Harry Potter in 3D!

I’ve always been a fan of 3D technology. Being a huge fan of the show The Bots Master and of optical illusions in general it’s a concept which always fascinated me. With such juvenile movies as Spy Kids and Shrek being the main 3D movies in theatres lately I was excited to hear that Harry Potter, a movie which was actually paleteable to me, had 3D in it. Excited, that is, until I actually got to see it.

I went to see the movie in Imax and though the 3D was only for the last 15 minutes or so of the movie it was so bad that I would have gladly watched the movie on normal film to avoid the crapulescence. It uses stereoscopic 3D using glasses with differently coloured lenses, meaning everything looked like it was flickering and there was almost always an after imagine on the right and left of objects, due to the fact that the movie was not in black and white so that even if it was colour shifted to be visible through one eye, there was still a shifted image for the other.

Ignoring the fact that this flawed, flickering, ghost prone technology was used, the 3D itself was simply not good. Good 3D is when you shoot with 2 cameras and use filters to make an image that makes each camera visible to 1 eye to make it as realistic as possible. Here all the 3D was done in post and it’s quite obvious. It seemed like more of an after thought than something considered at the onset of the film. While individual objects, usually characters, are often in a 3D perspective from one to another, most objects don’t have any depth to themselves, so rather than having a truly 3D looking image it just looks like a bunch of paper cutouts stacked in front of each other. Generally, the main focus object or person had some details done, like Harry’s nose or glasses sticking out or Malfoy’s hands sticking out but still it looked fake. Arms did not look like 3D arms but like flat paper arms with the image of real arms on them.

Add to this the fact that, as is usually the case with 3D, the perspective is exagerated to the point of not seeming natural at all, and the experience distracting at best and usually just annoying. What’s worse is that, since the 3D was stereoscopic, watching it without glasses was pretty much impossible as there are 2 images tinted and superimposed on one another. A suggestion which was made to me, unfortunately after I watched the film, was to simply close one eye while wearing the glasses. I would recommend this to anyone stuck in the same situation as I was.

3D using steroscopy, while cool looking, is not a very feaseable technology for movies. I don’t think it’s just a matter of perfecting it but rather a flaw of the technology. If they used the Pulfrich Effect, which uses light intensity and relative movement of on screen objects, it would look fine without glasses, like with The Bots Master, but that would require the movie to basically have things moving all the time which would greatly impact the look of the movie and make it very unnatural looking when it would come to the normal movie.

Until I get full on Virtual Boy style goggles to wear during the movie I don’t think it’s going to get any better. And in that case… why do I need the screen?

Harry Potter 3D makes me want to hit the sauce!

Feel free to follow up on this in our forums, and please chell out this crappy 3D gallery I made years ago.