| The Future of Film! |
[Aug. 22nd, 2010|05:23 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | film | ] |
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| |  hopeful | ] |
The other day my wife and I were discussing the NEXT THING in film.
For those who aren't familiar with film, here's a brief history* of film:
[*Historical accuracy may vary]
- People enjoyed paintings, which were mostly painted with oil. Since oil paint takes years to properly dry, some considered this as fun as, say, watching paint dry.
- People got bored with painting, so they started using a device that would burn an image of light on a photosensitive receptor. Since this technology mimicked the effect in a camera obscura, or dark cave, we decided to call it a cave. Well, a camera.
- It was discovered that if you flip through a sequence of images, each with a minute change from the previous, it begins to look like it's moving. Likewise, if these images were not drawings, but a series of photographs, it was almost as if the subjects of those photographs were actually there, moving! We borrowed a term for motion from the Greeks: cinematics, which is like the physical principle known as kinematics, only with a c (technically, they should be pronounced the same, but I digress!). Since this new technology resembled pictures, only moved, we called them MOTION PICTURES, which was a mouthful for some people. Thus we abbreviated it: movies.
- Since our primitive technology at the time only allowed for images, movies were silent, until some guy determined that you could record the dialogue on a phonograph, and, assuming the projectionist started both at the same time, the audio would sync with the video. This was a revolution, giving us films with dialogue, instead of boring cards giving us a gist of the dialog. To differentiate these films from the others, people referred to them as talkies.
- Eventually, people got bored with just black, white, and all the different shades of grey. Kodak made popular the idea of photographs preserving the color of the subject (and succeeded in the competitive film marked by making their boxes yellow), and in a matter of time, many people were making films in color, like Walt Disney, who seemed especially thrilled by this concept, incorporating it into most, if not all, of his feature-length films from then on. These films were called colories. Actually, I'm not sure what they were called. But that would be funny, huh?
- Colorization hit the world, and missed. Particularly because it made the old movies look like they were crayon drawings done by three-year-olds, and the colors were particularly mustardly. This fad died, for the most part, aside from being a pass time of Turner media outlets.
- Somebody noticed (a while ago) that a physical characteristic of light was that if certain things were certain colors, if viewed through a lens tinted its complimentary color (light-wise), the thing looked black. So, seeing red through a cyan lens: black. Seeing cyan through a red lens: black. Likewise, seeing something a certain color through the same color lens made things seemingly invisible, or white, relatively speaking. This principle was extended: if you cover one eye with a lens of one color, and then the other eye with a lens of the opposite color, and look at an image in which half is tinted with one color and half is tinted with the other, each eye receives a different image, which the brain will then try to juxtapose. Assuming this is all done right, you'll see something that looks very similar to a three-dimensional image. This concept was applied to film, and 3-D movies hit the world by storm, like 60 years ago.
- Some entrepreneurial computer hackers introduced us to a world of running around a dark room, being chased by glowing things, eating pill-shaped foods, and listening to really loud music. Eventually, a narrative form developed around this concept.
- Also, somebody realized that since light has wave-like properties, you can get a 3-D image without everything being red and cyan (or blue and yellow, or green and magenta), using polarized lenses whose polarity is at right angles to each other. This gave us a new wave of 3-D movies which briefly held our attention, until EVERYBODY STARTED DOING IT, and kids started losing their depth perception, and theaters started charging extra for what was, for the most part, and uncomfortable, tinted 3-hour headache.
Neither my wife nor I are convinced that 3-D is the NEXT BIG THING, especially since those glasses are unusually distracting. We both agree, however, that 3-D MAY eventually become the NEXT BIG THING, but only after it gets to a point where it's not the same thing we've been doing since the 1950s. Holograms, something like that, are the better way to go. For the most part, we're both equally unimpressed with 3-D films, and see them, mostly, as vehicles for having things poke out of the screen at you. Yawn.
After contemplating this, we finally came to the conclusion that the NEXT BIG THING will be cinematic video games. That is: games that play like a movie, with a plot, characters, opening credits (especially while you're playing!) and end credits too! I mean, if you've played a video game recently, you'd notice that most games actually have some semblance of a plot, especially one that rivals most films. And the joy of games: you can save or pause, to take a break to eat, pee, or otherwise live. So, you have the depth of a film, but a breadth much, much larger.
This is further backed up by the personal theaters we build to combat the ridiculous prices of theaters. One of my neighbors has a TV whose diagonal is better measured in feet (like 5, or 6) than inches. Honest! Hook an XBOX 360, PS3, or Wii up to one of these puppies, and Mario is bigger than you!
Likewise, for those of us too lazy to actually play through these 10+ hour commitment games, we have a concept introduced recently by Nintendo: Play it For Me. Now, when you're at the opening menu of a game, you'll be able to pick "Just play it, and let me watch!" and the game will handle all the tough stuff while you sit back, relax, and enjoy a second mortgage-free popcorn and soda. You can even spill some on the floor if you want that sticky floor feeling you're used to in the theaters. Have a crying baby, a makey-out couple, and a dude talking loudly on the cell phone, and it'll be JUST like you're at the theater. But, if you want, you can avoid all that stuff and get something a little better. |
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contemplative