The eye-popping spawn of Avatar reach critical mass this month when, for the first time, 3-D openings will outnumber wide-release 2-D movies at the box office.

Beyond summer's stereoscopic swarm, spearheaded by Friday's release of Thor and previewed in the gallery above, the 2-billion-gigabyte gorilla is the looming 3-D conversion of The Phantom Menace, slated to thrill sci-fi fans (and probably enrage Star Wars purists) next February.

While some moviegoers remain skeptical about the technology, movie studios – entranced by the thought of "must see" theater experiences and premium-priced tickets – have embraced 3-D as a sort of cinematic savior.

That puts filmmakers in a tough spot as they struggle to reinvent visual storytelling while learning to master fast-changing technologies that morph practically by the minute.

"This is the Wild Wild West right now," said director Michael Bay, who famously dissed 3-D before embracing the technology for his upcoming third Transformers movie. "Theater projectors are different, the camera systems are different – there's no standardized anything right now."

While Avatar blew minds and broke box office records, many of the 3-D movies that followed James Cameron's experiment in immersive storytelling trafficked in cheesy tableaux that resembled pop-up books, punctuated by "gotcha" scenes reminiscent of cornball 1950s gimmickry.

3-D evangelist Cameron regards the stereoscopic dimension as a sea change that will one day be taken for granted in the same way sound and color made black-and-white silent films seem quaint. But now that the novelty has worn off, filmmakers face a big question: Does depth of field really make a movie better?

Turns out there is no easy answer. The success or failure of 3-D from an artistic point of view depends largely on three variables: technology, time and taste.

3-D Technology Never Sleeps —————————

Even in Hollywood, competing technologies evolve so quickly that this spring's cutting-edge moviemaking tools will likely be old hat by Labor Day. When Bay shot Transformers: Dark of the Moon a few months ago, primarily using the Avatar 3-D camera system, he found the technology irritating.

"The rigs were a pain in the ass," he said. "They weren't built to go 70 miles an hour in a camera car. We put them through their paces and had the cameras doing things they were never intended to do. I like to do my stunts live, whereas Avatar was [mostly] CG."

Those monster rigs Bay used for Transformers have already been eclipsed, in terms of portability, by the introduction of 3-D RED cameras. The lightweight rigs made a convert out of Cameron, who reportedly dropped $2.9 million on a 50-camera spending spree.

Even relatively low-budget projects can now consider 3-D an option. Saw 3D: The Final Chapter executive producer Daniel Heffner said "the technology changed so dramatically between Saw VI and Saw VII that after we tested the new camera system, we were able to shoot the majority of Saw 3D with Steadicam and handheld cameras while maintaining our editorial style of quick cutting."

Complicating the 3-D crapshoot further is the distinction between "native 3-D" movies, filmed by cameras equipped with "two eyes," versus movies like The Green Hornet and The Last Airbender, shot with conventional 2-D cameras and converted during post-production into multiple layers to increase the depth of field.

Native 3-D would obviously produce the superior 3-D viewing experience, right? Not necessarily, said Chris Cookson, president of Sony Pictures Technologies. The original version of this

story incorrectly stated Mr. Cookson's first name. His name is Chris. 1

'2-D to 3-D conversion has the potential to far exceed what you can do with native capture.'"2-D to 3-D conversion has the potential to far exceed what you can do with native capture because you have so much control," he said. "Conversion is a creative tool that lets you have more control over the placement of the objects in the picture that actually plays better than the native 3-D might have played because you can slightly alter the relation of the objects beyond what the real world can do."

Marvel Studios' 3-D conversion Thor, opening Friday, suffers at times from Cardboard Cutout Syndrome, but director Kenneth Branagh takes full advantage of the extra depth when it comes to capturing the grandeur of mythic Norse kingdom Asgard. Cliffside chase scenes involving a fang-toothed creature also work well stereoscopically, and Jotunheim's Frost Giants gain menace when they stomp around against a deep depth of field.

"Sometimes [3-D] has got to do with just placing you inside the world of the film in a way that is even more engrossing, even more of an escape, and I think that can apply to quite a lot of movies," Branagh told Box Office Magazine.

With 3-D Conversions, Time Is Everything —————————————-

The same company that handled conversion of the critically panned Clash of the Titans is also converting Phantom Menace to 3-D, but that's no reason to panic. Prime Focus CEO Namit Malhotra and his team had plenty of time – eight months – to meet George Lucas' demanding specs.

By contrast, Prime Focus converted Clash of the Titans to 3-D in only eight weeks.

"Would Clash have been better had it been had we had more time to work on it?" Namit asks. "Yes. But was it compromised? I completely disagree."

Despite a rude critical reception, Clash of the Titans made a whopping $656 million. Namit told Wired.com in a phone interview that the movie pulled in more revenue from 3-D viewers than it did from traditional filmgoers.

"The bad rap that you sometimes get on film conversions from 2-D to 3-D shows that you can't just run it through a black box and it comes out 3-D," said Sony's Cookson. "You have to very carefully deconstruct the images, and that takes a significant investment of time and money along with really skilled people doing very careful work."

Harry Potter producers heeded the lesson that "rush job" and "3-D conversion" should never appear in the same sentence. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I skipped 3-D. But with an additional eight months of post-production to work on the series finale, filmmakers figured they had time to properly render flying wizards and smoke-snorting demons on 3-D battlefields.

3-D: A Matter of Taste ———————-

While the exercise of restraint might seem antithetical to 3-D's appeal, filmmakers agree that nuance matters.

"Lucasfilm's made it very clear that they did not want a gimmicky experience," said Prime Focus' Namit. "There's a lot of thinking behind [Lucasfilm's] craft. They wanted to present Phantom Menace aesthetically in a way that maintained the basic language of this very defined space. There were subtle enhancements (to the original material) to the point where nobody really saw this as a dramatic change from the original film."

'Lucasfilm’s made it very clear that they did not want a gimmicky experience.'Namit promises especially spectacular 3-D effects in Phantom Menace's pod race sequence.

"At one level, all of this comes down to the question of, 'What is the right amount of 3-D?' At what point do audiences like it, not like it," he said. "In moments where you do action scenes with a lot of quick cuts, for example, you might want to back off on the 3-D."

Even Transformers auteur Bay, known for favoring over-the-top spectacle, decided to "go flat" for close-ups in which the human face conveys emotion more effectively without the distractions of 3-D.

Caveman Wild Card —————–

A final wild card hurled into the 3-D game might be called the Caveman Factor.

"Our brains are programmed to detect lots of depth up to about 18 feet or so, but beyond that, it's something you perceive more intellectually than viscerally," said Prime Focus President Mike Fink. "Based on our history as hunter-gatherers, things that are farther away tend to come into one plane of distance because we needed to determine what was threatening and what wasn't."

The original version of this

story incorrectly stated Chris Cookson's first name.

Images courtesy their respective studios.

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