Shard Cinema by Evan Calder Williams

Author:Evan Calder Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Shard Cinema
ISBN: 9781910924822
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

2. Surface Tension

To gain some sense of the way that space is constructed in shard cinema, we may as well start with its smallest units, those ever-present particles. As suggested earlier, the most explicit motivation behind them is to counter the flatness of the images. In the making of Dredd, Jon Thum (the visual supervisor of Prime Focus World) noted that, “[w]hen we first shot that sequence [of a massive shootout in the apartment complex] it looked flat and unimpressive. But that’s when the visual effects kick in, when you add those tracer fires and the dust and the debris, and you add it on top of everything, suddenly it looks incredibly dangerous.”21 What’s crucial in his comments is this tension between the attempt to produce a sense of danger – which requires making the depicted space feel inhabited, lethal, navigable, and deep – and the technique used to achieve that, which is to simply add heaps of chaff “on top of everything.”

This is hardly unique to Dredd. Throughout these productions, the superficial overlay of ridleys/floaties/particles is there to restore a sensation of continual and perspectival depth that has been cancelled out in the process of compositing (given that it isolates single elements to join into a shared frame). This is especially true for films in 3D, like Dredd or The Martian, where “practical” bits of fluff and dust were mixed with those generated in a computer, adding layer after layer to extend from the lens on out, “trying to maintain that perception of depth all the way to [the] background” (in the words of VFX supervisor Richard Stammers).22 And it’s all the more crucial for films not shot stereoscopically but converted after the fact,23 like Edge of Tomorrow.24 In trying to generate a sense of depth for that film, the “particle team” of Prime Focus worked “to generate extra dirt hits, missiles, and spray – not just for the extreme foreground but to fill up some of the mid-ground space also, to make it more interesting in 3D.”25

However, the unique issues confronting 3D and 3D-conversion only amplify a general tendency. Consider the original use of those “ridleys” in their namesake Scott’s early-to-mid-’80s films. Richard Isanove, describing his work with Jae Lee on The Gunslinger Born, speaks of trying to bring that effect into his comics and notes that “If you look at Blade Runner or Legend, Ridley Scott has particles, smoke, and dust constantly floating in the air, which allows him to literally film the atmosphere.”26 Here Isanove detects something vital about how the particles work in Scott’s films, and in film more generally prior to shard cinema. They articulate an urge towards a certain density, carried out by what moving images can uniquely enact: to make the air itself visible by means of what wafts through it across time, letting the screen transmit the sensation of wind to the skin of the watcher, like the waving grass in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Something different is at stake in the shard moments of the past fifteen years when the ridleys go fully wild.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.