Mission: control

One of the things you always hear about filmmaking is how you can't completely control the process. Making a film is less about imposing a vision and more about setting the stage for things to happen.

I believe this is true.

At the same time, filmmakers from visual arts backgrounds tend to think differently. Artists are used to having control over every aspect of their work. Think about those all-blue screen films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or Mirror Mask (both made by people with art backgrounds). Or think about Star Wars I-III made by George Lucas who thinks like an artist. All of these films are heavily composited, and feature sock-puppet performances in which the actors are essentially objectified. All of these films have a kind of deadness that comes from the director's total control over the image, tone and performance. We are not watching performances so much as watching sculpture-in-motion.

My tendency is similar. Consider the fact that I just have one character. This character is placed into rooms/sets that I control to the extent that one set has been standing for over a year (the garage) just so I can continually run tests and fiddle with the lighting/production design/set dressing. At the same time, I wonder if this is why Ben and Erik and I are all feeling so strongly about doing practical (vs. digital effects). I also like very much the fact that while the sets are all transformed, they still start out with their own character. They are dressed but not totally created.

So it will be interesting to see how this all turns out. Will we end up with another one of those artist-made, visually suffocating, performance-challenged films? Or will it like somewhere between a virtual creation and a typical film? The overriding question from the very beginning of this project was "where does the performance exist?" At one time I had the idea that the performance existed in the fact that the film would have no cuts. I still think there's a certain a truth to that. But at the same time, Hitchcock's Rope doesn't seem to have more or less performance value than his other films. The editing, in a sense, was done in rehearsal, and in the actors' training. So performance value seems to be less a matter of method or approach, but of participating in the process of life come into existence. This isn't so much about cuts or blue screens, but knowing when, where and how this sense of liveliness occurs.

Added 3/10
I was reading a book about production design today. A designer said you have to be cautious of making a set too perfect or it can detract from a sense of reality. I also remember reading something like that in Cinefex in which some vis effects supervisors complained that visual effects were often too perfect, taking away from the sense of reality. The example was the elephant squashing the car in Jumanji--the elephant steps too squarely in the middle of the car roof and that never happens in reality.