First 3D movieThis page was last revised on 2009-10-04. NB Full references to printed sources may be found at the foot of this page.
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First 3D movie |
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On 12 November 1852 Louis Jules Duboscq (1817-86) patented the 'stereoscope-fantascope or Bioscope', which apparently combined the properties of the stereoscope with those of the phenakistoscope. Twelve pairs of stereoscopic images were placed round the surface of a disc, and when spun the images were viewed by lenses or mirrors. An image of the only surviving Bioscope disc is reproduced on p. 136 of Reynaud, Tambrun, & Timby, eds (2000). No example of the instrument itself has yet been found. By 1878 Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion, using stereoscopic cameras at the outset (a surviving slide dated 1877 on the mount suggests he may have achieved this earlier). The first demonstration took place successfully on 15 June with the press present. He used a series of twelve stereoscopic cameras, 21 inches apart, to cover the 20 feet taken by one horse stride, taking pictures at 1/1000th of a second. The cameras were arranged parallel to the track, with trip-wires attached to each camera shutter triggered by the horse's hooves or (for wheeled vehicles) the passage of wheels. [The Complete Eadweard Muybridge: Chronology 1876-1880, Pop Art Machine, Riggins; Prodger (2003); Herbert, ed. (2004)] Muybridge constructed his own stereoscopic-zoetropic viewer, by which to view his sequence photographs, by synchronising two zoetropes and directing images from each to left or right eyes only by means of mirrors. He described the result as 'a very satisfactory reproduction of an apparently solid miniature horse trotting and of another galloping.' [Herbert, ed. (2004)] Muybridge's stereographic movie experience cannot now be reconstructed, however. Fragments of stereoscopic glass plate negatives for what appears to be this series were unearthed from a garden behind Muybridge's house in Kingston-on-Thames in 1998. [Zone (2007)] One of these damaged stereoscopic negatives is illustrated in Herbert, ed. (2004). This source confirms that most of the fragments found in 1998 are in very poor condition, and in many cases the image has disappeared. That said, the holographer David Pizzanelli has, in recent years, successfully created holograms using re-photographed images from Muybridge's Animal Locomotion. By employing 'temporal parallax', rather than stereographic parallax, he has produced moving holograms from the original sequence photographs. See Pizzanelli's website for more on this, with 2D examples. Quicktime movies of Pizzannelli's holograms may also be found here.
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First 3D movie viewed by its contemporaries |
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In October 1889 William Friese-Greene (1855-1921) appears to have made an experiment in stereoscopic cinematography, using a camera built by Frederick Henry Varley, and filming in Hyde Park, London. Varley patented the camera on 26 March 1890. Evidence for successful projection, however, is widely disputed. W.E.L. Day's account, in the (old) Dictionary of National Biography reports that public exhibition was made at Chester Town Hall in July 1890, and that a portion of this film was (1927) in the Science Museum in London; however this account does not describe the film as stereoscopic. Laurent Mannoni, in his 'The "feeling of life": the birth of stereoscopic film', in Reynaud, Tambrun, & Timby, eds, p140, reports that:
Will Day is the W.E.L. Day of the DNB article. His collection at the Cinémathèque Française was purchased from the Science Museum, so it seems reasonable to surmise that both accounts refer to the same film. [Silent Era website, Who's Who of Victorian Cinema]. Three successive images from stereoscopic film shot by Friese-Greene in Varley's 1890 camera are reproduced at p46 of Coe (1992). Coe notes that in this example the camera was operating at less than one frame per second. Raoul Grimoin-Sanson (1860-1940) began experimenting with movie cameras and projectors in 1895, and was in contact with other early researchers such as Étienne-Jules Marey. He patented the Cinéorama on 27 November 1897. The earliest 360° cylindrical panoramic movie, Cinéorama was an early film experiment and amusement ride at the 1900 Paris Exposition, that simulated a ride in a hot air balloon over Paris. It represented a union of the earlier technology of panoramic paintings and the recently invented technology of cinema. Cinéorama consisted of 10 synchronized 70 mm movie projectors, projecting onto 10 9x9 metre screens arranged in a full 360° circle around the viewing platform. The platform was a large balloon basket, capable of holding 200 viewers, with rigging, ballast, and the lower part of a huge gas bag. The film to be shown was made by locking together 10 cameras with a single central drive, putting them in an actual balloon, and filming the flight as the balloon rose 400 metres above the Tuileries Gardens. On projecting the film, the experience was completed by showing the same film backwards, to simulate a descent. Some references describe a much longer experience, involving a trip to England, Spain, and the Sahara, but it is unclear whether the complete plan was realized. Cinéorama lasted only three days at the Exposition. On the fourth day it was shut down by the police for safety reasons. On 10 June 1915 an anaglyphic one-reel film was shown at the Astor Theater in New York, now identified as the untitled Porter-Waddell demonstration film. It consisted of stereoscopic