Shake-up caused by COVID can also be seen as a blessing, Cinema now has to evolve and move on
The American inventor, Charles ‘Boss’ Kettering, believed that a problem well stated is a problem half solved.
While it’s true that the entertainment industry is reeling under never-seen-before disruption following the pandemic where all movie-related activity came to a grinding halt, some have taken the idiom ‘the show must go on’ a little too seriously.
When the pandemic put the breaks on his war thriller V2: Escape from Hell, Russian-Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov completed his shoot from 1,200 km away.
Lead actor Pavel Priluchny was seated in a plane cockpit on a soundstage in St Petersburg, Russia, with four LED screens around him playing gamers online, and Bekmambetov directed the scene from a room in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan.
The shake-up caused by the coronavirus can also be seen as a blessing. From a creative point of view, the lockdown has compelled the industry to re-examine the way they functioned.
Most of them were forced to come up to speed with the kind of things the audience sought, ponder how traditional cinema-making and exhibiting could operate in the brave new world of OTT and direct-to-home entertainment.
This is also a period where the trade could benefit from reassessing its functioning and perhaps change the way it looked at things such as visual effects and animation. With the pandemic putting the kibosh on live shoots and big-scale productions, many believe that VFX could facilitate an era of ‘virtual production’.
In a roundabout way, cinemas across the world have, in fact, been gearing up for virtual filmmaking for decades.
Many would think the increasing numbers of superhero films in the last two decades have changed the technique of filmmaking but it was almost 40 years ago when this kind of ‘electronic-cinema’ was first seen.
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982-musical One From the Heart saw extensive use of pre-visualisation. The filmmaker used videotaped rehearsals of actors, cuts of his film, and Polaroid stills and artist sketches. This was also the first film to use video assist, the ability to see the scene on videotape instantly without waiting for the rush print to develop.
Most filmmakers tend to believe that the world revolves around their films, if not them. This is the reason why the film industry rarely welcomes any change.
In the months since Covid-19 spilt water over some of the movie industry’s best-laid plans, it seems to be coming around to make use of available technology.
The successful remote completion of projects has finally convinced the powers-that-be that the world has moved on. As a result, techniques such as pre-visualisation, VFX et al, shall become commonplace.
One of the things that stopped a full-embrace of visual effects beyond creating crowds or intricate action sequences was the lack of respectability attached to the notion of green screen filmmaking.
But that, too, has changed with the use of LED screens where actors would react to ‘real’ events around them.
The fact that this method could drastically reduce production costs might finally push the trade to become more realistic about budgets. It’s a matter of time before the ‘new normal’ becomes normal.
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