NEW 3D technology will revolutionise the way we watch sports on screen and bring the biggest change in the movies since the "talkies", the producer and Labour peer Lord Puttnam predicted yesterday.
In 2012, he said, London Olympics coverage could be shown "every single day in 3D on every single screen in the country".
In yesterday's keynote address at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the British film grandee predicted 3D screening
s of sports events would be a "real staple" of British cinemas.
"The enjoyment I had watching 3D sports, that is a completely different experience," said Puttnam, who won the best film Oscar in 1981 for Chariots of Fire.
"It's like being on the pitch. It's quite extraordinary... something utterly different from the biggest outsize TV you have at home."
Lord Puttnam, 68, the producer of 35 films, including Local Hero and The Killing Fields, is a deputy chairman of Channel 4.
About 10 per cent of British cinema screens now have digital projectors, alongside ones using traditional film prints. The equipment has already brought a surge in 2D broadcasts of live operas and concerts, but most machines are 3D capable. This year, the Disney 3D film Up, about a grumpy pensioner who attaches balloons to his house and floats to South America, opened the Cannes Film Festival in an unprecedented move.
A wave of 3D films this year include G-Force, the live-action digital 3D film, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, another children's film. Tickets are already scarce for the Edinburgh festival screening of the 3D Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, ahead of its UK release.
Lord Puttnam said he had seen 3D at work in excepts of director James Cameron's new film, Avatar, expected to be a Christmas blockbuster. "It really knocked my socks off," he said.
The technology was as big as the advent of talking pictures in the 1930s, and bigger than the introduction of colour.
The UK Film Council's head of distribution, Peter Buckingham, heard Lord Puttnam speak to a packed auditorium at the Edinburgh Filmhouse.
"3D is a game-changer. Whether you are showing live theatre, live sport, live opera or film, it is a much more immersive experience," he said. "You are in it in a way that 2D doesn't deliver.
"There will be 3D Olympics screenings of the games if broadcasters embrace it, he said. "The short answer, is that nearly everything is going to be in 3D."
'WE MUST TACKLE THE BNP'LORD Puttnam issued a rallying cry to British film-makers yesterday to confront political issues, in particular the BNP's gain of two seats in the European elections.
He cited his own documentary Swastika, on the rise of the Nazi Party, and Shane Meadows' This is England, where a young boy gets mixed up with National Front skinheads in the 1980s.
"This is where political cinema comes into its own," he said. "It's crucial that cinema remains responsible to the political climate."
