Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  Stereoscopic cinema works by creating simultaneous left-eye and right-eye (binocular) views, whereas conventional cinema offers a monocular (single-eyed) perspective.

  Stereoscopic movies today are digitally shot and digitally projected, and they are often visual effects-intensive, making them a purely digital medium. Scientific knowledge about stereoscopy and stereoscopic devices preceded the invention of photography, and continuing attempts throughout cinema history were made to create and project stereoscopic motion pictures. Celluloid film, though, was a flawed medium for this purpose and proved unable to create perfectly aligned and matching right-eye and left-eye views. Digital capture and digital projection largely solved these problems, which is why stereoscopy today has returned to feature filmmaking.

  How is the stereoscopic illusion created? Binocular images can be created either at the point of filming or in postproduction. If produced during filming, then two cameras are used to shoot the film in order to get separate right-eye and left-eye views. But two cameras are not necessary; a second view can be created digitally in post-production. The separation between our eyes— interocular distance (IO) —

  averages 65mm and, as a result, each eye receives a differently angled view of solid objects. This difference increases as we converge our eyes to view very close objects.

  Stereoscopic space in cinema is created by manipulating these variables—interocular distance corresponds with the distance between two camera lenses, and convergence corresponds with the size of the angles at which the cameras are pointed. IO settings determine how large or small an object appears to be in stereoscopic space.

  Convergence settings determine how near or far it seems relative to the viewer.

  Ideally, IO will replicate the average 65mm separation of the viewer’s eyes, but in practice filmmakers vary this setting depending on the screen action or the focal length of the lens used in a shot. IO settings on Avatar , for example, ranged from one-third-inch to slightly more than two inches. Wide-angle lenses may require a smaller IO setting because of the manner in which they scale perspective information. Objects close to the camera in a wide angle view will appear much larger, requiring less stereoscopic volume for effect and therefore a smaller IO setting.

  A camera move from an object in close-up to a wider view will be orchestrated with continuous changes in IO so that the viewer perceives a physically continuous space on screen and does not feel like s/he is growing larger or smaller in relation to that space. This is one of the paradoxes of interocular settings—their variation can induce a sensation in the viewer of growing larger or smaller in relation to the screen world. A camera move in Coraline (2009), an animated film with puppets as the characters, began with a puppet’s face in extreme close-up and pulled back to show a house and yard.

  The move was orchestrated with an IO change from 0.5mm to 18mm because spatial volume could be minimized in the extreme close-up and maximized for the wider view.

  The IO settings were smaller than 65mm, the distance between people’s eyes, because of the need to scale space according to the size of the puppets and the sets and models they inhabit. Coraline’s puppet eyes were 19mm apart. Using a human IO setting 319

  Visual Effects

  Filmmakers position

  objects in front of or

  behind the screen by

  adjusting negative

  and positive parallax.

  Crossed-eye images

  (negative parallax)

  require the viewer to

  converge her/his eyes

  in order to fuse the

  images into one, with

  the result that objects

  appear to be in front of

  the screen. Uncrossed

  viewing places objects

  behind the screen.

  Objects at the screen

  surface exhibit no bin-

  ocular disparity.

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  would produce the phenomenon of dwarfism in relation to the 1/6 scale puppets and sets. Dwarfism results in stereoscopic displays from excessive IO distances. It can make the observer feel hundreds of feet tall and make distant environments look abnormally small. The visual reality of Coraline ’s puppet world depended on making the viewer feel like an inhabitant there rather than like a giant looking at a miniature world. The smaller IO settings created an appropriately scaled space for this illusion.

  Convergence settings determine how close objects in stereoscopic space seem to be in relation to the viewer. They vary according to how much the left-eye and right-eye views are displaced from one another. A filmmaker can place an object or character in front of the screen (between screen and viewer) by adjusting convergence settings so that they have negative parallax —the left-eye image is on the right, and the right is on the left, requiring that viewers converge their eyes to fuse the images. Objects or characters behind the screen surface have positive parallax ; the right and left eye images are not crossed. The screen itself is a zero parallax area; no displacement of right- and left-eye images exists there. The two images are aligned. Filmmakers, therefore, can position objects in front of the screen or behind it by setting negative or positive parallax values.

  One of the biggest differences between the gimmicky use of 3D in earlier eras and today is the conservative use of parallax. Unlike the garish fly-out effects of the 1950s, excessive parallax is minimized or avoided today so that viewers will not be presented with discomforting image fusion tasks.

