46% of 2014's Oscar Winners Were 3D Films

The 86th Academy Awards were held in March, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres. When the gathered stars and glitterati weren't taking selfies, the famous gold statues were being handed out to a host of worthy winners. Amongst them, 3Defence counted 11 wins for 3D films, helped mostly by Gravity, but ably assisted by Frozen and The Great Gatsby. This means that 46% of 2014's Oscar winners were 3D films. By comparison, 21% of 2013's winners were stereo movies, and 23% of 2012's were too. So, why the meteoric rise this year?

Gravity - as many predicted - swept the majority of the 'technical' categories. It took out the Visual Effects, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing awards early on in the evening. These particular awards have been given to 3D films in the past. Cinematography and Film Editing came next though, and winning both of these awards is a significant breakthrough in terms of the industry's recognition of stereo film-making. For one thing, the teams working on both fields for Gravity were utterly dependent on each other to succeed. Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography filmed the unfilmable, and had to predict where effects and edits would be made many years before they could be finished. Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger's editing stitched together hundreds of shots and effects into a seamless whole, to the point where their edits were nearly invisible to the audience. Their combined achievements meant that 3D cinema was awarded its first Best Film Editing Academy Award.

Steven Price took out the Best Original Score Oscar for Gravity too, joining Life Of Pi and Up's composers as the third 3D film to win that particular award. Finally, Alfonso Cuarón won the Best Director award for the film. After Ang Lee's win last year, this makes it the second year in a row that the Academy has awarded a director of a 3D film... and then not awarded them a Best Picture Oscar to boot. 12 Years A Slave pipped Gravity to that eventual win, and by all accounts the race was very tight.

As mentioned earlier, it wasn't just Gravity cleaning up at the Oscars; smash hit Frozen picked up 2 golden statues. Frozen has widely been regarded as a 'return to form' for Disney's animation division, and is the first time the animation studio has won an Academy Award in 14 years. The film has now earned over $1 billion at the global box office (ably helped by 3D ticket surcharges) and one of its songs Let It Go reached the Billboard Top 10. That particular achievement may have helped the studio win Best Original Song, and it also picked up an award for Best Animated Feature.

Finally, the immaculately designed and photographed The Great Gatsby picked up 2 Academy Awards also. Catherine Martin & Beverley Dunn were rewarded for their efforts in Production Design. Following wins from Avatar, Hugo, and Alice In Wonderland, this category is beginning to look like a 3D-dominated one. Catherine Martin picked up another gong for Best Costume Design (another category that Alice In Wonderland took out a few years ago). Gatsby's opulent aesthetic has had a major cultural influence in music videos and dress-up parties this year, and the decadence came alive wonderfully in stereo.

In a few years' time, a 3D film may eventually take home the Best Picture Oscar. While it hasn't happened this year, it's still great to see the film industry recognising the craftsmanship of stereo film-making. We at 3Defence heartily congratulate the likes of Catherine Martin, Mark Sanger and their esteemed peers for their efforts in making 2013 a banner year for 3D cinema.

And the Oscar goes to... a 3D film?

This year's Awards Season is gearing up for its main event: the 86th Academy Awards. Many cinephiles justifiably find the concept of 'Awards Season' horrifying. They can validly cite examples through the years where Oscar was wrong  (My Fair Lady over Strangelove? Crash over Good Night and Good Luck? Shakespeare In Love being allowed in the same room as the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan?) and they can cite many more examples where films "should at least have been nominated!" Thankfully, the Academy broadened the nomination pool after universal outcry at The Dark Knight's nomination snub in 2008, and that's alleviated those tensions a little. It means we get a more balanced summary of the year in cinema: edgier films get nominated (District 9, Amour), and broader-playing fare (Up, The Help) makes the cut as a nearer summary of what movie-goers... go to the movies for in the first place.

The Nominees

2013's nominees are typical of the post-Dark Knight era: a David O. Russell "actor's movie"; a film about American racial discrimination; a couple of films about elderly people; a movie about finding love in an unlikely place; a smattering of biopics and... a 3D film. Wait, what was that? A 3D film, nominated for Best Picture? You got it. Every year since 2008 there has been at least one 3D film nominated for Hollywood's biggest accolade. In 2009, there was Avatar and Up. In 2010, Pixar stayed the course with Toy Story 3. Scorsese's Hugo literally popped out of the screen in 2011. Life Of Pi followed in 2012, and now we have the big kahuna: Gravity. We'll get to Gravity's chances later though.

