Toy Story 3D opened at cinemas across the country on Friday (18 June) and features a 3D commercial for DStv during the trailers - the first-ever 3D South African advert.
Screened just before a short 3D film called Day & Night, the ad tells the story of a balloon seller who makes animals out of twisting balloons for a girl.
The balloon dude tries to wow the girl by creating various balloon-animals: none of which impress her. Realising he's not winning, he makes a merry-go-round out of balloon horses, which she rolls her eyes at too.
In a final attempt, he turns the sky into multi-shaped balloons that explode with the buzz of colour and rad 3D effects that make you feel the balloons, flying round you, coming for you, grabbing you into the spectacle, ending with a DStv message.
I didn't get a video of the promo 'cos it has to be seen 3D.
It's bizarre: this photo was taken while it was happening, yet even though it has the 3D image, when I put the glasses on I can't see it in 3D ... they only work when you're watching it live.
Feeling while watching: the future is here. I kept wondering what our eyeballs do and
why, imagining the first TV shows we'll see in 3D. And how quickly it's happened.
3D seemed such an elusive thing, seen infrequently in movies over the years and suddenly it's everywhere. I'm fully convinced that it's going make HD irrelevant before it's become relevant.
All the fuss about HD has never intrigued me as much as it's wanted to - yes you can see the clarity blah blah but I've never found the difference excitingly mind-bending. Also, it it can look so wrong and distorted. If you see it on particular TV's, that oblong, squashed picture it delivers really sucks.
3D kicks it's butt
bigtime, particularly with it's focus on
how you're feeling things. I've been researching to find out how the technology works and discovered this explanation on
How Stuff Works:
Most human beings come equipped with two eyes and a binocular vision system.
For objects up to about 6 to 7 meters away, our binocular vision system lets us easily tell with good accuracy how far away an object is.
For example, if there are multiple objects in our field of view, we can automatically tell which ones are farther and which are nearer, and how far away they are. If you look at the world with one eye closed, you can still perceive distance, but your accuracy decreases and you have to rely on visual cues, which is slower.
The binocular vision system relies on the fact that our two eyes are spaced about 5 centimeters apart. Therefore, each eye sees the world from a slightly different perspective, and the binocular vision system in your brain uses the difference to calculate distance. Your brain has the ability to correlate the images it sees in its two eyes even though they are slightly different.
If you've ever used a View-Master or a stereoscopic viewer, you have seen your binocular vision system in action. In a View-Master, each eye is presented with an image. Two cameras photograph the same image from slightly different positions to create these images. Your eyes can correlate these images automatically because each eye sees only one of the images.
In a movie theater, the reason why you wear 3D glasses is to feed different images into your eyes just like a View-Master does. The screen actually displays two images, and the glasses cause one of the images to enter one eye and the other to enter the other eye. There are two common systems for doing this:
Red/Green or Red/Blue 3D Glasses
The red/green or red/blue system is now mainly used for television 3-D effects, and was used in many older 3-D movies. In this system, two images are displayed on the screen, one in red and the other in blue (or green).
The filters on the glasses allow only one image to enter each eye, and your brain does the rest. You cannot really have a color movie when you are using color to provide the separation, so the image quality is not nearly as good as with the polarized system.
Polarization (the one currently used for movies)
At Disney World, Universal Studios and other 3D venues, the preferred method uses polarized lenses because they allow color viewing.
Two synchronized projectors project two respective views onto the screen, each with a different polarization. The glasses allow only one of the images into each eye because they contain lenses with different polarization.
Visions of the future:
1) As more people get home theatre systems, more movies will need to be in 3D to entice people to the cinema.
2) Once all TV shows are 3D, the movies will be screwed.
3) Fashion ranges for 3D glasses will be launched so that you buy your own fab pair to take with you to fliks. They'll become a "statement".
4) The internet goes 3D.
Unanswered questions:Sony 3D and all the advertising for the technology during the World Cup ... why? Who will buy 3D TV's if there aren't any 3D shows yet?? It must be to cater to ESPN in the US ... see:
3D World Cup Ads To Air on ESPN's 3D channel.Jeremy Mansfield's voice is nowhere to be heard in Toy Story. You may remember it was announced that he was going to do the voice of the chatter telephone - he doesn't - it's done by a South African called
Teddy Newton.
Eyeball-coolAs for the movie - it rocks!!
See it.
Also, keep your peepers peeled on TVSA for a special TS surprise.