FILM ART DISCOVERY

Hokitika Guardian, 22 February 1932, Page 3

FILM ART DISCOVERY

TALKIE IN THREE DIMENSIONS

The most revolutionary discovery in film art since the' invention 01 “talkies” has just been made (states the “Sunday Chronicle” of London;. It means, in effect, that instead of seeing fiat ’ pictures thrown upon a screen the audience will watch figures moving on a stage and apparently possessing all the substance of living actors and actresses.

Elaborate precautions have been taken to keep the discovery secret, but a film was recently projected before eight people in a locked and guarded room in a Hollywood studio. The exhibition that w’as given will be famous in history as that of the first three-dimensional film.

The demonstration was an amazing one. There w J n<s no screen. ‘By the play of light and 1 shadows filtered through a great number of varioussized lenses representations of the men and women photographed by the film camera were projected so that they appeared almost flesh and blood. The flatness of the normal cinema projection was entirely abolished; in its place were actors and actresses moving as in real life. For years brilliant scientists lave been experimenting in the endeavour to discover some meas of adding the third dimension of “thickness” to the 1 two, length and breadth, possessed by pictures projected by means <Sf a film on to a screen.

“Stereoscopic pictures’ ’ were the nearest they got. But here they were working along wrong lines. What held them up was the- screen, up till then necessary as the base on which the light pictures were painted. Now there is no need for a screen. The credit f or the invention of “three-dimentional films” belongs principally to a young electrician employed in the Hollywood studios of Universal pictures Ltd. Already 20 patents covering the discoveries have been taken out.