  In stereoscopic cinema, the screen itself can move around. Filmmakers can re-position its apparent location by using what is called a “floating window” to make TOY STORY 3 (PIXAR, 2010)

  Stereoscopic cinema is naturally biased toward deep focus compositions, maximizing positive and negative parallax. Stereoscopic cinema also emphasizes longer shot lengths, rather than fast cutting, so that viewers have time to visually explore the extended depths and spaces that the format supplies. In these ways, stereoscopic filmmaking reconfigures some of the stylistic features (principally, shallow focus and fast cutting) of contemporary film. Frame enlargement.

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  the screen surface seem nearer or farther from the viewer. This is often done in order to choreograph framing and depth of field to minimize the image fusion tasks that a viewer is presented with.

  Stereoscopic movies tend to require different compositional and editing styles from conventional cinema. Stereoscopy privileges depth of field, deep space framings, wide-angle lenses, and a slower cutting rate so that viewers have time to visually explore the stereoscopic frame and are not presented with fast changes of perspective that can be jarring in 3D. To design all of this, a new member of the production crew—the stereographer —consults with the director about the orchestration of binocular space. The stereographer creates a depth score , a kind of thematic pattern in the way that stereoscopic space is configured throughout the film in relation to the characters and their conflicts. For Bolt 3D (2008), stereographer Robert Neuman used negative parallax (placing characters in front of the screen) in order to heighten the viewer’s emotional connection and involvement with them. In Tron: Legacy (2011), the depth score distinguished between the film’s two narrative worlds—the everyday world of ordinary reality was shot in a monocular fashion, whereas the computer world of Tron was stereoscopic.

  Stereoscopy is sometimes dismissed as a fad or a gimmick, an intrusion onto

  cinema for purely commercial ends. And some viewers don’t like 3D movies. But the long history of stereoscopic devices and the continuing use of binocular display systems in cinema suggest that there is a natural connection between cinema and stereoscopy. In the hands of gifted filmmakers, such as James Cameron ( Avatar ), Steven Spielberg ( The Adventures of Tintin, 2011), and Werner Herzog ( Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010), stereoscopy reconfigures the nature of the medium and extends and enhances cinema’s artistic potential.

&
nbsp; NARRATIVE AND SPECTACLE

  Surveying early film history, scholar Tom Gunning suggested that one of cinema’s primary appeals for viewers was its ability to provide startling, eye-popping imagery.

  He emphasized that cinema’s ability to provide startling and pleasurable illusions often was more important than storytelling, that spectacle offered its own pleasures and that these could be greater than those of narrative. He identified trick films and visual effects as examples of what he called “the cinema of attractions.” By this term, he meant entertainments that were based around spectacle.

  Visual effects often are identified with spectacle, and many films, such as

  Transformers (2007), appeal to viewers based on eye-popping imagery. But visual effects perform many functions in cinema; while these include spectacle, often the functions are narrative ones. Visual effects may create settings and locations in a story, describe characters and visualize dramatic conflicts, and in general enable filmmakers to tell stories about places and situations that they cannot directly film but can create using effects tools.

  Most visual effects artists agree that story is critically important for the quality of a film and that good effects cannot save a badly told story. As effects artist Stan Winston said, “ Jurassic Park wasn’t successful because of the effects. Terminator wasn’t successful because of its effects. Lord of the Rings wasn’t successful because of its effects. They were all great stories.”

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  Visual Effects

  Cinema has never existed without visual effects. They are a core component of the medium, an essential part of cinema structure. And like so many other elements of cinema, what counts, finally, in determining the quality of a visual effect is the intelligence and skill of the filmmaker.

  KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS

  aerial image printing

  foreground miniature

  nodal tripod

  alpha channel

  front projection

  optical printer

  animatronic model

  interocular distance

  positive parallax

  binocular disparity

  (IO)

  rear-screen projection

  camera-mapping

  male matte

  rendering

  composite

  maquette

  Schufftan process

  convergence

  matte

  stereographer

  counter-matte

  miniature rear

  stereoscopic

  depth score

  projection

  cinema

  digital backlot

  monocular depth cues

  travelling matte

  digital composite

  multi-pass

  visual effect

  female matte

  compositing

  Z-axis

  forced perspective

  negative parallax

  Z-depth map

  SUGGESTED READINGS

  Ron Brinkman, The Art and Science of Digital Compositing , second edition (New York: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008).

  Linwood G. Dunn and George Turner, eds., The ASC Treasury of Visual Effects (Hollywood, CA: ASC Holding Company, 1983).

  Lenny Lipton, Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema: A Study in Depth (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co.. 1982).

  Shilo T. McClean, Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

  Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (New York: Wallflower Press, 2008).

  Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (Rutgers University Press, 2011).

  Richard Rickitt, Special Effects: The History and Technique (New York: Billboard Books, 2007).

  Michael Rubin, Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution (Gainesville, FL: Triad Publishing, 2006).

  Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002).

  Mark Cotta Vaz, Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996).

  Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007).

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  324

  Modes of Screen Reality

  OBJECTIVES

  After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

  ■ explain the basic modes of screen reality

  ■ explain how this double capacity for

  recording and transforming relates to the

  ■ describe the principles of narrative, character

  basic modes of screen reality

  behavior, and audiovisual design that operate

  in each mode of screen reality

  ■ explain the importance of production design

  for the mode of fantasy and the fantastic and

  ■ differentiate ordinary fictional realism,

  how fantasy settings achieve credibility

  historical realism, documentary realism, and

  fictional documentary realism

  ■ distinguish two modes of cinematic self-

  reflexivity

  ■ describe how the cinema functions as a

  medium that can record properties of the

  ■ explain why multiple modes of screen reality

  visual world before the camera as well as

  are possible in cinema

  transform the appearance of that world

  From Chapter 9 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.

  Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

  325

  Modes of Screen Reality

  This chapter examines how filmmakers use the elements of structure (lighting, editing, camera position, etc.) to create versions of representational reality on screen. Audiences routinely view a wide variety of films, ranging from comedies and Westerns to serious dramas, science fiction, and gangster films. The worlds represented on screen vary considerably among such films. Each possible screen world establishes its own validity, and a filmmaker must convince the audience that what they are seeing is plausible and is, taken on its own terms, real.

  The concept of screen reality pertains to the principles of time, space, character behavior, and audiovisual design that filmmakers systematically organize in a given film to create an ordered world on screen in which characters may act and in which a narrative may unfold. Obviously, different kinds of films create different representational realities on screen and relate in different ways to the actual social worlds inhabited by their flesh-and-blood spectators. A film’s screen world is a systematic, artistic transformation of the viewer’s personal and social frames of reference. This process of transformation is complex and multileveled. This chapter explains the basic modes or types of screen reality and why there are several different but equally acceptable modes.

  The cinema can configure physical, social, or psychological reality in many different ways or modes. Cinema persuades film viewers to believe in the validity of various uniquely constituted on-screen worlds. There are five fundamental modes of representational reality on screen: realism , expressionism , fantasy and the fantastic , cinematic self-reflexivity , and animation .

  (For the purposes of the discussion, each mode will be treated as an ideal type. In practice, however, a given film may draw on elements from several modes.) How do these modes operate and how are films constructed from within them?

  REALISM

  This is one of the most commonly encountered modes of screen reality, but one must be careful in discussing it. The term realism is probably the most overused and over-worked item in critical discussion and daily conversation about film. Realism is a slip-pery term, with meanings that can be difficult to pin down or with connotations that ill-fit the medium of cinema. Nevertheless, it is an essential term for de
scribing some of the attributes and functions of cinema, provided one is clear and cautious in using it.

  The difficulty that the cinema poses for the term realism is that the medium involves so much artifice. What these chapters have termed the transformational function of cinema is its ability to go well beyond the viewer’s visual and social experience, to create novel images that have no counterpart in life, and to do so using structural elements—wide-angle lenses, for example—that transform normal vision. On the other hand, though, the camera is a recording mechanism that produces images of the things that once were in front of its lens, and these images can correspond very closely to the viewer’s experience and sense of the world. Recording the things and events that were before the camera connects the cinema in a powerful way to the real world. The camera can take pictures of that world. Thus the realistic components of cinema are generally those that accord with the medium’s abilities to record and correspond with experience.

  Since these are very important attributes, one or more concepts of realism become essential to understanding the medium. Three broad types or categories of realism clearly exist in film: ordinary fictional realism , historical realism , and documentary realism .

  Ordinary Fictional Realism

  In this mode, the world on screen closely resembles the one that the viewer inhabits.

  Time and space operate much as they do in viewers’ ordinary lives. Characters belong to 326

  Modes of Screen Reality

  readily recognizable social worlds and communities (though these may differ from the viewer’s), and they do not have magical powers or behave in ways that are exotic, strange, or incomprehensible. In other words, films in this category seem to have an ordinary, everyday kind of realism. This mode characterizes a large number of films. Among them is A Beautiful Mind , the 2001 Academy Award winner for Best Picture. Russell Crowe portrays John Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose mind was clouded by schizophrenia.

  Three fundamental components of ordinary fictional realism operate in A Beautiful Mind , as in other films belonging to this mode.