vilakins | Thoughts on filming technique

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Thoughts on filming technique

On the way home from King Kong, whose SFX I thought were wonderful, we were talking about special effects and filming conventions.

The original King Kong used stop-motion models which were state of the art at the time but required a certain involvement form the viewers; they had to translate the jerky scenes to ones that would frighten them. After seeing King Kong, Narnia, Serenity and other recent films with lots of CGI, I'm wondering if current SFX can get any better or more realistic without going 3D or VR.

I also noticed that the two actors very effectively put on the accepted 30s voice and intonation for their shipboard scene together which made me ask whether we have any strange affectations like that which people might be amused at in the future--apart from docospeak which reporters are presumably trained in. And yes, we have.

There's that irritating 'ramping' or sped-up bits of scenes. Boston Legal has adopted it for their new opening credits. Hey, I liked their stills with posterised outlines. Why follow a stupid trend? At least it's not part of the show. Yet.

The other new convention that annoys the hell out of me is the mock hand-held camera. Years ago when I first saw The Lion King, I thought it was clever to have simulated lens glare in a cartoon. It's only now that such artifice taken to extremes that I wonder why it struck me as added realism. We're supposed to be a disembodied viewer of what's on the screen, a fly on the wall, part of it. So why do series like BSG go to great trouble to constantly remind us of the camera lens as barrier? I could understand it if it were a mockumentary like The Office, but simulated focussing errors in CGI scenes of spaceships is not just irritating and distracting, it's saying, "This isn't real. This is something we filmed, and not very well at that," and this shoots down my belief in what I'm watching as something I can pretend is actually happening. I can't quite pretend to believe in a scene as real when I'm constantly made aware of deliberately flawed filming technique.

Does that have the same distancing effect on everyone else?

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I think that the viewers of the original King Kong were terrified by what seemed to them to be astonishing verisimilitude! Robertson Davies says that in the late 19th century, peddlers worked the villages of Eastern Europe carrying stacks of copies of four photographs: a clean-shaven man; a man with a beard and moustache; a man with a moustache and no beard, and a beard and no moustache. The photos were purchased by delighted punters, to whom the photos--of Just Some Guy looked *exactly* like their husband or brother or fiance, because they had never seen any other photos. And I think we look at the CGI and gasp not because it's realistic in some objective sense, but because it satisfies the conventions we're used to.

I think I've mentioned it before--going to an exhibit of costumes for Hollywood historical films--flapper!Cleopatra and Maidenform!Rebecca in Ivanhoe, f'rex. Nowadays, it's OBVIOUS not only that Van Meegeren didn't paint like Vermeer, but that he painted like somebody who saw a lot of 1920s magazine ads but then even quite sensible people were fooled.

Interesting. I was seeing it as art approaching reality, but of course back then a B&W stop-motion was as amazing as CGI is to us. Not that realism is what we want, anyway. I enjoy and am moved by anime like Miyazaki's wonderful films and marvel at how closely his version of the Adriatic approximates the real thing (even though no one would take one for the other). I suppose it all depends on whether something is meant to be realistic or not. I think the mock hand-held stuff annoys me so much because it's attempting to make something look more real and does the opposite--for me, anyway.

I rather like the old painters depicting mythical, classic, or biblical figures in contemporary fashion, but I have no idea whether it was a conscious effort to make their subject accessible and modern, or just ignorance of how people dressed and lived in the past.

Van Meegeren didn't dress the figures of his fake Vermeers in 20th century costume--it's just that his STYLE is very 1920s.

Sorry, your mention of Verneer and flapper Cleopatra made me think of it.

You're right, though, medieval and Renaissance painters very commonly dressed Biblical personages in the clothing of the painters' own time.

I often translate that to someone doing the same now (like the Julius Caesar I saw in modern dress) and think of it as an interesting statement about universality, but it probably wasn't. Just another tradition.

The "artsy" camera stuff tends not to bother me, but I will say this: since I've started listening to commentaries on the B7 DVDs, I've been much more aware of B7 production values. And I am ever more impressed with the "invisibility" of their camera work. The camera angles seem almost ideal almost all the time for showing precisely the face/group/action scene they need to be showing, but the camera work essentially never calls attention to itself; it just unobtrusively does its job.

Which is what I want it to do! OK, sometimes there are stunning shots or pans I can marvel at (and even hit replay to watch again) but continually drawing attention to the fact that a camera is there--and even simulating it for CGI--is just distracting and annoying.

Yay for B7! Yes, the scenes with people are usually very well done. Some of the so-called SFX (the Liberator turning, just about every planet they show) are pretty bad, but I can't fault their flight-deck stuff. It's like the music on Babylon 5: so much a part of the scene, you don't notice it unless you try to, whereas so many shows almost drown their dialogue in intrusive and overtly manipulative music. But that's a whole other topic.

However. Worst scene in B7? The walk on the moon by Blake--that painted backdrop was so naff and totally unnecessary.

