How much does Phil McNally love 3-D? So much that he legally listed his name on his British driver’s license, and later on his Social Security card and American license, as “Phil Captain III D McNally.” <\/p>\n
Captain 3-D, a 42-year-old Northern Ireland native, is also known as the resident “hurl-o-meter” at DreamWorks, the guy who goes through every frame to adjust the amount of depth, dial the intensity up or down, and fix the right-eye\/left-eye camera settings so that moviegoers can enjoy dragons skydiving past them without having to turn their popcorn bags into motion-sickness bags. <\/p>\n
“I am certain that it is not good to be in a business in which the result of what you do is to make people hurl,” says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation. <\/p>\n
Because 3-D gels in the brain, the Captain spends his time seeking an equipoise where objects can fly around without making you dizzy – a synchronicity that has a technical name that sounds like a spy thriller: “the zero parallax setting.” <\/p>\n
As we realized watching James Cameron’s “Avatar” explode into the highest-grossing film of all time, 3-D technology has come a long way since it was the butt of jokes on “I Love Lucy” and a gimmick with polarized glasses in the ’50s horror classic “House of Wax.” <\/p>\n
I had coffee with Katzenberg in Los Angeles recently because after seeing “The Polar Express” in an Imax theater, he has emerged as one of his industry’s biggest 3-D boosters, even when it meant rooting for Cameron’s blockbuster for another studio. <\/p>\n
He knows that a 3-D revolution would be great for his business by spurring people to desert their home entertainment centers and actually go into theaters. It’s rare in this economy, he notes, for people to opt for “the more expensive, higher-end experience first.” Echoing the King of the World, Captain 3-D observes that “the struggle of movies has always been to transport viewers to a virtual world.” Directors simply have to get past their denial. <\/p>\n
“They’ve spent their whole lives eliminating 3-D to make theatrical 2-D,” he said, “and now they’ve got to go from real-life 3-D into theatrical 3-D.” <\/p>\n
Katzenberg says that “if you look at the history of film, there have now been three great revolutions. The first was silent to talkies. The second was black-and-white to color, 70 years ago. And this is the third great revolution, a quantum leap. We’re at the top of the waterfall with 3-D. And this is going to cascade down into virtually every facet of our lives where we are encountering video imagery or even photography.”<\/p>\n
The 3-D market is popping. Studios are fighting over 3-D theater space and are well aware that the handful of new 3-D movies made in the last year represented a disproportionate chunk of the box office. Burberry is planning to live-stream a catwalk from London in 3-D. ESPN and Discovery Channel both plan on beaming 3-D into homes. Even the porn industry is nuzzling the new technology. <\/p>\n
Katzenberg envisions a world where you can process so many pixels into space that we’ll all be watching 3-D TVs (without glasses in 10 to 20 years) and seeing every big-scale movie – not to mention every poster or painting you walk by on a wall – in 3-D. <\/p>\n
Even Sandra Bullock comedies or dramas like “The Godfather”? “Absolutely,” he replied. <\/p>\n
But both Katzenberg and the Captain concede that some movies may be too action-packed or intense – yes, they’re talking about you, Michael Bay and Martin Scorsese – to be experienced in 3-D because, as McNally says, “carrying that much data into the brain is not an enjoyable situation.” <\/p>\n
Like his boss, the Captain thinks we are on the cusp of being immersed in a virtual world akin to lucid dreaming or the “Star Trek” holodeck, “where you start with a blank room and you are transported to a whole world of all the senses.” <\/p>\n
Just as we had to be dragged into acknowledging that sound and color made movies more realistic, now we must get accustomed to films where, with apologies to a colleague, the world is not flat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How much does Phil McNally love 3-D? So much that he legally listed his name on his British driver’s license, and later on his Social Security card and American license, as “Phil Captain III D McNally.” Captain 3-D, a 42-year-old Northern Ireland native, is also known as the resident “hurl-o-meter” at DreamWorks, the guy who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}