footage shot on the set of a conventional 2D film, Jiim the Penman. [3-D Revolution] The earliest-known surviving anaglyphic film is Kelley’s Plasticon Pictures: Movies of the Future and Thru’ the Trees: Washington, DC, made in 1922/3 by William Van Doren Kelley, and photographed by William T. Crespinell. Originally anaglyphic (r/b), the film has been fully restored and was shown again in 2006, for the first time since the 1920s, in a new polarized dual-35mm print. [3D Moving Pictures] The first polarised 3D film seems to have been a Polaroid presentation at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City in February 1936. George Wheelwright III, partner in Polaroid with Edwin Land, gave a further demonstration in May 1936 to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers at the Hotel Pennsylvania. [Zone (2007)] Herbert Ives (1882-1953) first demonstrated his apparatus for austostereoscopic motion pictures in a public demonstration to the Optical Society of America on 31 October 1930. The pictures were small, and could only be seen by small groups at a time. He demonstrated a further refinement to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in New York City on 28 April 1933. The process proved excessively complicated, and was developed no further. [Zone (2007)] The first really successful autostereoscopic movie was Semyon Ivanov's Land of Youth, a short parallax stereogram motion picture produced in the USSR and released there on 4 February 1941. A special cinema, the Stereokino in Moscow, had to be constructed for the viewing of this film and its successors: autostereoscopic movies played in Moscow for 18 years, and four additional autostereoscopic cinemas were built in the Soviet Union during this time. [Zone (2007), Hayes (1989), 3-D Revolution] The first (monochromatic) holographic movie was made in April 1969, by Alex Jacobson and Victor Evtuhov at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California. It showed a 30 second scene of tropical fish swimming in an aquarium. [Kac, Youngblood - which includes two still images from this movie.] Imax: The first IMAX film made was the 17 minute short Tiger Child, released on 15 May 1970, and premiered at the Fuji Group Pavilion at Expo '70, in Osaka, Japan. [IMAX chronology, IMDB] The first film both shot and projected in IMAX Dome (formerly OMNIMAX) was Garden Isle, released in August 1973, premiering at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center, San Diego, California. IMAX Dome is more immersive than standard IMAX, wrapping 180° horizontally, 100° above the horizon and 22° below the horizon for a viewer at the centre of the dome. The first IMAX 3D film (not counting the 1985 animated short We are Born of Stars) was the 1986 Transitions, created for Expo 86 in Vancouver. Co-directed by Colin Low and Tony Ianzelo and produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the film explored the world of transportation and communications. [IMAX chronology, IMDB, 3-D Revolution] Interactive movie mapping: The Aspen Moviemap began as an idea by Massachusetts Insitute of Technology undergraduate Peter Clay, in collaboration with graduate students Bob Mohl and Michael Naimark. Clay "moviemapped" the hallways of MIT in early 1978, as the second demonstration videodisc made by the Architecture Machine Group. Produced at MIT, the Aspen Moviemap - the first interactive moviemap - was filmed in the autumn of 1978, in winter 1979, and briefly again in the autumn of 1979. A gyroscopic stabilizer with 16mm stop-frame cameras was mounted on top of a camera car and a fifth wheel with an encoder triggered the cameras every 10 feet. Filming took place daily between 10am and 2pm to minimize lighting discrepancies. The camera car carefully drove down the centre of the street for registered match-cuts. In addition to the basic "travel" footage, panoramic camera experiments, thousands of still frames, audio, and data were collected. The playback system required several laserdisc players, a computer, and a touch-screen display. Very wide-angle lenses were used for filming, and some attempts at orthoscopic playback were made. [Naimark] The Aspen Moviemap is now viewed as a classic of hypermedia; the contemporary Google Street View - a feature of Google Maps and Google Earth - builds on the same concept. Google Street View, launched on 25 May 2007, provides 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street level views and allows users to view parts of some regions of the world at ground level. Stereoscopic movie mapping: In 1992 Michael Naimark developed the "See Banff!" Kinetoscope, a stereoscopic movie map filmed in and around the Banff region of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. [Naimark]
Interactive stereoscopic panorama:
Naimark also developed, in 1994, an installation called "Be Now
Here (Welcome to the Neighborhood)." Just as the Banff
kinetoscope was an experiment in making a stereoscopic version of
interactively moving around, "Be Now Here" was to complement
it by making a stereoscopic version of interactively looking
around. Filming took place at Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Timbuktu, Angkor and, for counterpoint, the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. [Naimark] Spherical VR panoramic movies: Spherical VR panoramic movies are now feasible, as can be seen at Redbull Surfing. This uses the Dodeca 2360 Camera System - a camera system that takes in high-res video streams (at 2400x1200 pixels per frame, 30 frames per second), and captures the GPS coordinates of its motion. The camera can record for up to 3 hours at a time. [Wired blog network]
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First 3D movies of people |
