5/12/2014

Seattle Cinerama, UFOTOG and the Fourth Wall

The Seattle Cinerama is wrapping up their annual Sci-fi Film Festival today and I’ve been very happy to attend several screenings, including Gattaca, the Matrix, 2001, Brainstorm, UFOTOG, and tonight I’ll be seeing Akira for the first time on the big screen. I would have seen a bunch of other movies (The Thing, Logan’s Run, Dark City, etc.) but alas, my wife wasn’t up for it and I didn’t want to spend the money.

2001 was, as usual, amazing to see in 70mm on the huge Cinerama screen. There’s nothing like it, and that’s all I can say or I’ll be here all day. One of the greatest films ever.

Brainstorm was actually one of my favorite movies as a child, or at least one of the most influential. It blew my mind right open. It’s actually not the greatest movie, but the ideas it showcases and the questions it asks represent realities we will likely be experiencing in the next couple decades.

Douglas Trumbull was there for Q&A sessions for each of those movies, and I got to ask a couple questions of him, mainly dealing with VR. Since Doug is clearly someone interested in developing truly immersive experiences, products like the Oculus Rift would probably be on his radar. They are, and he’s keen, although I didn’t get the impression that he’s actively involved in developing anything.

I have long had the dream of being able to watch movies from a VR headset that would simply allow me to turn my head and look around the scene. That would be the full extent of the interactivity—no reaching out your arms to hold something, no turning around when you get bored with the movie and walking around the world until you find one you’re interested in. Nope, just IMAX on your face.

Of course, the rest of VR will move towards a holodeck-type experience (and there are plenty of merits to that) but I like movies. In twenty years, when I can step into a holodeck, I think I’ll still want to watch movies just by virtue of their nature. There’s something very, very special about how they force you to see things the way they want you too.

He screened UFOTOG, a new short film / tech demo / advertisement for a new process he’s developed that involves shooting and projecting at 4k and at 120 fps in 3d. Frankly, I don’t know what’s so special about it, given that they used off the shelf Canon C500 cameras. You can’t “own” a framerate choice, so I’m scratching my head a bit on why they’re trying to patent and market their process as something unique. The 120 fps looks a lot cleaner than the 48 fps Hobbit movies, but to me the look of the film is anything but what I associate with a “cinematic” look. I doubt it’ll go anywhere, but it could be good for theme park rides or something. The short film itself—story, acting, and all that—was pretty embarrassing, but I tried to keep my face straight because apparently the crew was in the audience.

I do think that there are some pretty valid practical reasons for a higher frame rate, but they’re mainly for effects work (because there’s no motion blur and therefore it’s easier to cleanly separate elements). It just looks too real to me. I don’t want movies to look like real life for the same basic reason that I don’t want paintings to look like photographs.

In the intro to the film, Doug Trumbull mentioned that the entire film was going to be breaking the fourth wall in an attempt to create more immersion. Oh no, the cardinal sin of dramatic filmmaking. Ironically, even though you might think that watching a movie in the first-person, with characters addressing you, etc. would be the ultimate in immersion (“wow, I’m really in the movie!”), it actually has the totally opposite effect of taking you out of the experience.

Is it because there’s no character development for the characters we become when the fourth wall is broken? You ask yourself, what is my character? What’s my backstory? If I’m playing “me” in this story, nothing makes sense, because regular-old-boring-“me” has nothing to do with what’s going on in the movie. You know you’re not that guy, so if you’re suddenly in the movie, who are you? We’re either rejecting the casting of ourselves or need some fleshing out of our own character in the context of the story. I think that describes perhaps the one exception to the rule, exemplified in films like Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void”—a great film all in first-person which has loads of character development, so the audience doesn’t have to “play themselves”.

But I think there’s a much bigger reason—movies are about a surrender of self.

I think that watching film is a surrender more than in any other medium. It is almost a way of temporarily simulating ego death, allowing you to live for a couple hours at a time through the experiences and emotions of other people and things. The film does pass through the filter of your own mind, but when it’s at it’s best, you forget that you’re watching a movie and you emotionally react as if it is real.

Watching a film is an inherently non-interactive experience, and that is part of what makes it so special. It is not a video game—you cannot in any way whatsoever control what is happening on the screen. Sure, you may interpret, but you’re never going to answer a characters question in your own words or turn left when a character turns right. It is a surrender of self.

When we watch movies we are watching in the third person, but we inhabit the characters in the first person, and to the exclusion of our own selves. We feel what characters feel (but not necessarily through their eyes, per se). Film allows us to safely feel emotions in a way totally different from our self-conscious, mentally locked-in everyday life. We can empathize with anyone in a way almost impossible in real life, because we’re distantly removed from the actual consequences of actions and are therefore out of danger. We’re watching a simulation played out in front of our eyes as observers, and like vampires we leech off the emotions of the players on the screen.

We participate in movies by feeling, not by acting. That basic limitation allows us to experience a complete transformation in how we normally approach life for a couple of hours at a time (when it works, lot’s of movies don’t really do this very well).

The reason why breaking the fourth wall is like the cardinal sin of movie making is that it prompts interactivity. If someone addresses you from the screen, you want to respond. When you can’t, it reminds you that no, you aren’t really Luke Skywalker or Neo or whomever (luckily Star Wars and the Matrix didn’t play around with this), you’re actually just a shlub in the theater and have been all along. It forces you to face the fact that no, this experience is not an interactive one, and therefore it is not real.

When you’re in a movie theater, you’re a cripple. You cannot act, you can only feel. When a movie breaks the fourth wall and prompts active participation, it is like tossing a football to a quadriplegic and inviting them to play a game. It’s not going to work.

Our dreams are interactive. Video games are interactive. Reading a book is interactive. But movies are not. The entire exercise is based around the audience surrendering their notions of self to the filmmakers, which allows them to vicariously experience other lives. By prompting normal interaction, you force the audience to be self-conscious and remember the weaknesses they’d forgotten about.

So yeah, unless your experience is fully interactive, or you at least have a lot of character development that actually tricks you into feeling like someone else (a la Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void”), breaking the fourth wall is the exact opposite of immersion. Frankly, I would have thought that Doug Trumbull would have understood that. But oh well! Here’s hoping that this little film is a precursor to something that knows what to do with the tech.