Special effects
Dec. 26th, 2009 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerSomewhere 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-27 04:55 pm (UTC)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...