Invisible Worlds

A thing happened at work today that made me think.

I'm pretty lucky in that sometimes my job involves hanging around on film sets with some interesting people for six or eight weeks at the start of a project that I'll end up working on for one or two years. It's my job to add the visual effects after the main shoot ends. Right now I'm working with one of the Directors people think of as a visionary, and perhaps one of the most creative minds in the business. You've all seen his films. I can't say who he is, but they're usually fairly unusual, fairly dark pictures.

Anyway, for this project we've put together some relatively new technology that tracks what the film camera is doing and can add a computer generated environment and characters in real-time. Usually you don't get to see this until long after the shoot, and by then its too late to change anything, (it helps if you know where the castle's supposed to be behind the actor who's out there standing in an empty stage in front of a green screen). It's pretty cool. The weird thing is, he doesn't want to look at it.

He sits in front of two flat-screen monitors, one with the empty green background and the other with an entire virtual world. He only ever looks at the green one. He says he finds the rest 'too distracting'. The trouble is, if he only looked, he might decide to put the camera in a whole different place so you could actually see that castle... he might get the real actor to look at where the computer generated characters are instead of somewhere too high/low/back/forward of them.... hey, he might even shoot a shot wide enough to see them in the first place!

So here's the philosophical part. This virtual world we're making isn't real, but does it affect this Director's movie? You bet! If he took notice of it, would it change some of his decisions? Absolutely! It could make his movie better, cheaper and more believable, but to him it just isn't REAL.

But it's there.

I think the same thing goes for 99 percent of us. We only see the world that's right in front of us. If we hear there might be something else, something more than that, its easier to dismiss it than to change our way of thinking to incorporate it; even if one day its going to bite us in the ass! Just like our Director, we only have a certain amount of time in a day so we tend to spend it on things that are familiar - our job, paying the bills, taking care of the kids. Beyond that, nothing much matters. Then one day we retire. The kids leave home. Our pension/401k is all the money we'll ever have. At that point, our life is effectively... over.

So let the Director carry on looking at his green monitor. At the very least, I'm going to walk away with the lesson that even though I spent another day at work - that's not all there is.