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Friese-Greene's experimental film of 1889 (if accepted in evidence) showed his cousin Alfred Carter, and Carter's son Bert, arriving on foot in Hyde Park, London. It seems likely that the 'elegant top-hatted gentleman' referred to above was Alfred Carter. [Zone (2007)] Emile Reynaud built what he called a Stereoscopic Binocular Praxinoscope by 1907, and a stereoscopic motion picture camera for use with it, in which he filmed himself, a 3D self-portrait in motion. Only one example of Reynaud's praxinoscope survives, in the Musée des Arts et Metiers in France; he became despondent and threw the camera into the Seine. The date of his self-portrait, and its present whereabouts, are not clear. [Zone (2007)] The untitled anaglyphic demonstration film, shown on 10 June 1915 by Edwin S. Porter (1870-1941) and William E. Waddell, included test shots of Marie Doro (1882-1956) and John Mason (1858-1919), as well as unidentified Oriental dancers. The earliest-known surviving anaglyphic film is Kelley’s Plasticon Pictures: Movies of the Future and Thru’ the Trees: Washington, DC, made in 1922/3 by William Van Doren Kelley, and photographed by William T. Crespinell. Originally anaglyphic (r/b), the film - in which people of both sexes appear - has been fully restored and was shown again in 2006, for the first time since the 1920s, in a new polarized dual-35mm print. [3D Moving Pictures] The May 1936 demonstration by Wheelwright [see above] appears to have been the first polarised 3D movie showing people. One scene include a children's garden party, with four children seated round a table; a small boy near the camera turned and leaned his chair back, as if falling into the auditorium. [Zone (2007)] Three types of lenticulars exist: transforming, 3D, and motion-capturing. Transforming lenticulars are irrelevant in this context. But the history of motion-capturing lenticulars appears inseparable from that of lenticulars generally. As the motion capture is in any case of extremely short duration it seems likely that information as to whether or not lenticular images include motion has been not been given. With this caveat, one candidate must be Eugène Estanave's 'Portrait of a woman opening and shutting her eyes', made in 1910. A gelatine silver photograph on glass, it has a cross-hatched line screen, combining the possibilities of a vertical screen (3D effect) and a horizontal screen (changing effect). It is made up of four different images: two to show the woman in 3D with her eyes open, and two to show her in 3D with her eyes shut. NB This motion-capturing lenticular can't be described as a movie, by the definition used on this page. Estanave patented this process on 3 February 1910 and presented it to the Académie des Sciences the following month. Images of eyes open and shut are presented monoscopically in Frizot (2000)]. Lloyd Cross created a multiplex hologram of a woman called Lesley ____ in the summer of 1972, based on 35 colour slides taken over 15 minutes; though she tried to keep still as the camera moved around her, she smiled in the final frame. [Holophile's 'Story of Multiplex'] The best-known early multiplex hologram, and possibly the first shot in real time, was "Kiss II", made in 1974 by Cross in collaboration with Pam Brazier. This 180-degree integral hologram, shot from 540 ciné frames, shows the subject (Brazier) winking and blowing a kiss at the viewer. See above for recent holograms of pre-cinematographic subjects.
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First 3D feature film |
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The first 3D feature film was the anaglyphic The Power of Love, first exhibited (in fact its only stereoscopic exhibition) on 27 September 1922 at the Ambassador Hotel Theater in Los Angeles. This is now lost. [3D Moving Pictures, Zone (2007), 3-D Revolution] The first autostereoscopic 3D feature film was Ivanov's Robinson Kruzo, for which filming began in 1941, but which was released on 20 February 1947, in Russia. It was photographed on 70mm film with side-by-side stereo images having an aspect ratio of 1.37:1. [Zone (2007), Hayes (1989)] The earliest surviving 3D feature film was The Ship of Souls, released on 20 December 1925. Filmed in Miller Stereoscopic Process (dual 35mm printed single strip anaglyphic. Producer and stereoscopic supervisor: Max O. Miller; director: Charles Miller; photographer: Edwin P. DuPar. [Hayes (1989)] Imax: The first IMAX feature film was American Years, from 1976. The first IMAX 3D feature film was Wings of Courage, released in New York City on 21 April 1995. [IMAX chronology, IMDB]
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Earliest-born person to be filmed in 3D |
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Possibly W.H. Burton (1844-1926), who played in M.A.R.S, a.k.a. Mars Calling, and The Man from Mars, in January 1921. The film was later expanded and released as Radio-Mania. [Hayes (1989), pp290-1 & 339, 3-D Revolution] See above for recent holograms of pre-cinematographic subjects.
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Earliest-born woman to be filmed in 3D |
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Possibly Isabel Vernon (c. 1874-1930), who also played in M.A.R.S, a.k.a. Mars Calling, and The Man from Mars, in January 1921. [Hayes (1989), pp290-1 & 339, 3-D Revolution] See above for recent holograms of pre-cinematographic subjects.
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© 2009 Benjamin S. Beck |
If you know of any suitable examples, please contact me.
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