Enchanting images, to the point of discomfort.
Released in December,
Avatar: The Way of the Water
overwhelmed the worldwide box office and enchanted millions of spectators with its great showmanship and magical compositions.
Superlatives abound to praise this second part of James Cameron's favorite saga.
The film is definitely eye-popping.
Too much, maybe.
In the midst of an ocean of rave reviews, a few voices were raised to evoke the discomfort felt in front of the 3:12 feature film.
“I had pain in my eyes and then in my head while watching the film in 3D. Wearing glasses under normal glasses is still just as uncomfortable
, ”a spectator told
Le Figaro
after seeing the last
Avatar
, noting that the duration of the show transformed entertainment into a way of the cross.
Online, other testimonials dwell on the strange appearance of this "ecological fable".
The film is magnificent, but it also has an atrocious appearance”
, laments a user on the Reddit forum.
With every quick movement everything seemed wrong.”
Two types of reactions that draw their source from the technique of
Avatar: The Way of Water.
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Is it the fault of 3D?
By the time the first
Avatar
film was released in 2009, three-dimensional viewing – highly recommended by marketing – had seen increased equipment in theaters and excitement for this technique being put into service of immersion.
But she had also left some spectators on the sidelines.
The effects of 3D, in particular the "motion sickness" it can cause, have been known for a long time;
an article in the
New York Times
in February 2010 recalled that it was difficult to avoid this pitfall of technology.
However, with
Avatar: The Waterway
, this same discomfort also seems to affect the 2D sessions of the film.
By what sad miracle?
The answer would lie not in the extra dimensions, but in the extra images.
Two images for the price of one
Among the string of technical innovations that it carries within it, the second part of the
Avatar
saga surfs on a system that is still not widely used in cinema:
High Frame Rate
(HFR) technology.
This consists of increasing the frame rate per second (IPS, also known as FPS, for
frames per second
) of the film.
Instead of the 24 FPS which have been the standard frequency in cinema for almost a century, the new
Avatar
is thus studded with sequences at 48 frames per second.
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Several feature films have already used the technology.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a prototype called Showscan made it possible to broadcast certain films in 60 FPS.
More recently, Peter Jackson had chosen to broadcast his Hobbit trilogy in 48 FPS.
And in 2019, taking the vice even further, Ang Lee released 120 FPS
Gemini Man
, starring Will Smith.
Outside of cinema, a high frame rate of 60 FPS has also become the benchmark in the video game industry.
The variable HFR employed in
Avatar: The Way of the Water
is supposed to accentuate the immersion and the sensation of speed during the action scenes, according to the production of the film.
Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Studios
For films, the interest of the HFR consists in accentuating the impression of fluidity of the image.
During a video intervention at the Busan International Film Festival in October, James Cameron highlighted
"the sense of heightened presence
" and
"hyperrealism"
that HFR offers
, "especially underwater or in aerial scenes.
The technology also makes it possible to improve the comfort of viewing a 3D film, by precisely reducing the nausea and the floating sensations that these sessions can induce.
And how did some viewers feel with the first
Avatar
?
“Thanks to 3D, (...) and the high frame rate, we can present a better quality image today.
Avatar
… and by far”,
thus indicates the producer of
The Way of the water
, Jon Landau in the press kit of the film.
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Still, the HFR is not without flaws.
The grievance most frequently reproached to the precisely too real, too fluid aspect of the images.
"The technology goes against the suspension of disbelief that a director normally seeks to instill in a film,"
Richard Miller, head of technology at Pixelworks, a company specializing in the production of screens and displays, told CNBC. video broadcast systems
.
“It only really works with 24 FPS,”
he adds, also comparing the system to the settings of some modern televisions, set up for sports transmissions or documentaries.
“It's almost unconscious, you tell yourself that it doesn't seem right.
It doesn't look like a movie."
Movie theaters must be adequately equipped to be able to broadcast a film in HFR.
A detail that caused some problems when
Avatar: The Waterway was
released , especially in Japan.
Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Studios
Added to this is one last detail that is important:
Avatar
is not quite in HFR, but in variable HFR.
This means that the feature film alternates sequences in 24 FPS – for rather frozen scenes and dialogues – with passages in 48 FPS – as soon as there is a movement or an action scene.
However, part of the public is more sensitive than others to the dynamic back and forth between two frame rates.
Hyperfluidity versus Hypersensitivity
"The permanent change in frequency is completely disconcerting, it completely took me out of the film and from any pleasure I could have derived from
it", writes the American journalist Jenna Busch, in a column for the specialized media Slashfilm, by evoking snippets of scenes that seem to scroll by in fast motion in the middle of a normal sequence.
And a migraine on top of that.
"It seems impossible to follow all this with eyes that are constantly adjusting,"
she adds.
“Is it the effect of 48 frames per second or a malfunction of the 3D glasses, the atrocious feeling of watching HD TV in image interpolation mode reoccurs”
, also notes Nicolas Schaller, in his review of the film for
L'Obs
.
Particularly annoyed, the cinema videographer Durendal did not mince his words either.
“It was one of the worst cinema sessions of my life
, he hammered.
Every time we went back to a 24 FPS shot, I thought the projector was bugging, (...) like a jerky video game.”
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Another pitfall, the hyperfluidity obtained by the increased number of images per second would also result in a greater risk of nausea, or motion sickness – which is more commonly called motion sickness.
The disorder had already limited the development of 3D as well as virtual reality in recent years.
A study by the firm LudoTIC, specialized in ergonomics, pointed out in 2016 a correlation - in the case of the use of a virtual reality helmet - between the feeling of nausea and the duration of fixation of a point by the gaze .
In other words: in an HFR film, the eye focuses on twice as many images per second as in a normal feature film, which increases the risk of nausea.
Small consolation: the technical audacity of
La Voie de l'eau
did not only test the eyes of the spectators.
They also put a strain on some cinemas.
As the HFR requires special equipment, there were a few problems with the film's release around the world.
In Japan, the projection of
Avatar
thus turned to shipwreck in several rooms.
Showtimes were cancelled, Bloomberg reports, while a few multiplexes eventually aired the film in a normal 24 FPS version.
With half as many images per second, perhaps, but also less trouble.