For now, let's discuss what this means for the acceptance of 3D in Hollywood and the 'mainstream'. Does it mean anything at all? Given the post-Dark Knight boom in Oscar nominations, it seems easy to discredit any significance a 3D-focused site like ours might impose. So, we've decided to go one further. Today we're going to look at broader trends within The Academy Awards for the nomination of 3D films in the modern age, to see if we can read the tea-leaves for Hollywood's true view on 3D movie-making.

Cinematography

From 1928 onwards, every Academy Award for Best Cinematography was given to a 2D movie. Depth was communicated with focus pulling, the mono illusion of parralax, or a savvy combination of both. Those two concepts were fundamental to how cinematography "worked". At least, that was how it "worked" until 2009. That year, Mauro Fiore took home an Oscar for his revolutionary work on the 3D film Avatar. Two years later (enough time for Hollywood to hastily revisit this whole 3D business) Robert Richardson deservedly earned his third Oscar for his stereo work on Hugo. The 85th Academy Awards officially made it a trend: Claudio Miranda and his team were rewarded for working with the ocean & kids & animals & 3D on Life Of Pi. And guess what? 2013's Best Cinematography Oscar has another 3D film nominated: Gravity. We'll find out how realistic Emmanuel Lubezki's chances are after the American Society of Cinematographers announce their Award for Outstanding Achievement later tonight.

Visual Effects

So, we've established there's a trend underway for 3D Best Picture nominees, and 3D Best Cinematography winners. What about any other categories? As it happens, 3Defence has done deeper digging to reveal other surprises. The Academy Award for Best Visual Effects has been inundated with 3D films. This isn't that surprising: visual effects are expensive, and 3D is where the money is these days. The exponential growth in this field is surprising though. In 2006, Superman Returns was the first (partial) 3D film to be nominated in the category, Avatar was the first to win, and then - like the cinematography field - two years later a veritable deluge arrived. 2010 had one 3D nominee (Alice In Wonderland), while 2011 saw a 3D winner (Hugo) and 2 nominees (Transformers 3, and Harry Potter 7.5). 2012 saw another 3D winner (Life Of Pi) and 3 nominees (The Hobbit 1/3, The Avengers 1, and Alien 0.5 Prometheus). 2013... 4 of the 5 nominees are 3D movies (The Hobbit 2/3, Iron Man 3, Star Trek 12 2, and of course, Gravity). While we're a wee way off from 2014's nominees, it's fair to assume that we'll see a similar ratio of nominees this year (likely contenders are The Planet of The Apes 8 2, The Hobbit 3/3, Maleficent and Transformers 4), and probably the following year too. 3D is here to stay in the visual effects category.

Animation

You'd imagine that, having exhausted the two most obviously 'visual' categories, we'd be done with the 3D-focused trend at the Oscars... but then you'd be forgetting Best Animated Feature. Guess what? Since 2008, 4 out of 5 Animated Feature winners were 3D films (WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3 and Brave), and in addition to that, 10 of the nominees were 3D films too. It's a hard call who will win this year; will the 2D Miyazaki effort The Wind Rises reward the animation legend for his years of long-service, or will the Academy bow to the populist choice and reward the 3D hit musical Frozen? At this point we'd peg the chances for both at 50:50.

Other Technical Categories

Following on from these trends, 9 Oscars for 3D films have also been dealt out amongst the Production Design, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Original Score,  Costume Design, and Best Original Song categories. Notable absences can be found in the editing, hair & makeup, costume and two screenplay categories. It's possible Gravity will buck the trend for editing, and The Great Gatsby does the same for Costume Design, but we wouldn't recommend betting the house on either!

A 3D Film For Best Picture?

