Fix it in Post

I think if I had a time machine, it would be totally fun to take movies from today and bring them back to the past.  If I went back to November 1955 like Marty McFly, I'd  bring The Lord of the Rings trilogy on Blu-Ray (as well as equipment to play it) to show all the people who just bought the newly released book.  I imagine they would believe that in the future, we actually found Middle Earth, and sent a documentary film crew to record what really happened.

Look at how King Kong has evolved over 70 years.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the release of After Effects, which has become the industry standard when it comes to visual effects software.  If you've seen a movie in the last 20 years, you've seen something done with AE.  Chances are, if you've seen a movie in the last 10 years, you've seen something done with way too much AE.  

For films like Sin City, or Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the visual effects are part of the story.  For films like Transformers or Avatar, VFX are seemingly a crutch to prop up a film with no discernible intellegent story.  How many films have you seen that spend the entire budget on visual effects, and seemingly $2.00 on the screenwriter?  Or have you seen a trailer for a film that every sequence they show is a $500,000 VFX sequence, and you don't really understand who the characters are or what the plot is? (Pacific Rim).

This goes back to last week's post.  What is art?  Specifically, what is quantifiable to executives holding all the money?  After The Matrix came out, it seems like every film had that BulletTime shot in it.  That's executives saying, "The Matrix made a lot of money, and had great visual effects, therefore if we want to make a lot of money, we need great visual effects."  The Matrix was great because of the visual effects, but also because it knew that using them served the story about a computer generated world and a man who is able to manipulate the physics of that world with his mind.  It was also great because of the characters, the philosophy, and the story.

After all, movies are stories, not a collection visual effects sequences.  Those are called "demo reels."

Story, however, has seemingly been sacrificed for "realism" or in this case "hyper-realism."  We watch a movie, and if it looks "fake" it's a death sentence.

Or is it?

Has anyone seen The Mummy Returns?  If not, let me bring you up to speed.  Somewhere, in a giant underground hidden temple, Brendan "Encino Man" Fraser is engaged in a giant battle with Arnold "almost Billy Zane" Vosloo.

When suddenly, the Dwayne "The Rock" "The Scorpion King" Johnson emerges to do battle with them both.

Dah doing doing doing...

Something strange happens at this point in the film.  All the tension, all the story, all the build up suddenly dissolves. The audience suddenly doesn't care about the characters anymore or what's happening in the movie, and they begin laughing, because it's honestly terrible-looking.  The Rock looks more like The Rubber.  Compare that with Gollum in The Hobbit, who ten seconds after he appears on screen, you completely forget he's not real.

Or has anyone ever seen the film Birdemic?  It's incredible.  It's a modern take on Hitchcock's The Birds.  Although Birdemic was made 47 years later, the effects are somehow infinitely worse. It doesn't help that everything else about the film is terrible too.  Don't believe me?  Check it out. (Want to be even more depressed, fellow indie-filmmakers?  It's available on Netflix, and the sequel is in production.  It also was featured by Rifftrax, so there's some justice.)

But then there's Jaws.  

What's different about that one?  The shark looks fake, sure.  But no one seems to care.  It's still considered one of the most thrilling movies ever made.

I believe the difference with Jaws is simple: The movie isn't about the shark, and Spielberg knew it.  The movie is about characters.  A cop trying to protect his town and save his family.  An old sailor, drunk and destroyed from some horrible tragedy in his past.  The shark isn't the main character, it's just a device the others use to complete their arcs.  And thus, showing the shark isn't important.  And when we do see it, it's not important either.  It's better when it's obstructed, or just a fin, or not seen at all and our imaginations are left to picture it while John Williams two note masterpiece plays over and over.  The shark never gets a close up, full frame like the Rubber Scorpion Man does. The film isn't trying to wow us by showing us this special effect beast it created.  It's trying to wow us with the story and characters it created.  So the shark is almost an afterthought.  It's forgivable that it doesn't look perfect, because showing it was not supposed to be the thing that made us all remember the film.  They weren't hoping you left thinking "wow, didn't the shark look awesome?!," but rather, "I jumped out of my pants when it popped out of the water, and it was totally sad when Quint died."  

Has anyone ever watched The Empire Strikes Back and couldn't get past how fake puppet Yoda looked?  Because people sure had a hard time with CGI Yoda.  Was it because the story was so much better in Empire? When a film sets itself up to look real, and can't pull off the VFX to match the real footage, it's jarring (like Attack of the Clones).  But if you set up that your movie is going to be full of puppets, your mind just accepts it (like Empire Strikes Back.)

Fake is the wrong word.  Nobody cares if it looks fake.  They care if it doesn't match.

Technically, only one of these is real.

Have you ever watched The Wizard of Oz with someone and heard them say, "You can totally tell that isn't a real lion."  Of course not.  The human imagination can suspend disbelief if it is expected to.  That's why live theater still exists.  No one has had trouble believing a play because it looks fake.

FAAAAAAKE.

Fake isn't the problem. Matching the rest of the film is.  VFX artists want to be known for their work, but it's a job where doing it right means hiding the fact that you did anything at all.  Forcing VFX to do something they can't do draws attention to them and can ruin the experience.

So to that end, film makers must know and accept their limitations.

Knowing your limits can make your film.  Take a look at a film like Kevin Smith's Clerks.  Smith had a convenience store, a video store, some friends, and a black and white 16mm camera.  You aren't going to make Jurassic Park with that.  If Clerks was about two store clerks living through a massive alien invasion that had destroyed New York City and turned everyone into zombies, and to defeat the alien army they had to fly an F-16 into the heart of a UFO and blow it up, that movie would be terrible if all he had to make it with was a convenience store, a video store, some friends and a black and white 16mm camera. So instead, you make a film about some of your friends working in a convenience store and a video store.  Seems simple enough.

So when indie people say they're going to make a movie about giant killer robots after the apocalypse, and they have a budget of $5,000, it's already going to suck.  Unless it's animated. Or unless they get really really creative.

Limits are what made the Paranormal Activity franchise.  A film about a haunted house made for $11,000 (or for $2,500 more than I made Being From Another Planet) makes back $115 million, (or $114,997,000 more than I made back on Being From Another Planet… if only I had $2,500 more.)  How?  By using it's limitations to make the story.  If you only own one digital camera, no lights, and you can only use your house as a set, and don't have the budget for big name actors, you make a docudrama about your own haunted house with two of your friends as the leads.  You don't try to make Gone With The Wind.

Limitations are not a bad thing in film making.  So often you hear indie film makers get discouraged because they don't have a $15 million VFX budget and therefore can't "compete" with Hollywood blockbusters.  That's just an excuse. VFX can't make a film.  And to bring it back to art again, Picasso never looked at Michelangelo and said "He had the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to paint on, and I only have these tiny canvases.  I'll never be able to compete. I might as well quit."

Besides, being unlimited in film making can sometimes be just as much of a curse.

Never forget.