundane in sharp relief against the wondrous.

Coraline is weird and wonderful. It isn't often you find a film that succeeds both in being perfectly intimate, and perfectly monomythic.

But! The same technology that King expounded upon, I found jarring and newfangled. Watching it on our tv at home, we found quickly that the benefits of 3D were strongly outweighed by the cons - namely, we found it loused up an otherwise fine colour palette, transforming the shabbilly beautiful shades of the film into a muddy smudge. After watching about 20 minutes, we switched to 2D... it may be one D worse, but we got by just fine.

Despite everything, I'm quite happy we got two pairs of rinky-dink glasses with the rental for free. Now, if I ever stumble across a re-run of "The Bots Master", I'll have 3D shades at the ready.

Or, more accurately, "3D Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaades."



Oh, look. It's my childhood. What can I say? I'm a sucker for jive-talking robots.


- Rook

Sweeeet Coraline, dah dah dah!

So I went to see Coraline the other day and was surprised to discover my ticket had smacked me for $15.50 instead of the usual $12.50. I was instantly excited that I would soon be learning all about the economy in university at which point this sort of bullshit would make sens- What. The. Fuck. I had just been handed 3D glasses.

I was shocked to say the least. I had come to see a magical children's story come to life on the big screen, not to dodge red and blue bat-dogs and button eyes flying off the screen into my face. Imagine my surprise then when I discovered what 3D movies were all about these days.

You could totally just wear these out to the mall.
Like, maybe with a nice hat?

Gone are the red and cyan cardboard glasses of days yore. Now they use Polarized glasses which create the illusion of 3d by limiting the amount of light that reaches each eye. The projector then projects two images, superimposed on each other, with opposite light levels and each lens of the glasses filters a different level of light tricking your brain into perceiving depth where there is none.

Science!

The result is a great effect. As the opening credits roll everything appears to be, for lack of a better analogy, in a fish tank. A mysterious pair of hands comprised of sewing needles is stitching together a rag doll. The hands appear to be occupying the space a fish would, the rag doll appearing just behind, the desk the doll is resting on would be the bank of the tank and the opening credit names look as though they were written directly onto the front of the tank.

We've come a long way.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that it's an extremely subtle effect which simply provides depth of picture. I can only recall two instances where something jumped out of the screen in an attempt to kill me. It is a testament to my awesome reflexes that I am here today to tell of it.

This new form of 3D is has also made it's way into video games with support from Nvidia, one of the major manufacturers of graphics cards. One of the things that easily fascilliatates games using polarized 3D is that they don't need to be designed with the feature in mind, it's relatively simple to add in later. And with other new discoveries in gaming technology who knows what the next generation of gaming, and movies could bring.

Until next time, may you see the sailboat

-King