{Perhaps after the artistic success of South Park, it might work to do a cartoon totally in the style of children.} Some of us progress beyond our childlike drawings to varying degrees of drawing ability yet still may find artistic value in childhood technique. Some artists are truly amazing creatures. Computer drawing software has allowed many people without hand drawing skills create imaginitive images with software instead of camel hair. Some contemporary artists use both. In all that time, none of our pictures moved, unless we first folded them into paper airplanes. Ancient cave paintings appear to be attempting to show animals running by multiplying their legs in a fan shape. I believe, then, that a moving picture seems all the more magical the more we are aware that we are tricking our brains into perceiving motion and flow of time.
Moving pictures happen in our visual cortext, not on the screen, nor in our persistence of vision in our retinas. The screen only presents a sequence of still images. Persistence of vision prevents us from seeing the flicker of dark between the images. It's the visual cortex that puts it all into motion for us sitting here centered in our prefontal lobes.
Movie magic is also the movie magic we talk about when we're talking special effects in the movies. It's perfectly fitting that one of the first genuinely creative use of early motion pictures was a professional French magicianGeorges Melies. Magicians use all sorts of contrivances to create some of their illusions, and so it's not surprising he saw in this new inventon, another kind of magic trick for his act. He had, in effect, invented the special effects department. One of my favorite Lumiere background stories is that he needed exact composition for his special effect shots, but there was no reflex viewing at that time, and only simple viewfinders. His solution was to tie strings from the camera to walls of the set, so the actors could tell when they were in frame. One more silent movie trick, I loved was Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr." where he blurred the line between the audience in front of the screen, and the action on the screen, by stepping from the stage into the moving picture on the screen. The trick was so well done, it's as if he's challenging you to figure out how he did it.Movie magic shares a magic traight of that part of the human brain involved in storytelling, like the Magic Theater of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf. When someone read us stories as children, we learned to accept that the familiar face and voice could represent other faces and other voices. The actor uses acting skills to impersonate another person, and a really fine actor can persade us that the character we're watching now is the real one, but the audience brings skills to the performance sometimes called the willing suspension of disbelief. That's an excessively fancy way of saying everyone plays the game of pretend, not just children.
Movie magic empowers us to slip inside another person's timeline of life, for a limited period of time. We can come away from that vicarious experience more insightful and more understanding of the diversity of humanity. In real life our point of view can only subjective, and what we think another persons point of view may be is conjecture. It's awesome to think about this on a crowded street,we are only vicarious with ourself, and we experience other peopleNormally, we only experience the timeline of other people, we know just walking a crowded street, everyone we pass was born some time ago, had all kinds of life experiences, and they currently have a reason to be passing by this very moment, on their way into the rest of their life.
Movie Magic is also the name of my favorite screenplay writing software.
No comments:
Post a Comment