The
Academy Award (tm) for visual effects is not given for the film that
has the splashiest visual effects, or the most innovative, or the
most expensive, or even the one with the most visual effects in some
quantitative sense. According to the rules of the game, the film that
wins this prestigious award and confers on its recipients a
competitive lustre, is the film where the visual effects best serves
the film.
Sadly
it is not the film with the most computer generated robots beating
the heck out of other computer generated robots, but rather that film
where the robots who are beating the heck out of each other appear to
be doing so in a way that contributes to the film's higher purpose.
Of
course no award process is perfect and compromises need to be made.
One of those compromises is that only films that make use of visual
effects are considered for the award in visual effects. Who knew?
This is a logical limitation that can have the most unfortunate
effect, so to speak, depending on how dreadful the year's visual
effects films are. Another issue that must be faced is that the
side-by-screening of the different films in competition must
necessarily restrict that screening to an edited compilation of the
visual effects for each film. Whether that “effects reel” is 10
minutes long, or 12 minutes, or 15 it is by definition an abbreviated
version of the larger creative project.
Trust
me, when seeing these effects reels back to back, even 10 minutes per
film can seem like forever.
It
happens though that an effects reel for a creative project may not
actually communicate the real value of those effects in context.
This is why it is often the case that the selected films (those films
that go past the bakeoff and are actually nominated for an award) may
seem to go to those films with the largest budget, or the greatest
number of giant robots exploding, or even, heaven forbid, the films
that generated the most money at the box office.
So, years ago I attended the bakeoff and one of the films in competition
was Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010). Although it was nice to see a
film that did not depend on explosions or giant robots per se to
communicate its higher vision, I was bored with it. Many of my
friends thought it was very original, but I didnt. To me it seemed
nothing more than a rip off of the classic genre of the 1 or 2 person
fighter games from the world of coinop video games.
What
the VFX reel did not communicate, and which I only discovered later,
was that this film was actually a pretty good low budget film with
visual effects. It wasnt totally successful, it fell apart near the
end but the first 2/3rds or so of the film is actually very, very
funny. The premise is that a very young man, maybe 23 or so, falls
in love with a woman who has moved to Toronto from NYC to escape her
previous life. But if our hero wants to date her, he must first
defeat in battle her evil former lovers.
It
is also a good example of regional filmmaking, being based in Toronto
as Toronto, not as Toronto as a film location trying to be some other
city.
So
if you get a chance to see this film, or the first 2/3rds or so, and
if you appreciate regional, low-budget filmmaking, this is a pretty
entertaining example.
And
I never would have guessed this from just seeing its VFX reel out of
context.
No comments:
Post a Comment