Filmmaking: Constructing the Illusion of Reality
When looking online for tips and advice on filmmaking, there’s a lot information on how to get cinematic quality. There’s list of equipment, types of shots and how to achieve them, acting tips, lighting for beginners and so on. Very rarely though do we find anything on the subject which is at the heart of filmmaking.
When we were shooting our sci-fi web series Kosmos, there was a scene where a character jumps off the roof of a building. This involved careful thought when it came to thinking about how to achieve the illusion of this, on our very tight budget. We had a roof, we had an actress, but how to make it look like she jumped off without any risk of the actress coming to any harm?
We couldn’t throw a dummy human because the street below wasn’t closed off. Anyway, it always looks fake when arms and legs waft about in the wind on the way down. I think when someone conscious falls from a building, they’re still in control of their…
And that’s another thing about filmmaking. When you’re creating the illusion of violence or injury, we filmmakers enter a strange macabre thought process. We have to get into the minds of people inflicting or suffering pain, for example. And how does it look in reality?
Often, this involves a dark humour amongst cast and crew. Perhaps to cover the unsettling feelings we have about such subjects.
The Illusion of Death
So this was how we created that scene…
For the shot of the actress standing on the edge of the roof, we shot her from a small (like 1 meter) wall with the camera looking up. We also shot from the street looking up at about the same angle, with nobody standing on the roof. Later, I composited the 2 – placing the actress on the edge looking down.
We couldn’t have the actress actually standing on the edge, it was too dangerous. So I took the actresses boots and placed them on my hands. I then leaned over the rail and controlled the boots edging forwards, while we shot a close up of them.
At the point where she jumps, we had a head and shoulders shot of the actress. She turns and jumps down a small step (ou of shot), ducking herself down at the same time. So she vanishes from the shot quickly, as if she just jumped off the building.
Then we have the actor playing the scene with her rush to the edge and look down into the street. Another problem was a rail which went around the roof and would ruin the illusion. So in one wide shot I had to paint out the rail using After Effects.
Once this is all cut together, you hope it creates the illusion of the action. One thing which is really important – if you do this well enough, the audience will create the illusion in their minds. Humans are very imaginative. So when watching films, our minds fill in the gaps.
Less is More
For me, this is one of the problems with the current dominance of CGI in movies. Everything now gets shown so our minds have less to do. And now matter how great you are as a CGI artist, you will never beat the human imagination when it comes to inventing reality.
Anyway, here’s that scene:
Thing is, we never actually see her on the edge of the roof. We only see her boots. But the human mind puts 2 and 2 together. What is far more important is that we care whether she makes the jump.
As a watcher, once you invest in the character that’s when your mind starts to go to work. Then, the audience multiplies the power of your effects by 100 in their own minds.
We recently watched a movie on Netflix with Jake Gyllenhaal called Velvet Buzzsaw. In the movie, various pretentious art folk get snuffed, one by one, Destinations style. The deaths were pretty effective in terms of realism and very little was left to my imagination.
But the real problem was the people were so unlikable that I didn’t care if they died or not. And if you don’t invest emotionally, as a watcher you become a rational-minded critic, analysing every effect. And no movie in the world will stand up to such cold-hearted scrutiny.
It’s all about the edit
While we try to assemble a set of shots which will collectively create a feeling of reality, it’s the editing process where it all comes together. And this includes the effective use of sound.
In the movie Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) starring Steve Martin, scenes from old film noirs are edited into scenes shot decades later. Those old shots are reinvented and reinterpreted by the power of editing to create entirely new scenes, for comical effect.
But apart from the humour, this film brilliantly illustrates how movies are actually made. This scene below has Steve Martin with Alan Ladd (who died in 1964), from a movie called This Gun for Hire (1942).
To create the illusion, a stand-in wearing the same overcoat is placed into shot – but we only see an out of focus arm, for example. Steve Martin walks through a door created to perfectly match the one in the original film. New shots are carefully choreographed to match shots from the original film so when they’re edited together you don’t notice.
Sound Design
Even the crunching of cookies, while funny, also serves to help glue the different parts of the illusion together. The sound and the activity connects the two actors together in our minds. As watchers, we feel like they’re eating cookies together and with the sound of crunching overlapping the shot, it binds them together.
All these things build an illusion that everything is taking place in the same room at the same time. If it’s done well, anything missing will be invented in the audience’s mind. As watchers, we fill in the gaps.
Once you are emotionally involved in a scene, that scene is elevated in your mind beyond mere practical effects. But ultimately, the illusion of reality is achieved in layers throughout the filmmaking process, from script to edit software.
For this reason, it’s important to ask yourself from the very beginning: what kind of reality do I want to create?
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