Watching Tales of Television Centre

[avevale_intelligencer]

Before the Sky box pointed out that I'd asked it to record two other channels and it only had one pair of hands, thank you so much. Maybe they'll repeat it again.

And it occurred to me. You can make, say, an alien planet using thousands of pounds worth of computer hardware, populate it with hundreds of CGI extras, whip up a futuristic soundtrack using Cubase and all the latest virtual synths, and have the finest actors in the land pasted into it all emoting their socks off, and if you're all good at your jobs it'll look and sound jolly impressive. And that's fine.

But if you can make an alien planet in a grimy, stuffy soundstage on a wet Thursday afternoon with two dozen milk crates, a roll of silver foil, a collection of alleged musical instruments cobbled together from old wartime radar equipment and that bloke off Z Cars, on a budget of whatever's left over at the end of the month...that's magic.

It may not be fair, but that's the way it is. That's why we're jaded. That's why the more amazing CGI becomes the more people kvetch about how unconvincing it is. Nobody complained about Milk Crate Planet being unconvincing, and it wasn't because we were all eight years old. Not all of us were.

We'll happily allow a stage conjuror to misdirect us and be amazed when he pulls a flower out of our ear. But if we ever come to think that he might be trying to tell us the magic's real--that actual supernatural forces are involved--then it's a very different story, and it'll be a cold day in hell before he convinces us. And while we're at it, we never really believed that thing with the milk crates either. I mean, it was obvious.

You can't unopen people's eyes, or undestroy their innocence. Maybe, when it's all gone smash, and travelling troupes of players go from city to ruined city reciting old Dixon Of Dock Green scripts on sets improvised from non-biodegradable milk crates, a new generation will recreate the old Punch-and-Judy glamour in which performer and audience are complicit, and nobody will be standing at the back saying loudly "It's not real, you know." And maybe in time there'll be a new Television Centre, and no Thatcher this time to wreck it and turn it into just another business.

Well, I can hope.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

It's also a great deal about the vision behind the effects. Think about Star Wars and Alien, both of which presented worlds that were far more realistic than the foil effects you mention, and were also visually absorbing. The details -- in both cases, largely including the fact that things aren't perfect and clean, but dirty, dingy, banged-up, and well-used -- made them both a treat for the eyes (to the extent that Alien was pleasant to watch; if you don't like the genre, it won't be).

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Vision is a good thing, but it's not what I'm talking about. I'd peg Star Wars as the beginning of the change, the first faint inkling that the audience's complicity was no longer required. People talk about using all sorts of devices to make entertainment interactive, and they forget that it always was; the current state, where we sit as passive consumers while utterly convincing images are beamed directly into our brains, where the only choice is to accept the input or to wthhold acceptance....that's recent.

Whether that complicity could have been maintained in parallel with the development of better special effects, I don't know. If you've seen and enjoyed the HPLHS film of Call Of Cthulhu, then you may agree with me that we've still got the mental "muscle" to do it. Perhaps if fewer films had been made which relied wholly on special effects to carry an otherwise inadequate story, that muscle might not have begun to atrophy. But I don't know if we'd all agree on which those films were. Maybe we're the victims of our own raised expectations.

[batyatoon]

Oh for a fireless muse, eh?

(That's actually the opening line of a satire called Mac Bird -- yes, it's the Henry V opening they're parodying; there's also some Hamlet in there, it's something of a pastiche.)

I think there's something to the your-thoughts-must-deck-our-kings approach, but I don't agree at all that the only choices in the current state of media is to "accept the input or withhold acceptance". Visual seamlessness is neither necessary (as you know) nor sufficient (so I maintain) to suspension of disbelief.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

At least part of this is the "Uncanny valley" effect, in which acceptance of robots and such rises as their "human" appearance gets more realistic, then suddenly drops way down when they get too close to looking real.

See also this blog entry, which notes inter alia:

Now it appears that a major motion picture has fallen in. Jonathan Kim writes that "Disney's CG/3D animated film Mars Needs Moms [is] destined to become one of the biggest flops of all time," and identifies the culprits as a mediocre script, dull characters, high ticket prices, and the "zombie effect" of the uncanny valley.

[howeird]

I still enjoy Milk Crate Planet. Last night I was watching the original of one of the early Japanese Gomorrah movies, dubbed into something resembling English, and somehow my brain reset itself to 1950. I actually have more of a problem with the modern remakes because they try too hard to look real.

And it's why I still enjoy seeing early Doctor Who episodes.