3D Film History Goes Back to the Beginning

The picture Avatar has been exciting audiences around the world with amazing 3D film technology and smashing CGI and computer effects. For many , the tale line of the movie is secondary to the visual feast provided found in the 3D motion picture. 3D technology is clearly beginning to become popular and during the previous 10 years or so , a considerable number of popular animated films using 3D processes and CGI technology have been made. And, while the flick Avatar could be history making in its use of advanced filmmaking processes, it actually isn't the 1st live action 3D film and if box office receipts are any suggestion, it won't be the last.
What many of today's flick lovers may not realize , however , is that the history of 3D film goes back much further than a decade, and even further than the '50's pulp horror films. The history of 3D film really goes back as far as the history of flicks themselves.
As far back as 1856, an inventive inventor named J.C. D'Almeida gave an interesting demonstration to the Academie des Sciences. Essentially, he demonstrated how two pictures of the same scene could be filmed from slightly different viewpoints ( about two and half inches apart - to simulate two eyes ) and then be projected rapidly through red and green lantern slides. The spectators viewed the projector screen through glasses fitted with red and green lenses as the red image could only be seen thru the green lens and vice versa, so that the two slightly different images mixed to form a 3D image. As fascinating as this experiment was, it didn't quite catch on then and rapidly alternating right and left eye views would not be used again in film until almost a hundred years on.

Almost forty years passed by before Ducos du Hauron developed a refinement of the anaglyph or two-color film system. In this system, two transparent stereoscopic ( two subtley different views of the same image ) views, one red and one blue were superimposed on top of each other and projected onto a screen. Again, through the utilization of glasses with different colored lenses, this time a blue and red one, the spectator saw a 3D scene.
Naturally, by the end of the 19th century, moving photographs had arrived and in 1897 C. Grivolas had adapted that same anaglyph photograph technique to a specialized camera that exposed 2 reels of film at the same time, thru 2 lenses spaced about 2 and a half inches apart. The way forward for 3D film had arrived. Of course, it was still a great distance off from the outstanding feats of James Cameron and the film Avatar.

Intriguingly enough, it wasn't until 1922 that the planet's first feature length 3D film would be screened at the envoy Hotel Theatre in los angeles. The Power of Love, filmed using anaglyph technology received positive reviews and a couple of short months later another film, William Van Doren Kelley, ( engaging enough the inventor of the Prizmacolor process ) screened a short film called movies of the Future, using what he called the Plasticon anaglyph process, with film coated on both sides, one side being green, the other red. Again, this process required the onlookers to view the photographs thru glasses, this time with cellophane red and green lenses, so as to get the 3-D effect.
There would be many experiments with film in 3D in the years yet to come, some successful, some not. However , without the attempts of these early film front-runners, the blockbuster films of today might haven't ever been made.
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