Class Blog 2

It is Friday once again.  We didn’t make it to the cinema last weekend, so we are going tonight. “Resident Evil: Afterlife” is on the menu.  An update to my original post regarding “Piranha 3D”:  the film was pretty good for what it was a sleazy, bloody, funny, mess.  It had some truly sick parts in it, as well as, some excellent 3D effects.  Also, there is a cameo by Richard Dreyfus at the beginning, in which he was in a boat singing, “Show me the way to go home…” I hope you know what film that is from.  I would definitely see “Piranha” in the theater, because without the “eye popping” effects, it is just another stupid horror movie.  3D movies have become the new thing.  But, how long have they actually been around?  According to Widescreen Movies Magazine, 3D films have been around since the 1800s.  What makes these movies come alive in the 3^rd dimension is a process called stereo scoping.  In this process, 3D images are made by using two layers of color that are shifted slightly when laid on top of each other. Usually the main subject in the image is centered, while the foreground and background are offset from each other, about 2 to 21/2 inches, which is about how far the eyes are apart.  This creates the 3D image.  The visual cortex in your brain brings the two images together when you look at them through a special viewer holding two lenses with different colored filters, usually red and blue; however, with advancements in computer and green screen technology, the filters are increasingly green and purple. The first public demonstration of the Polaroid projection of 3D movies was at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York in a promotional film for Chrysler.  While there were various attempts at anaglyph 3D motion pictures over the next 30 years - most notably the introduction of Edwin H. Land's Polaroid film.  The heyday of the format came between 1952 and 1955. This is when filmmakers attempted to make movies "bigger and better than ever", to compete with television.  One idea they were testing was experimenting widely with anaglyph 3D processes. This period is often called the "golden era of 3D."  The first full-color stereoscopic feature, "Bwana Devil," was released in 1952. "Bwana Devil" was project dual-strip using Polaroid filters. The now-iconic image of moviegoers watching a 3D film wearing paper-frame anaglyph glasses has come to represent both this era and the American culture of the 1950s. Another important 3D film around this time period was “House of Wax” starring none other than Vincent Price.  According to www.ezinearticles.com, British film pioneer William Friese-Greene gets credit for ushering in the era of stereoscopic motion pictures in the late 1980s. Friese-Greene patented a 3-D movie process in which two films were projected side by side on a screen. The movie watcher looked a stereoscope that brought the two images together.  However, because this process was so mechanically cumbersome, as in trying to get two different films to synchronize on a screen, it was never commercially viable for use in a theater.  A better way to show 3D movies was the over and under method.  Movies that utilized this method were “Friday the 13^th Part 3” and “Amityville 3D.”  Today and the future of 3D utilizes digital processing to put the third dimension into the film from the get go.  Some future releases in 3D that are noteworthy are:  “Saw 3D”, “Jackass 3D”, and “Tron 2”.
My next blog will feature what I think about “Resident Evil”.