world dominated by on-demand entertainment, the future of cinema is being questioned with considerable anxiety, even pessimism, by moviegoers. Yet, this industry, constantly evolving since its inception, is no stranger to challenges; it notably demonstrated remarkable ingenuity with the invention of CinemaScope upon the advent of television in the 1950s. It’s therefore highly likely that the collective and social experience of the movie theater is far from over and will outlive Netflix. How? This article explores some of the innovations that have emerged.
Hope for the cinema of tomorrow immersion
If we are to believe Spielberg’s latest film, Ready Player One, the future lies at the intersection of cinema and video games, in other words, in the immersive experience. This fascination with cinema “as if you were there,” initially illustrated by the (not entirely convincing) use of 3D technology, has led filmmakers toward VR cinema. Indeed, how can one resist the temptation to completely immerse the viewer in the story, even making them a character in their own right by allowing them to interact directly with the virtual scenery and objects? This is the very ambition of extended reality (XR), which refers to the combination of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Enthusiasm for these new technologies is so great that the most prestigious festivals in the industry now award prizes to “augmented” films to foster their development. This is notably the case with the Cannes Film Festival, which introduced a new space dedicated to immersive technologies in 2019: Cannes XR. Alongside virtual reality, this quest for the perfect illusion of a fantastical or realistic world inevitably leads to greater image precision. Examples include 8K and 12K cameras with ultra-realistic rendering, and the 120 frames per second format (used notably by Ang Lee) for enhanced 3D technology. Sound is also becoming increasingly sophisticated and immersive: consider, for instance, Dolby Atmos technology, which places speakers above the audience and literally envelops them in the world of the film! All these new techniques represent complex tools to master,” explains Maxime Laumond, coordinator of Sound and Music training at EICAR. “ Therefore, we aim to give our students the necessary skills to manage tools such as multichannel. The technology must serve the film and not overpower it, at the risk of pulling the viewer out of the story.EICAR students then have access to this state-of-the-art equipment, which they will encounter in their future professional environments. For directors and image technicians, the RED Weapon Helium 8K camera; for future sound engineers, the Cantar X3 recorder. All these innovations have obviously paved the way for a new type of theater, 4DX, which allows viewers to see films in immersive conditions similar to those found in amusement parks (like Futuroscope), with dynamic seats, lighting effects, scents… all the senses are awakened. Are we perhaps slowly returning to the very foundation of cinema, which, originally, was a fairground attraction?
But there’s a major challenge too much virtuality kills the virtual world.
The 1990s and 2000s marked the arrival of computer animation; we still fondly remember the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. The peak of quality for these special effects was reached in the mid-2000s with the refinement of motion capture, which made it possible to create the aquatic hybrids of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy . Since then, technical progress seems to have stagnated, and the aforementioned technological advances are beginning to bore viewers, who are too accustomed to computer-generated imagery to be truly amazed. The latest Terminator films, more akin to video game cutscenes, were heavily criticized, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic World, while technologically remarkable, have never looked so artificial. The actors in Peter Jackson and George Lucas’s trilogies even regularly complained about the difficulty of acting amidst green screens, lamenting that their performances were lost in the directors’ technological extravagances. Thus, the observation is clear: the latest installments of franchises made in the 2010s seem to have lost quality compared to their older siblings made ten or twenty years earlier. Furthermore, films such as Final Fantasy, The Polar Express, and Beowulf, all made using full motion capture, were genuine commercial failures, notably raising the issue of the uncanny valley. This theory, first published in 1970 by a Japanese roboticist, highlights the fact that the closer a robot physically resembles a human being, the more monstrous its imperfections appear to us. Thus, the more virtually animated characters in films try to look like us, the greater the viewer’s discomfort. This is precisely what was recently criticized regarding Will Smith’s double in Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, also entirely animated using motion capture. However, should we completely abandon cutting-edge technologies a return to the “good old days”?
Improving old tools for a return to the future
For the most radical directors like Nolan and Tarantino, digital technology should find its place in serving on-set special effects, without constituting the core of the cinematic experience, which, according to them, must remain physical and tangible. In other words, goodbye to virtual characters! Christopher Nolan has built his career on a return to the use of on-set effects: pyrotechnics, models ( Interstellar ), painted sets, and even crowd effects created with cardboard soldiers ( Dunkirk ). As for Tarantino, he mostly rejects digital blood, preferring traditional blood capsules. For these conservatives, true technological development should therefore focus solely on image quality (film development) and the cinematic experience (new theater formats). Christopher Nolan, in fact, has undertaken the refinement of the IMAX format, further revealing the potential of film, which even digital technology cannot match. However, one could argue that IMAX requires bulky equipment, lengthy and expensive shoots, and specially adapted theaters, significantly limiting its accessibility. However, the hope for a lasting partnership between time-tested methods and cutting-edge technologies was born with the series The Mandalorian. Although broadcast on television, it astonished audiences with its enhanced reintroduction of one of the oldest cinematic techniques: on-set projection. Remember those films where the character drove a car past a passing landscape? The Mandalorian retained this idea, perfecting it with gigantic LED screens, thus immersing its actors in a perfectly realistic setting. The experiment had already been attempted (in a more archaic form) with success in the 1960s for the prehistoric scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, no one had revisited this technique since then. Thus, The Mandalorian could well be a textbook case for the future of cinema, proving that sometimes the key to future developments lies in the past. At EICAR, the emergence of these new technologies is taken very seriously,” explains Mehdi Mostefaï, coordinator for students specializing in Post-production and VFX. “ Students are trained in particular on the Unreal Engine real-time 3D creation engine. Historically used in the video game industry, it is now used in modeling sets displayed on LED walls. And this is done in real time, combined with camera movements. This promise brings us back to the beginning of the article and Spielberg’s Ready Player One: for all his technological prowess, Uncle Steven still based his film on the nostalgic pleasure of virtually revisiting the great classics (a visit to the corridor in The Shining, an urban encounter with King Kong, a road trip in the DeLorean…). As if he sensed that the future of cinema lay within the very history of filmmaking itself.