Which leads us back to Gravity's Best Picture nomination. Will it be the first 3D film to win the industry's most coveted of awards? It's got good chances. In its director, Alfonso Cuarón, the film has a 'career come-back' narrative that Academy voters love (his last film, Children Of Men, was well regarded critically, but poorly attended at the box-office). The film has the 'popular vote' sewn up, with wider audiences still paying millions to see it on the big-screen, despite it being 3+ months into its cinematic release. The Director's Guild of America gave its top honour to Cuarón, and the Producer's Guild gave a rare tie to Gravity and 12 Years A Slave. The scales are weighed in Gravity's favour, save for one thing: it's not got many actors in it. 22% of Academy voters are actors, and they have historically bestowed Best Picture awards out to, well, 'showy' films with large casts (see Crash, for example). It's certainly possible their enduring love for Sandra Bullock will help out Gravity's chances, but we at 3Defence would be weary of giving the film more than 60:40 odds to take out the Best Picture Oscar.

Still, the very fact this conversation is possible is amazing. Within a month's time, either 3D movie-making will either finally be legitimized, or we will have to wait for another year to have this debate all over again. No matter what happens, it's clear that - from Hollywood's perspective at least - 3D is here to stay. The movie industry's own voters are recognising the technical excellence being used to pull off stereo movies convincingly, and are rewarding their talented crew and studios accordingly. Fingers crossed Gravity helps break some more records on March 2nd!

How's The 3D In 'Life Of Pi'?

Background

Considered an 'unfilmable' book, Life Of Pi has been kicking around Hollywood for years. Despite being briefly in the hands of Shyamalan and Jeunet, the burden of adapting Yann Martel's award-winning novel eventually fell to Ang Lee. A proven master of visual effects in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk, Lee seemed a good fit for the material. Eyebrows were raised though, when Lee announced he would film in native 3D; the wider industry seemed to ask, "doesn't he have enough trouble with the tiger and the ocean?" If you're after more background info, check out this 3Defence piece from a couple of months ago.

Native 3D

Life Of Pi was shot using Alexa cameras on Fusion 3D rigs provided by the Cameron Pace Group (as in, James Cameron). In charge of the film's visuals was accomplished cinematographer Claudio Miranda, whose most recent film was the similarly stunning Tron: Legacy. Between these films, his prior work with David Fincher, and upcoming film Oblivion, Miranda is carving out a niche for himself as one of digital cinema's true pioneers. If you're interested, we recommend having a read of this article to read about the challenges Miranda faced, filming digital footage whilst being surrounded by water. The crew had to contend with very bright reflections, whilst always measuring how 'seasick' the audience might feel bobbing up and down along with Pi and his tiger, Richard Parker.

Does the 3D 'pop'?

Does it ever! Ang Lee was reportedly motivated to film in 3D because of the new cinematic language it offered him (and not motivated by financial necessity or 'fad' like frenzy). His choices in Life Of Pi reflect this desire to learn and to innovate. The most significant trick he deployed was to add subtle letter-boxing to shots, to allow elements to jump out of the frame without actually popping out of the screen itself. You can see this technique in use in this picture, where a fish tail briefly flashes outside of the black border. This approach drew gasps from the audience 3Defence saw the film with, perhaps because the integrity of the frame was not compromised, and yet the film seemed to defy dimensions with something still managing to break free of the frame.

How's the depth of the 3D?

Life of Pi runs the gamut of depth choices available to modern film-makers. Many scenes favour the 'deep focus' Lee applied to his 2003 film Hulk. Others seem to stretch out to an infinite horizon, the likes of which are impressionistic and - dare we say it - nigh on Kubrickian. Then there are Pi's flashback scenes, which are often shot with incredibly shallow focus, where an actor's close-up is visibly separated from a blurry background. On paper, these stylistic choices may seem a hodgepodge of disparate ideas, but their varied usage in the film's extended opening sequence helps establish visual cues that later create a sort of short-hand that Lee can use to ease his audience into a narrative that jumps around between decades, multiple actors playing the same part, and various changes in scenery too. In short, Lee didn't just shoot in 3D to learn to speak its 'language'; he clearly shot this way so he'd later be able to teach the language.

Did it make sense to film in 3D?

