Cheaters Anonymous

In Poseidon, wave size accuracy is optional.

I've been thinking about cheating in film because I just reread the Cinefx article on Poseidon. The article states that they cheated the wave size depending on the shot: sometimes it's 500 feet tall, sometimes just 200 feet.

There's a long tradition of cheating in film and Ben and I seem predisposed to cheat from the start. When the slightest shooting problem arises, the first thing that comes to our mind is to cheat. Let's move the lighting fixture higher. Let's change the angle slightly. Let's move you over here even though before, you were over there. Let's shoot this on a different location: no one will know. Cheating works because film by its nature fragments reality. In interpreting the world for the camera, locations are destabilized for expressive purposes. Further, filmic spatial ambiguity is such that without signposts, it's often difficult to tell where you are.

Interestingly, however, I found out that for our project, the footage looks better the less we cheat. In the church shoot, I consciously avoided cheating anything. And the scene cuts much more smoothly than the others. It's interesting to me that rather than learning how to cheat, we started cheating and are now trying to reign it in.