A blog about 3D cinema

Background: Katy Perry now ranks amongst the best of the early-21st Century's pop stars. She ties a record with Michael Jackson for the most number one hit singles from one album, and was the first female to do so. It's been several years since she invaded the airwaves with  her hit single,  I Kissed A Girl , and now Perry is out to dominate movie theatres with her own quirky take on the doco/concert film. To do this, she's recruited  the directing team of Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz. The pair are producers on the wildly popular 'the show must go on' TV series  Project Runway , and they made Justin Bieber's 3D film  Never Say Never   in 2011. Safe to say they know how to manipulate documentary footage into a narrative! Since Katy Perry: Part Of Me 's release last week, critics have been unexpectedly kind to this particular manipulation of Perry's life and recent worldwide tour. It deftly juggles three narratives: Perry's rollercoaster of a personal...

Britain's BFI IMAX screen, the biggest of its kind in the UK, just had a major overhaul. They documented the process in amazing detail on this site here . The team responsible went to enormous effort to make sure the screen, all 500m2 of it, could take advantage of the latest and greatest in projection systems. The end result will surely look stunning, and - thanks to a laser-guided paint job - will glisten bright silver. The silver coating applied will ensure that light from the projector is reflected in straight lines from the screen, lessening refraction.  So, why are we writing about this here at 3Defence ? Well, firstly because the photos are so damned cool. And secondly, because we love it whenever a cinema goes to great lengths to supply the brightest and clearest image in town. Brighter screens and projector bulbs are key to the ongoing success of the 3D format, and it's nice to see world-class theatres like the BFI London IMAX leading the way forwards for the r...

We at 3Defence have decided that film critics aren't giving audiences enough information about the usage of 3D in modern-day cinema. As such, we've been working on an ongoing series that can help you decide whether to fork out a few extra dollars or not to see the latest and greatest blockbuster while wearing glasses. Today we're looking at The Amazing Spider-Man, the fourth webslinger film, and the first to get the stereoscopic treatment being heavily pushed by Sony. You'll notice the article below is separated by sections; we've standardised these sections, to help regular readers compare one film's usage of the 3D technique to another. Let us know if you think of anything else that'd be useful in the comments section! Native 3D: Like Prometheus , The Amazing Spider-Man was filmed using Red Epic cameras, in 'native' 3D. In 2012, we've seen a string of high-quality post-production conversions, and we were hoping that Spidey webslinging in thre...

Men In Black 3 , in 3D. Too much e-ink has been spilled over the fact this is the second needless sequel in a series that should have remained in the 90s. Very little ink has been spent discussing the film's post-converted 3D job, and even less has been spent talking about how it was implemented. MIB3 just never attained 'event film' status this year, but we're keen to ask the hard questions anyway: how good is the 3D? Is it worth seeing the 3D version? Conversion: The film-makers made a conscious decision to film in 2D, and then convert it after the fact.  It seems they could have filmed in native 3D, had the key creatives preferred to do so. Ultimately they settled on post-conversion for a number of reasons. The most compelling is that the director, Barry Levinson, has always shot with really wide lenses, and usually frames the 'hero moments' dead-centre, just like the images you see to your right (Levinson is the dude in the right-hand corner)...