There's a lot of talk about 3-D, 3-D movies being released in theaters, doing great business. It's the next wave. If not the next wave that will actually break, it's definitely the next wave for the beachcombers to stand, shade their eyes and squint at, making appreciative comments while it's still just a tell-tale swell on the horizon. 3D is here to stay, in a major way! - or it soon will be, or at least we assume so. And not just in your local cinema, either. Feverish explorations of potential home-theater 3D technology - all with various practical difficulties, associated drawbacks and expenses - are well underway. While the home entertainment industry searches the fringe of the cutting edge for ways to put a product together that can be mass-produced and priced within reach of where the people will pony up, we're left waiting - cardboard two-tone cellophane glasses in hand, waiting for the promised glut of 3-D options to slake our thirst for entertainment that jumps out at us.
Well I say, sometimes it's not about peering ahead, yelling years down the road and telling the future to get a move on, already. Sometimes it's a matter of looking in the other direction! Taking a step back, and finding a creative solution in some forgotten, old-school technique.
I saw Shakespeare's King Lear done once in 3-D, and let me tell you it was masterful. The effect, I mean! The play itself - look, we all understand the limitations there, which in this case were pretty pronounced. You couldn't understand the gist of what they were saying, hardly. The characters would speak with great feeling and enunciation, but only every third word or so is still English! It would have benefitted from a serious re-write, just for understandibility's sake, but that would violate some sacred cow or something so of course we can't have that. But all that's beside the point - the 3-D itself, and the whole visual presentation in general, was utterly realistic. It looked great. No special glasses!
The visual space that can be depicted in true 3-D is always going to be bound by the constraints of the format. This particular display, they pretty much had to confine the action to a space about 40 feet wide, 30 feet deep and 20 feet high. This constricted the action somewhat, but they managed to adapt what they were doing to fit within it. All told, I was very impressed.
It's a technique that I think shows a lot of promise to wow and amaze.
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