Simplicity and Magic in Filmmaking
By Michael Goi, ASC, ISC
I’ve always been fascinated with magic. From the time I helped form the Magic Club in high school to my first experiments in doing stop motion animation with my Regular 8 film camera, I was obsessed with how to make the audience believe what I was showing them. For my feature film, Megan Is Missing, that meant using the audience’s expectation of what looked “real” as a way of getting them to be emotionally involved in the story. On American Horror Story, it meant pushing the envelope in cinematic extremities to the point that, even if the audience knew what they were watching couldn’t possibly be real, we were so committed to the vision that it took on its own reality.
The Magic of Belief
The fact that an audience wants to believe what they are seeing is the foundation of magic and filmmaking. We exploit that desire to believe as directors, cinematographers, and editors. But it requires being an artist who is first willing to think beyond what you yourself see and believe. If you cannot think beyond what your eyes are telling you is real, how can you transport your viewer to the Mars in your mind?
Technology vs. Simplicity
Technology in this industry is constantly on a quest to make the images we see more real and lifelike. But is that what we really want? Consider that the films of Ray Harryhausen like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts still have the power to unleash the imagination of viewers in an age of ultra-high definition visual effects. It’s not the technology that makes things real. It’s the imagination.
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