Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
You Fail Film School Forever
|
Television may have an excuse for putting on all those unrealistic Medical Shows and unrealistic Police Shows and unrealistic Lawyer Shows and unrealistic Western shows. After all, Television writers don't have any first-hand experience at being Doctors or Cops or Lawyers or Cowboys. But what's the alibi when Television puts on an unrealistic Comedy about Television ?
A situation that would normally be chalked up to Did Not Do The Research, but can't really be put in that category because movie shooting is being inaccurately portrayed... by people who are in the process of shooting a movie or making some other form of visual entertainment! Scenes are shot in a single take, often in sequence, with the camera kept at a great distance where it couldn't possibly be getting the right angles or close-ups to make the scene convincing, and they never do a retake. This is especially annoying in action scenes, although it can often follow the Rule Of Cool.
This can be a result of the belief that Viewers Are Morons, or they can just be simplifying everything for the sake of brevity. To be fair this can often be one of the Acceptable Breaks From Reality, since the entire process of filmmaking is rarely the point.
There can often be some overlap with Magical Security Cam and You Just Ruined The Shot.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- When Renge decides to make a movie out of the titular Ouran High School Host Club (with a Hollywood camera crew handy), the intended Throw It In scene with Tamaki fighting young Yakuza thugs couldn't have been filmed from the position the camera was in (not to mention it wasn't there when the fight started).
- Street Fighter II V.
Film
- The film Bolt uses this, with the dog convinced that the show is real. This is handwaved by saying that they wanted the dog to think the girl was actually in mortal danger, so they'd get a better performance. Still, method acting didn't come close to justifying the absurd expenses and dangers incurred by the type of shooting they were apparently attempting.
- Bowfinger is all about this. It even has a shoestring guerilla film crew shooting around an actor who doesn't know he's their star.
- With a crew made of illegal Mexican immigrants. And a cult in the mix.
- Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
- Subverted in Ed Wood, as he does do all those "simple mistakes".
- Johnny Cage's introduction scene in Mortal Kombat.
- Ironically the ending of snuff film Snuff, which was actually supposed to look like a real film shoot, looked nothing like a real film shoot.
- Charlies Angels has Matt Leblanc's character acting in a movie - the inaccurate portrayal, in this example, was a device to show that it wasn't reality. This is similar to the Mortal Kombat example above.
- The first scene of Austin Powers in Goldmember, which has an action scene filmed in one shot for a Movie Within A Movie of Steven Spielberg's Austin Powers.
- Completely overturned trope in Living In Oblivion, an independent film about an independent film, which exposed every possible technical and artistic complication that can happen on a movie set, up to the cameraman and director arguing and playing politics over how the a scene was to be shot.
- It's not entirely clear if the opening of Tropic Thunder is intended to be this, or if it's intended to be a Movie Within A Movie that then cut to the actors. The camera is never seen, so it might not be intended as a single take.
- The Stunt Man
- The Truman Show is pretty good when it comes to the visual footage — the show does have the wonky camera angles, lack of/awkward use of camera movement, inappropriately close or far-away shots, etc, that you'd expect from a live show captured with hidden cameras. What is more problematic is the sound. All the dialogue is very clean and clear, as though caught on a high-end unidirectional mic from a couple of feet away, including a scene on a beach (beaches being notoriously awful places to record sound even under ideal conditions, usually requiring some degree of ADR for dialogue to even be comprehensible). At one point it's suggested that certain passers-by are concealing little shotgun mics on their person, but it's a Hand Wave at best.
Live Action TV
- The deservedly forgotten ITV sitcom Finest Half Hour was set in a TV station but bore no resemblance to a real one. Wasn't funny either.
- The Fall Guy
- Subverted by Extras, as the director of "When the Whistle Blows" is deliberately shown to be totally incompetent.
Newspaper Comics
- In The Amazing Spider-Man, MJ was to star in an action flick. One scene involved a brawl in an elevator. Only the two actors were anywhere near the elevator. Apparently there were no microphones, no lines, no choreography, and two unmanned or remote-controlled cameras. Small wonder that it went horribly wrong.
Video Games
- The Movies. This game is about running a studio and making movies. However, you have to shoot all the scenes in order—which can mean that your cast and crew will shoot a scene on one set, then run to another set for the next scene, then back to the first one if that's where the next scene takes place. And if another movie is shooting on the set, they have to wait instead of shooting another part of the movie. And scenes are shot in a single take.
- In Stuntman and Stuntman: Ignition, long car-chase scenes are shot are shot in sequence, with very little props - even when the scene involves a helicopter chasing a sports car through San Francisco, shooting just about every single thing with missles. But hey, otherwise, it wouldn't be cool.
Web Animation
- The Homestar Runner short "The Next Epi-Snowed"
 does this with cartoons. Apparently the animation is being made concurrently with the voice recordings, because Crack Stuntman's recording-booth improvisation was able to wildly change the events of the Cheat Commandos episode. Of course, the in-universe Fourth Wall has never been very strong in Homestar Runner.
Western Animation
- An episode of Tom and Jerry Kids did this.
- An episode of the Powerpuff Girls did this, although the movie was actually part of a scam to rob the bank.
- An episode of The Flintstones not only did this, but had a director filming Fred and Barney, with no apparent script, who didn't even know they were in a movie, while they were being chased around and hit by boulders.
- Parodied by The Simpsons (like everything else). The climax of Radioactive Man: The Movie cost a million dollars to shoot, was only shot in one take, and used real acid (which no protective eyewear could ever hope to stop).
- Partially justified: They were filming an action scene that destroyed the set. They would not have the time to rebuild the set or the budget to film a second take and the scene had a signifgicant risk of injury to the actors. This happens much more often than you would like to think in filmmaking. Typicaly it is dialoge scenes with heavy acting that have multiple takes. The real problem with this scene is that it could have been filmed more safely and cheaply with special effects.
- Subverted earlier in the episode though, when Milhouse has to spend over twelve hours saying "Jiminy jillickers!" in order to get a shot right.
- Used justifiably in Home Movies because the filmmakers are kids who don't know how the process actually works, and only have a home video camera to work with. In one episode, when it suggested that he should be shooting a different scene, Brendan replies, "Yeah, well we don't really have any editing equipment, so we kinda have to shoot in sequence."
|
|
