Frank Miller's Christmas Spirit

I want to see Frank Miller's The Spirit so badly. This tells you what I find interesting about films. Much of the time it's not the pleasure of watching but the curiosity of seeing how thought and process affect the final result. I want to test my conjecture that the film's problems stem from its virtual shooting approach.

This semester I discovered that it's difficult for students to create simple animated virtual shot sequences. For instance, let's imagine you start wide then cut closer then cut to something else. Shooting that sequence in the real world is pretty straightforward. But creating it in After Effects means building everything from scratch. It's a lot harder because you have to control the background size and movement, among other things. I think it's a lot easier to do this sort of thing when you have actual shooting experience first. Without this experience you're practically flying blind.

When Zack Snyder and Robert Rodriguez directed their Frank Miller stories, they were doing something very difficult, perhaps analogous to writing a good sonnet or song lyric. In these cases, meaning is expressed within a highly circumscribed structure. The storyboard is not the reality, but the form of the film. It's like an actor hitting marks. Good performers make it seem natural. But I suspect that in The Spirit, Miller mistook the storyboards for the reality. Without a reservoir of shooting and editing experience, he made the freshman mistake of shooting his boards.

Storyboards only work when they are grounded in actual shooting experience and even then, they only inform the process of shooting. At their best, they prepare the director to more clearly see the moment of shooting. That's why I'm not too big on using storyboards in class at first. I've seen it over and over—students shoot what they had storyboarded but it always comes out wrong because they are trying to impose a template on reality that blinds them to what's there. Storyboards invoke past shooting experience. They do not create it.

The Spirit seems to be an interesting experiment in the development of virtual filmmaking. What often happens in these films is that the actors' performances become backgrounded, upstaged by the production design (e.g., Keanoshow). Or the work takes on a lifeless, puppeteered quality (e.g., Sky Captain). The Spirit, on the other hand, seems to bypass cinema altogether. It doesn't even seem to be animation, but (even more so than Dave McKean's work), storyboards in motion. I can't wait to see it.