CQ: Director, direct the audience!

Still waiting on Dan before continuing work on our film. On a side note, I checked out Photoshop CS3/After Effects CS3. What Adobe calls the perspective grid is actually a form of photogrammetry which could prove very useful for our project. You can take a photo, input perspective information then you can do some simple camera moves on the now 2.5D photo in After Effects. Very nice for exteriors.

Tonight I watched the beginning of Roman Coppola's CQ, which is about the making of a Barbarella-esque go go spy film. I watched the first 20 minutes or so and it seemed like it was going to be one of those indy-vibed, pining from afar, work-simulates-life-simulates-work things. So I just stopped watching it. I realized that a director has to control an audience's expectations. Coppola set me up so I believed I knew exactly where the film was going and how it was going to end. So there was nothing to do but turn it off. Whether I was right or wrong is immaterial. The point is I really thought I knew where it was going.

This contrasts with Zhang Yimou's Hero. One of the things I love about the film is the way that Yimou sets you up to believe that the film is going in one direction. Then he takes it in a totally different direction. Once he does that, he's got me. I'll sit through the whole thing because he proved that he's my master.