Visual Effects. We used to have Special Effects, but now they are Visual Effects. I still think they should be called “special” because they truly are. Most people these days are hard pressed to differentiate between real and computer generated backgrounds, action, and sometimes even characters. Technology is at a point where one wonders just how much longer we’ll need petulant actors… or actual sets… or actual people generating all of it.
Someday a 15-year old executive at Fox will be able to type an idea for a series into a canned program, view the pilot, schedule it for airing, and cancel it. All in the span of a few days. Yes… something to look forward to.
But this is not about bashing Fox executives. No, this is about imagination. Specifically, the imagination of viewers. Sometime in the last 20, maybe 30 years, what we watched on the screen caught up, and then spectacularly blew right by, what most of us could imagine. Visual effects also encompass more than a writer can describe. Take the space battle between the Alliance and Reavers in Serenity. That scene is rich with much more detail, foreground action, background action, and scope than is possible to describe in words, or imagine on our own.
The impact to movie watching is nothing but good. A veritable bonanza of amazing visuals, rich in scope and detail, and every day more and more indistinguishable from reality. The Lord of the Rings trilogy broke new ground in bringing a book to life. Nearly every scene matched what I imagined the book described… only better. It fleshed out details I had conveniently ignored when reading the books. It was great. But if I read the book now, I’m visualizing the movie, the actors as characters, even details that are not in the book. Someone else has put their imagination in my head. Is this good or bad? I don’t know.
At first glance, one would probably say that it is a good thing. But I wonder if what we gained in the movies has resulted in a loss elsewhere. Do we use our imagination as much as we used to? Or do we just recall a movie scene in lieu of firing up our own ability to visualize with our mind’s eye?
Perhaps a simpler example is in order. There used to be a time when kids played war, or Cowboys and Indians. Plastic guns, rubber arrows, makeshift costumes all went into a mixing bowl along with a good dose of imagination. Convoluted stories, epic battles, impossibly able heroes deployed over a common makeshift theater of operation, the back yard.
Contrast that to the choice of available weapons in today’s typical computer game. Don your headset, and you and your friends are a team of elite troops storming a fortress, complete with realistic sounds, and target rich environments with adversaries who fall when you shoot them with your state of the art rifle, and who shoot back if you are too slow or miss. The game is near perfect… except it’s not your imagination, it’s someone else’s.
Games, like the movies, have outpaced what the average kid, or adult, can imagine. You don’t have to imagine being the tough sergeant, tough football player, agile basketball player, or steroid-laden baseball star. You flick a switch, and you slip on their personas… but you’re not only playing in someone else’s sandbox, you are at the same time limited to it.
The cost of that wondrous scenery, realistic effects, larger than life sensory input is that you are living a canned fantasy, and it’s not your own. Worse yet, it’s likely that trying to imagine something on your own will fall far short of what is available through your game box or PC screen.
I have not gone to see Cloverfield, but heard you don’t see the monster. I wonder if part of the idea was to give people’s imagination free reign, to let them go hog wild in their visualization prowess. If so, it sounds as if it fell far short of expectations. Is it the premise that is wrong, or is it we have lost even the desire to fire up our mind’s eye?
Lastly, I wonder if book reading is suffering because of the rich tapestry offered in visual mediums. Used to be reading a book on space travel was a lot better than watching a plastic toy on wires spewing smoke as it bobbled across the screen. Now the competition between the flickering image on the screen and your own mind’s eye is fierce. Sadly, I think the mind’s eye is fading fast.
Nice article but don’t forget that some kid did use his/her imagination, grew up to work for the special effects company and continued to use his/her imagination to create those special effects and virtual worlds that you speak of.
Definitely food for thought. And you have raised some genuine concerns. But I can happily report that I have seen a seven-year-old boy build his own gun out of cardboard boxes and duct tape. And I have seen complaints that a movie based on a popular book didn’t film the pictures that were in the writer’s mind after they read the the book. Well, okay, that was me complaining. But imagination won’t go away, I think, just because CGI is so good at it. Because doing it our own way, in our own heads, is too much fun. I hope I’m right.
Someday a 15-year old executive at Fox will be able to type an idea for a series into a canned program, view the pilot, schedule it for airing, and cancel it. All in the span of a few days. Yes . . . something to look forward to.
I thought they did that now.
tim
As a teacher, I see imaginations being wasted. I agree that kids don’t have independent new ideas, only those they copied from a book, a movie, or game. Another problem is the communication of the idea. Kids have imaginations but lack the skills of story telling. The books you site have beginnings, plot dimensions, problems and solutions, and endings. My students have problems writing a simple paragraph or story longer than one page.
I think movies have always usurped the imagination – I read The Shining and then saw the film – all I can remember is Kubricks’ genius. Same is true of Clarkes’ tour de force: 2001 a space odyssey.
Isn’t most imagination is derrivative anyway? – Not really original thought, but ideas based on text in a book, or elements of what we have seen or experienced. To that point I reference your last article about honoring physics on film: As long movies we are unbounded by natural laws there should be no shortage of raw material for young minds to assimilate and regurgitate in ever more spectacular and currently unimaginable forms.
The problem may come in the subjective definition of what is realistic – but then most folks know real life isn’t like the movies. Except maybe 2001 – there is something great about watching a sci-fi movie that might actually be possible. Is there a market for that kind of art now?
These are all very good point. Yes, there is a small group of people out there who use the same technology I refer to for their own creative outlet. They can, and have, produced works indistinguishable to those of big budget movies. And they do it in their basement.
I still think the number of people who harness today’s technology (and I don’t mean YouTube) comprise a small percentage of the general population. And yes, some of the younger users may even get inspired to pursue their own creative urges. But they will do no more than impress their vision, their imagination on countless others. Unlike writing, the details of the visual products available nowadays leave little to the viewer’s imagination.
The point is that in most movies these days the visuals are replacing the content of the story. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, where the effects were used to enhance the telling of the story, in many movies the effects themselves are the stars. Not the story, not the actors, but the visual bonanza is what people take away from the movie. Dare I say it? Effects don’t make people think. Perhaps that is why so many people like them.
Imagination is derivative, but my concern is that what we see and experience is more and more the complete package. There is no need, and likely no ability, to go beyond what you see. Again, I’ll repeat that I don’t know if this is good or not. I do think that pure visual stimulus, without corresponding engagement on a deeper level, is not a good thing in large quantities, and that is the way we are heading.
Speaking of visual effects, what software was used to create your picture with a suit on? Ha Ha, just kidding.
As far as your article, the older I get, the more it seems that I go to a movie to only see the visual effects. Many of the block busters of the last several years, fall short in visually telling the great story lines presented in the books the movies where created from. I know hollywood can not create 13 hour movies, but I find myself enjoying books-on-tape even more then the movies. With the large selection of great narrator’s, they can allow the listener to use their own imagination.
I believe you’re absolute right!