Special effects

[avevale_intelligencer]

Somewhere in the last years of the twentieth century, a genie escaped from a bottle...

Once there were just plays. Actors speaking lines on a stage, in costumes, waving fake swords and pretending to die. If they wanted thunder, then maybe they had a chap in the wings with a sheet of metal waggling it around. How they did lightning before the electric light bulb I do not know. But there was a kind of unspoken agreement between the company and the audience (well, unspoken till Shakespeare laid out the terms in the opening speech of Henry V) that you understood what they were trying to achieve and gave them the credit. Think when we talk of horses that you see them and so forth. If anyone had interrupted King Lear's famous storm scene to say "you know it's just a man with a metal sheet, don't you?" they would have been roundly shushed, because what was the point? It would just have been spoiling it for everyone else.

Then there were films, and Georges Melies, and filmmakers started to realise that you could do convincing effects--thunder that really sounded like thunder, model ships that actually sank beneath the rolling waves of the studio tank, explosions that really went bang, rockets that looked as if they were actually going to the moon. And somewhere along the way, some people started saying "it's only a model." I don't know why. No filmmaker had, as far as I know, tried to claim that Charlton Heston was actually talking to God in the Ten Commandments, or that they had actually brought in a genuine radioactive dinosaur to attack Tokyo or reanimated a real dead man in a genuine laboratory, but the game changed; it was no longer about enjoying the story, it was about catching them out. Maybe it carried over from stage magic; maybe the irritating fellow in the audience who kept saying "it's up his sleeve" and "they do it with mirrors, you know" decided to start frequenting the picture palaces instead. I don't know. But like a disease, it spread, and there was no way filmmakers or workers in the new industry of television could fight it, because, well, yes, they were fake explosions, and it wasn't real blood, and it wasn'ta real metal corridor in a genuine space station, and why should it be? Why weren't they watching the story?

So now we have people moaning about how obvious the CGI is in nuWho or LOTR, and doing their level best to spoil it for those of us who still like to immerse themselves in the story and give the storytellers the credit, because they (the moaners) are far more interested in showing off how clever they are to have spotted the trick. As if there was ever going to be a real Gollum to cast, or a real Time Lord who can turn into a skeleton. And you can not listen, but that kind of vitiates one of the main points of these things, which is that it's a shared experience.

The genie is out of the bottle. The contract between storyteller and audience is broken, and not by the storytellers, but by people who don't want to tell stories themselves, just to make it more difficult for those who do. There are ways around it--the film of the Call Of Cthulhu, that I've raved about before, gets you so thoroughly immersed in the artificial idiom of the silent film that by the time Cthulhu actually appears you are perfectly comfortable with it being a silent-film-type effect, and happily ignore all the subtle technological wizardry that recreates 1920s America in the background--but that's a very specialised solution, and wouldn't work with your general run of films and telly shows.

If there's any good to come out of this, then maybe it's this; no-one can pick holes in the special effects you get in books or on radio, so the pictures there will always be better. But it's a meagre kind of consolation for the loss of trust.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear! What's worse, some of the same damage can be done to print fiction.

There's a bit in G.K Chesterton about how being able to see through everything is indistinguishable from being blind.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Consider this: if the script and the acting are good enough, bad SFX will be forgiven. Bad FX are only really noticeable if the story fails to grip. And other people noticing bad SFX should not spoil your enjoyment.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I don't agree, for a number of reasons.

Point one: "good enough" is a subjective judgment. For some, everything RTD does is brilliant, for others it's rubbish, for most of us the truth lies somewhere in between. So everyone's definition of "good enough" will vary.

Point two: I have encountered many reviews and fan posts which speak of a good story let down by bad FX; no question of forgiveness there. And to some extent I think it's become a game; people look for holes in the FX rather than allowing themselves to be engaged in the story, however good it might be. They deliberately remain detached, and I don't know a storyteller good enough to overcome that, unless it's Doctor Lao.

Point three: ideally, you're right, I should be able to ignore the carping, even when I am in the middle of a crowd of fans all doing it at the tops of their voices while I'm trying to hear the dialogue over the shouting. (Ah, memories of Hackney and Janet Ellicott's living room...) But of course that doesn't work. Once the attention is drawn to a visible matte line or a dodgy model it's impossible to un-notice it again, like not thinking of a specifically hued animal. I used to be able to watch the last episode of "Robot" and not even notice the disparity between the tank and the eponymous automaton. Now I have to metaphorically stick my fingers in my ears and go LA LA LA because someone mentioned it in my hearing and broke my link to the story.

It does spoil the enjoyment, just like someone explaining the magic trick, and while for politeness' sake you don't mention it at the time, there's no point in pretending it doesn't happen. You just wish that they would exercise a similar politeness and keep their little triumphs to themselves.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I'm back to the point I was making (to lil_shepherd IIRC) that to me it doesn't matter. After the film I'll happily geek about what they could have done better, how they did things (SFX, languages, props, historical accuracy, etc.), but during it the film carries itself unless the makers do something totally against their own world. If someone had started using a lightsabre in LoTR, I'd have complained, because it's against the principle of that story, or if an SF novel uses bows and arrows or swords (unless that's explained or there from the start), or if a character does something completely OOC, but those are failures of the storyteller. When it comes to "can you really make a crossbow which fires three bolts without reloading?" (Ladyhawke) or "how do you ride a horse from Dover to Notingham before dark the same day?" (Robin Hood) they are things I'll happily discuss afterwards. And then only if I felt that the rest of the story was good, if it was rubbish (by whatever criteria I use) then I don't care what the SFX were like.

