A daft question but what exactly is the difference between 2d & 3d films?

Trust me, it’s not a silly question. I’m a 2D / 3D artist myself and until I started on the course I didn’t even know the difference.

Essentially, all film is 2D by nature as it doesn’t jump out the screen at you – it is displayed on a flat, two dimensional screen. What 3D means is the nature in which it is created.

One of two programs are usually used to create 3D models and animate them, Maya or 3D Studio Max. Within these programs a 3D model (ranging from a character to a environment to any number of items) will be sculpted in 3D:

Low poly model example: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v675/Psycho_Devi...

Maya (the 3D program) example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maya2009.png

Once this model has been created it can be animated by building a 3D virtual skeleton and graphing the vertices of the model (i.e. the dots which connect the lines on the mesh) to this skeleton and key framing it at different positions along the time line. Of course that is a very brief overview of how a 3D model is built and animated, but although it sounds complicated, that’s really all there is to 3D animating in Layman’s terms.

It can also have photographs or any other images mapped over its surface (like the truck in the Maya screen shot) so that it appears more real. The very best models have such good image mapping over them (and such good modelling of course) that they are indistinguishable from the real thing.

Any video game created in this manner (i.e. pretty much all modern video games) or any film made in this manner (i.e. Pixar movies like Toy Story and Finding Nemo, all the way to Final Fantasy Advent Children and Beowolf) are considered 3D, due to how they were made.

Some films (more often than you’d think) require multiple layers of 2D to be composited together (i.e. background, forground) etc. For instance if a 3D animated model needs to be rendered out and placed into a scene with real actors, like in The Incredible Hulk, it is rendered out (saved out) and placed into the scene as a piece of 2D footage using a compositing program such as Apple Shake or Adobe After Effects. So essentially, the terms 2D and 3D are used quite a lot in the Post Production industry, but as a standard movie goer the only thing you need to remember is that a 3D film is a movie created using 3D modelling programs, and everything else is just… well, not 3D!

However, on a further note, if by 3D you are referring to movies which do appear to jump out at you from the screen whilst wearing special glasses, this is achieved by the film makers overlaying two slightly different coloured pieces of the same footage an inch apart on the screen. The two eye pieces of the glasses are each coloured different so as to pick up the two different pieces of footage and once it hits your eyes it gives the illusion of being three dimensional and stretching out of the screen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_film

Well. A film slr camera needs a film, like all cameras were before digital came along. And a digital slr camera does not. They're like digital cameras in that way, except much more complicated to work, have many more different functions and of coarse the quality is so much better. I would definitely suggest the digital one, since you are a beginner. Because with digital you can easily delete the photo if you don't like it, and it also makes it so much simpler to edit them since you just load it onto your computer and then go from there. But with a film you might find yourself wasting a lot of it since you won't be very experienced in getting the right camera angles, shot sizes etc. and it'll be difficult to get the photograph that you want in the first few shots. Or that's what I've found at least.

2D is like looking at a flat piece of paper, it only has width and height.

3D is like looking at real life you have width height and depth.

In lift this is achieved by having two eyes which by giving a slightly different perspective to things, allow you to Jude distance.

In moves it is usually achieved by the use of special glasses which by the use of coloured filters allow the user to see a different image with each eye the brain then interpreters this as a 3D image although its projected on a flat screen.

1d