(Above: in a battle of control, beauty triumphs over meaningi)
When Mona said that the green printing press set looked theatrical, it got me thinking. Theatrical is not necessarily bad, but it made me wonder what makes a set look "authentic." This is important because in this age of hyper-possibilities, we need to know what makes an image look fresh and alive.
A lot of those all green-screen movies (Sky Captain & the World of Tomoorrow, Mirror Mask, Episode II) have a deadness to them. Everything is just too perfect, perfectly scrubbed and lit. The battle scene in Episode II, for example, looks like an illustration. It doesn't seem warlike, but fantastic and pretty. It's as if having the ability to control every aspect of a composition's arrangement, lighting and color makes artists want to overwork the image, draining the life out.
A recent issue of Cinefx described this problem:
CINEFEX: All of this tweaking--is there a danger of making a shot too perfect, of losing the "soul" of the shot, as Rob mentioned earlier?
ROBERT SKOTAK: I think so. There's an impulse to scrub the dirt out of the shots, to buff and polish them, to perfect nature through the computer. But to make our shots feel more real and gutsy, we have to learn to live with the sloppiness of nature. I'm a fan of the ugly matte shot. Not an unacceptable Matte shot, but a shot that is just ordinary, that doesn't call attention to itself. Or--something Jim Cameron has done in the past is to look for the not-perfeclty framed shot, catching an action that, because it happens so fast, you don't quite capture ideally. There was a nice thing in Signs--the camera comes through a window at a birthday party, and this creature kind of strides by and you don't quite see it. It's a haunting shot.
CINEFEX: We used to hear the expression "happy accident" all the time; but in CG, there are no happy accidents because everything can be so perfectly controlled.
ROBERT SKOTAK: And that's what makes it look wrong. A prime example is the shot of the elephant stepping on the car in Jumanji. In was technically brilliant, very well done. But to me, there was something not quite right about it--and it applies to this idea of perfecting nature in CG. In the real world with real rampaging, out of control animals, that elephant wouldn't step on that car so perfectly. It might just step on the trunk and the car mighit pop up and block the view of the elephant. A part of the car would fly off toward the cameraman, and so he'd duck and the camera would suddenly move to the side....
Production design has become increasingly interesting to me since it's a discipline that has learned to overcome this tendency. Good production design/set dressing is the art of creating artistically believable environments that seem life-like and natural. I'm pretty sure the solution is not to make images look more random. Noise is not the answer, nor is faking naturalistic cliches like handheld camera work, shaking cameras and dirty lenses. (Stealth is a relentless example of this. Note, above, the aerial refueling scene when droplets of gas spill on to the virtual camera lens!) The answer, I think, lies in understanding praxis. What makes something look alive is the way it discloses our engagement with the world--not the technological pleasure of manipulating pixels.
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