3D Films-IMAX

Some of us still remember the first great 3D film craze of the 1950's, particularly the popular horror releases, House of Wax, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space, with the requisite cardboard spectacles required to get that full three dimensional effect. The 1980's saw a brief revival yet again, with mostly forgettable films like Treasure of the Four Crowns and Spacehunter, Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. There was even a revival of 3D film in horror sequels such as Jaws 3D, Friday the Thirteenth III-D and Amityville 3D.

And then, at the Vancouver World's Fair there was the first showing of an IMAX film in 3D, about the exploration and settlement of Canada. This was a major investment in new and expensive technology, requiring a screen measuring over eight stories tall, extra wide film, two cameras and two projectors, along with Polaroid glasses for the viewers. But, the effects were worth it, as the huge screen eliminated any window effect, so tree branches looked as if they were right overhead and the water in rivers and lakes looked as if it was lapping right at the audiences' feet.

In 2004, the first feature film produced for IMAX using CGI and 3D effects was The Polar Express, adopted from a popular children's story and featuring the voice of Tom Hanks. While not wildly popular with critics, audiences seemed to love it and it even came back to theaters the following year before being released for home use.

IMAX 3D film started showing up in a range of locations throughout the 1990's, mostly for travelogues and science documentaries and by the end of the 90's IMAX was well established as a destination venue, showing semi-documentary science and exploration movies with startling and interesting 3D effects. Some of these better-known films were Ghosts of the Abyss, about the return to the Titanic, directed by James Cameron after The Titanic, and well before Avatar, and Walking on the Moon, produced by Tom Hanks. The IMAX 3D film experience created a genuine feeling of being part of the movie. Audience members really felt as if they were on the surface of the moon, or almost a mile beneath the ocean. For what felt like the first time, the audience was not just viewing the film, they felt as if they were in it.

As amazing as the IMAX technology is for 3D film viewing, it was really the push for digital projection that has helped 3D technology in movie making. With the switch to digital projectors, and Dolby 3D technology, most modern movie theaters are also 3D capable, without requiring any expensive retrofitting or additional equipment. These digital projectors have become so accurate and precisely tuned, that they project only the specific wavelengths for each eye, making the viewing of 3D movies much more comfortable for audiences and removing much of the 3D headache effect. So, even though shooting live action films in 3D can add as much as 25% to the cost, it looks like 3D film technology is finally here to stay.

As the knowledge of the functions and processes of the eye and brain grew so did the technology that resulted in our most recent procedure for viewing 3D films. The theaters advertise this technology as Real D Cinema. This 3D technology is just as the name implicates. Real D Cinema makes a film 3D through the use of a polarized lenses that you wear in comfortable glasses. These glasses utilize something called the Pulfrich effect which is the name given to how brighter images reach the eye faster than darker ones. The farther back depth will be darker than the images that will be closer to the front. The lenses that are used in the Real D Cinema 3D films also involve the use of polarization. This technique takes into the fact that one sees one thing while the other eye sees something different. The lenses put these two images together to produce a high quality, several layered image.