"reviews and fan posts which speak of a good story let down by bad FX; no question of forgiveness there"

Yup. Their problem, not mine. I still enjoy Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (the original), cheesy effects and dialogue included. I enjoy Capt. W.E. Johns' space series of books, even though I knew when I first read them as a teenager that the 'science' was rubbish. I don't care that most other SF fans consider my tastes to be rubbish, all that concerns me is if the rubbishers push it out of print so I can't watch or read it.

Yes, I'm aware of disparities. But I treat films (and to an extent books) like I do the theatre -- it isn't real, that "all [that] world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players", but I pretend and for the performance it is 'reality' for me.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Personally, I always want to know how the magic trick is done. It's why I read detective stories and hard SF, and why I have enjoyed reading Literary, film and TV criticism from age 11. It's why I listen to Mark Kermode and frequent Rotten Tomatoes.


If you get no enjoyment out of a room full of fans alternately squeeing and groaning at a TV show, then don't get into that situation. The rest of us are having the time of our lives.

And there's nothing better than seeing something that deserves it pulled to shreds in perfect prose.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

To me there are many things that are better. But that's just one of the differences between us.

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

It's about lack of imagination being envious of imagination. Those who are unable to suspend disbelief enough to enter into a story are eager to prevent others from doing so - it makes their cynicism look clever.

Of course , there are also plays/films/etc. which are simply so mediocre that all there is to do is carp at the poor effects... I once went ot see a production of Hamlet where the only redeeming feature was the set - a sort of maze-cum-climbing frame of staircases and balconies. I remember that set vividly.

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

I wrote a superb, detailed and informative answer to this. The internetz ate it. *sigh*

Short version: the problem isn't special effects per se, we've always had that. The problem is the fractured audience, as we have so many channels and ways to view, that there is no longer enough resources in television making to support detailed and narrative driven serial drama that works with character development as essential to the narrative development. You need a Straczynski or a Whedon, and RTD is neither.

The new bloke may pull it off, as the audiences are now so big the BBC might take the risk. But that takes us to Children of Earth, and I'll throw up if I have to discuss that.

The longer version I wrote made more sense. But I can show you a hundred Early Cinema films that are as bad as today's High Concept stuff... it's a matter of taste if you prefer spectacle over narrative and character, and spectacle is winning in cinema at the moment.

It's the resources for serials on tv, that drives using spectacle to plug holes in tv drama - and that's audience/resources led, not spectacle.

One can only hope new guy takes the audience figures, and puts proper narrative sequence back into Who. I too, yearn for it. I'm quite happy with whoring it for spectacle.. we've discussed this before. But I really enjoy the Good Stuff, and it's sorely missed...

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

For me, folks who bemoan SFX needn't bother; all they're telling me is that they didn't like what they saw, and that's their problem.

Far more important to me are people who criticize the story something's telling; that may concern me. Of course, if I were the sort who avoided spoilers and just watched everything myself, there would be no problem -- but then I couldn't speak with folks, because I tend to be five or ten years behind.

Folks who try to spoil things (in the sense of "wreck" them, as opposed to "tell secrets about it in advance") are pretty easy to spot after one or two of their reviews, and I've learned to avoid some. (Too many, as several are actual friends.) Here's hoping you can find a way to cope with them, as well, to restore your enjoyment in films and vids.

[howeird]

I think the phenomenon is much older than you give it credit for. From the time the first magician did his first parlor trick, there have been audience members trying to figure out how he did that. Houdini spent a big chunk of his life debunking the special effects of purported mediums. Most intelligent people have the "how did he do that?" gene.

Are you asking us to give the movie/telly producers a free pass on asking how they did it, or are you just asking those of us who have figured it out to not publish spoilers?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Neither. As I said in the post, I'm not expecting anything to change as a result of this moan.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I just had a thought on the opposite side from what I wrote before.

Perhaps the reminders that "this isn't real" are a reaction to the SFX which /do/ keep trying to be "more real than reality". They aren't a complaint that the SFX aren't good enough, or an attempt to be 'clever', they are people reminding themselves that "no, there aren't really monsters under my bed, it's pretend". They are scared that people -- including themselves -- might really be fooled by the SFX that these things are real. When it was obvious that the thunder was a metal sheet, or the ray guns were hairdryers, or the aliens were people in masks, they could accept it as entertainment, and pretend that it was 'real' for the duration of the show, but with advancing realism in the FX it is getting harder to tell. (I have no idea which bits of Avatar, for instance, were real actors and which CGI. OK, in some cases I'm pretty sure, but I've heard that there was a lot more CGI in there than I thought.)

In support of which I give as examples not only Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" (radio, note, not movie or TV) but also "Close Encounters" (the film) -- the latter I experienced myself, with a number of otherwise normally intelligent people taking it as fact. I've seen it with the X-Files. And the way people have treated soap operas for decades, being more upset about a character on the show than the same thing in Real Life, also supports it.

So perhaps you are right, that the amount of criticism and pointing out the SFX has grown, but perhaps that is necessary to remind a lot of people about the difference between fiction and reality, because it has got blurred. If some of us don't need that reminder, well, we can ignore it, but for some others they may need it. Hey there, you can't really jump off a 20 storey building and climb down like Spiderman, even though that looked so real...