That depends who you talk to. One imagines the crew on Life of Pi dreaded the complications of real tigers, over-bright sets filled with water, and child actors; they didn't need 3D bringing an extra headache to their shoot. Creatively, it makes sense to use every visual trick you can muster when telling a tale which overtly demands your suspension of disbelief in its own narrative. Finally, from a business perspective, the film was always likely to do well in the wider Asian market, where 3D cinema has been doing particularly great business for years, so it makes sense that the film's producers would chase a few extra dollars this way.

If we had to archive one version, should we save the 3D or the 2D?

The 3D version, without a doubt. Life of Pi joins the likes of Hugo and Avatar as an Oscar-nominated triumph that is a superior experience when watched with glasses on. Ang Lee abides by rules set by James Cameron: night-time scenes must have a dedicated light source (bio-luminescence is used here too), editing is allowed to be abrupt if quick-fire shots aren't "overtly 3D", and massive action (like Pi's shipwreck) ought to be framed with a human in the foreground to give us an easy sense of scale. It's clear to the audience that each shot's usage of 3D effects have been clearly thought out, and designed with purpose by master craftspeople.

Roger Ebert, notorious naysayer about 3D technology, has this to say: "What astonishes me is how much I love the use of 3-D in Life of Pi. I've never seen the medium better employed, not even in Avatar, and although I continue to have doubts about it in general, Lee never uses it for surprises or sensations, but only to deepen the film's sense of places and events"

The film itself

The one flaw most bring up with Life of Pi is its extended opening sequence, which deals exclusively with characters who, by and large, disappear from the narrative from Act 2 onwards. Many misread this as a 'waste of time'. The story itself is fiendishly difficult, in that grief plays a large part in the wider tale, and for that grief to seem palpable we must be shown how good things were before they got really, really, bad. Luckily, Ang Lee coaxes great work from his child actors and shoots these scenes with a warmth and sure-footedness that makes the shock of being stranded at sea that bit more effective. We at 3Defence didn't mind the pace of the film one bit - as an epic piece of cinema that traverses continents, it is a worthy Awards-season contender from 2012.

Life Of Pi - Preview of Ang Lee's first 3D Film

A couple of days ago, Ang Lee unveiled his new film Life of Pi at the New York Film Festival. Though the film's not quite finished (Lee has another fortnight of tweaks to go, apparently) it's amazing that a version of it exists at all. There's an old Hollywood adage, that says "never make a movie about kids, animals or water," yet Ang Lee has somehow managed to make a film about all three. If an 'unfilmable' novel weren't challenge enough for him, Life Of Pi is also Lee's first 3D film. What can we expect from Ang Lee's usage of 3D?

Well, for one thing, the film itself is going to be painterly. If the trailer's anything to go by, the film is a fifty-fifty mixture of real-world footage and digitally-created backdrops. Life Of Pi's crouching tiger is a CGI construction too, though computer-assisted characters have come a long way since Ang Lee attempted one in 2003's Hulk. In sum, with all this digital information available to be fed into the 3D footage, you can be assured that pixels will be where they need to be to make your eye at ease throughout the film. /Film's positive review of the film says: "the 3D enhances the experience by replicating the expansiveness of the ocean — breadth and height may be constrained by the edges of the screen, but the depth seems to stretch out indefinitely"

Ang Lee filmed Life Of Pi in native 3D, so you're not going to be seeing much post-converted footage in the film. It's interesting to see who has the clout to film in this way amongst the Hollywood "A-list" directors. In 2012 we'll have seen native 3D films from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Peter Jackson, and Ang Lee. Unlike his peers, Lee's gone for a very impressionistic usage of 3D. Given the allegories that are built into the story's narrative, and the various flash-backs and flash-forwards, this seems appropriate.

So, what are critics saying about the film? Well, The Chicago Tribune suggests that the impressionism becomes nothing more than "pantheistic fairy dust." The website Film School Rejects is more glowing, "It’s a powerful film with a moving performance by Suraj Sharma and one of the finest examples of 3D." Variety was less enthused, but suggested that Lee's team summoned "the most advanced digital filmmaking technology to deliver the most old-fashioned kind of audience satisfaction."

We here at 3Defence can't wait to review it ourselves, so stay tuned for our wrap-up that will inevitably ask, "How Good Is The 3D In Life Of Pi?" You can read other similar reviews here.