The haircut problem & unplayable effects

If vfx are performances, then perhaps they should be directed like performances. Rather than result-directing fx, you'd treat the fx person more like an actor. The idea wouldn't be to get the fx creator to do what you want (result directing). You'd get them to make something that works. A totally different goal. I realize that I've been thinking about this since college. It's the haircut problem. Do you tell the stylist exactly what you want (a little off the sides, not too much off the top) or do you leave it up to the stylist? The best approach is to find someone good and let them do what they want. It all comes down to casting which is something producers and fx supervisors often do take into account.

Next is considering what is an playable vs. unplayable effect. Certain things were just never meant to be seen on screen. That's the conclusion I came to with the bird effect in Noise film. For whatever reason, the scene was unplayable so I changed it. In acting, a good example of an unplayable scene is anything with an emerging split personality. You can play it for comedy. Steven Martin was great in All of Me and as was Jim Carey in The Mask. But for drama? It can't be done. It's the scene that made acting road kill of Glen Close in Maxie and Halle Berry in Catwoman. It's a testament to Alfred Molina's skill that the split personality scene at the end of Spiderman 2 doesn't stand out as being ridiculous.

There's a difference between uncinematic and anticinematic. A third act exposition is uncinematic. You have someone talking for a long time (again, Sleepy Hollow is my favorite example) or in my case, you just find a way to rationalize putting text up on screen that reveals the plot. The exposition needs to be done so you just try to make it as painless as possible.

But certain images are anticinematic. They just shouldn't be put on film. Like the switcheroo in The da Vinci code that I complained about in an earlier post. There's just no way to make that work. That scene looked like bad TV because that's what bad TV is. It's filled with unplayable, anticinematic scenes that could only exist in a writer's imagination. An example of an unplayable effect that was in fact, never played, occurred in a Smooth Crimina-era Michael Jackson music video. If I remember correctly, the story goes that Jackson wanted Rick Baker to do a robot transformation that started with metal coming out of Jackson's pores. Baker told him not to do it saying, "it looks ugly and I don't think Michael Jackson should look ugly."