Worst camera work? The Pyroans approaching Dayna and Tarrant. Now that was a prime example of being inventive and screwing up. When I first saw that, I thought those guys had telekinesis, but no, it was just time-lapse, and once again totally unnecessary. Simple is so often better.

I can't *stand* twitchy epileptic camera work. AURGH. I will stop watching even something that's been well-written if the camera just won't. Stay. STILL. If it's badly written dren, I'll switch over even quicker just because the twitchiness irritates me so much. My eyes don't like having to do that catch-up thing all the time. I know a lot of it is blamed on MTV, but even music videos most often have varying rhythms and filming techniques--plus, a five-minute punch is what a music video does, not nauseating swishing backwards and forwards for hours on end. Entirely different media:P. Funny how the swishy cameras tend to increase when the writing gets weaker. Couldn't stand the recent Charles II miniseries (yeah, reminding us that the camera is there and swishes about *really* pulls you into the 17th century, doesn't it?!?) or the dren that was MIT (even a few minutes of Tufty wasn't a good enough price for the irritation). Pet. Peeve. *flails*

Although I've seen some good uses of modern stuff that was successfully funny and not irritatingly pretentious--some recent history documentaries on UKHistory come to mind. I was quite amused by the "eyewitness accounts" of, say, Boadicea's troops or Roman generals. Perhaps because that particular documentary series didn't try too hard, because that could've so easily been irritating.

Oh, that sounds fun, and obvious hand-held jerkiness and focussing errors would actually work there, because there's meant to be a camera there. I don't mind that for mock docos at all because it's actually part of the pretence then. I'd like to see that series; I've seen that sort of thing done very successfully.

What's MIT?

I put up with the swooping and bad focussing on BSG (Battlestar Galactica) because I do love it despite huge flaws (these people's culture evolved in another part of the galaxy to be almost identical to the present day US?) but the camera work makes me grit my teeth each time. Off-centre zooms into whoever is speaking, oops, too, close, pull back, but still don't show us the whole face, just part of it. And they do the same things with CGI spaceships. Now that would be fine if someone was recording their voyage for posterity, but that's not the case. I don't watch the news but I suspect CNN coverage might be responsible for having this crap even during a battle scene, making it confusing to follow. Guys. It only makes it look more real if the story or premise actually has a camera there.

MIT was one of these Long And Dull ITV detective dramas, a spinoff of The Bill. Two very irritating women (one of whom NEVER BLINKS) solving cases and Tufty appearing from time to time as their grumpy boss. The camera dizziness is especially bad with every scene he's in, as both the female leads are about a foot shorter than him. Which was the only amusing thing about it... I think it's been cancelled already, thank goodness.

Never blinking - yeah, that sort of things can become incredibly distracting. Like when Naomi Watts finally closed her mouth in one scene in King Kong and Greg and I immediately turned to each other: "Hey, she can do it!"

Grumpty Tufty? Hee.

Oh yeah--I think the history programme with the "eyewitness accounts" was called Battlefield Britain. The UKTV History site (http://www.uktv.co.uk/?uktv=standarditem.index&aID=528160) only lists a few battles but I'm sure the programme included more. If this is the right one, it's been a while since I last watched the stuff. They also had *really* cool 3D maps onscreen--the presenter just opened a map folder and they'd CGI'd historical terrain and battle formations on it--the graphics were really good!

I've seen some very cool CGI stuff done in historical programs, and the classics dept at Auckland Uni has an interactive CGI walk-through of part of Pompeii.

Hey, the David Tennant Casanova is coming on teev here this week. Worth getting (apart from who's in it)?

Oh yes, definitely--it's great fun. And the music is excellent.

Ooh, goodie! It's a two-parter; must set the TiVo.

Oh, buggeration, they've done the two-part edit over there as well? It was a three-parter to begin with but many countries seem to have edited it into two parts. If it's the same we got, the pacing goes all weird in the middle and lots of later events happen before the earlier ones for some reason. Tch. Still, if it's one and a half hours each, they must've not cut anything out.

I suspect they bought it that way. It's well over 90 minutes each part, but we have a lot of ads here. I'm glad I can zap them in 2-3 seconds flat on the TiVo.

And Peter O'Toole! Yay!

Okay, colour me weird. I don't really pay that much attention to the camera work or the CGI unless it is *really* obvious. Extremely obvious CGI is one of my real pet hates - such as the "rubber arm" scene in "The Two Towers" (which was depressing because the CGI in "Fellowship of the Ring" was so much better than the general run of things). I'll live cheerfully with camera wobble, or starbursts and similar, provided it isn't being obviously precious. Oh, but *deliberately* bad CGI or deliberate bad camera work for purposes of parody is okay.

I blame it all on growing up watching the Goodies, Dr Who and far too many documentaries.

Oh, I don't mind bad SFX at all--hey, I love B7 after all-- but camera work that is deliberately so bad or strange that it detracts from what I'm trying to watch just irritates the hell out of me. I only mentioned CGI because BSG simulates it there too when there isn't even a camera.

The rubber arm scene?

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