Belated responses: Atheism (except not) and Continuity Errors

[jetpack_monkey_ljarchive]

qkellie asked me to discuss my atheism on Christmas. I did start to write the post, but I stopped. I really had nothing to say. Today, I'm going to lay out, briefly, what I believe.

Technically, my belief system is probably more agnostic, but my operating reality -- the way I prefer to view the universe on a day-to-day basis -- does not include a central omniscient creator/deity. I acknowledge that there could be one, but act as if there is not. I believe that no religions is correct about what is going on, because religions tend to start from the premise that everything can be explained right now and then build from there. I think that everything can be quantified and tested, but there's a lot we just don't know and aren't equipped to know yet. I believe that what we think of as the supernatural is simply nature we haven't explained yet (but I'll wait for science to be able to come to conclusions after rigorous testing). I believe there's more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

I also have a naturally superstitious disposition and tend to ascribe exaggerated meaning and patterns to personal life events. I'm constantly fighting that impulse. Human psychology is terrible.

cesperanza had a doozy: "I'm really wondering, if as a film person yourself, you've been noticing the really terrible continuity editing in the blockbusters of late. To me it's as annoying - and as obvious, and sadly now happens almost as often - as typos in the running scroll boards at the bottom of news programs, or people saying the "T" in often when they shouldn't. I am guessing that it is because the film is so expensive to shoot that if its too long, they just hack it out scenes, or if they don't have the shots they need, they just assume we won't notice. But I feel shocked and appalled by the sloppiness of mainstream film of the most expensive kind! Am I crazy?"

Right around the time you asked this, I was reading Robert Rodriguez's excellent book, Rebel Without a Crew, which is his journal of the making of El Mariachi. He has a bit that stuck in my mind:

"We only had one problem at Azul's. Since it was so hot, he kept taking his leather vest off between shots. In one sequence he forgot to put it back on. I hope it's not too noticeable. Azul asked if we should reshoot the scene and he'd put the vest back on. I told him it wasn't worth wasting film on something like that and that if people noticed it, that means they're probably bored and we've lost the battle so we might as well keep going."

Now, that's in reference to an ultra-low-budget film where film was at a premium, but I think the basic philosophy is sound -- if your audience is sitting there picking nits, you probably didn't have them.

The larger the picture, the more balls are in the air, the more people are involved, the more minute details need to get tracked. If you sit through the end credits of films (I always do, out of respect for the technicians who put a lot of time into being utterly invisible), you know that they're getting longer and longer.

With that said, there are some errors -- like misspellings in incidental graphics -- that are ridiculously easy to catch and correct and they make me mad.

I want to go off on a bit of a tangent and say I wish that people made more mistakes sometimes. Not silly careless mistakes, but happy accidents. Set dresser Frank Silva's reflection gets caught in a mirror while filming the Twin Peaks pilot and suddenly you have BOB. Patrick Fugit asks Kate Hudson to feed him his cue again while the camera is still rolling and Almost Famous gets the adorable "Ask me again" character moment for William Miller. There's a film -- the name of which is escaping me at the moment -- where, at a key moment, the entire picture dissolves to white. Artistic brilliance? No. There was a crack in the film casing. It was left in.

These days, though, everything is digital and it's easy to be a perfectionist. Anything you don't like can be fixed in post. Did the boom mike get into shot? Erased. Want the picture to pop a bit more? Throw in that ubiquitous orange-teal filter! You can be lazier while making the film because there's ways to take care of your errors later. I get that there are benefits and efficiencies to digital filmmaking, but it's a tool and should be deployed where appropriate. Some movies are still better on film, with all of the mistakes that can occur.

DW Post: http://jetpack-monkey.dreamwidth.org/490106.html ( comments). Comment at either location.

Comments

[lizbetann]

The dissolve to white... Was that Last Temptation of Christ?

[qkellie.livejournal.com]

While I'm probably a little more on the agnostic side of things and believe vague spiritual feelings and whatnot, I basically agree with you on the religious stuff, especially the idea that the supernatural is just what we haven't gotten an explanation for yet. I just wish we could get more science funding to actually answer some of the lingering questions about the universe. :)