Dusting Off the Magic Kit

People like to buy into the  unknown and the promise of what could be.  How else can you explain Enron, Bernie Madoff, or the Segway launch?   How else can you explain the popularity of Lost, or the entire career of J.J. Abrams? (And I don’t mean that in a bad way Mr. Abrams.  Can I call you J.J.?)  Non-destructive tricks can be good.  Creative tricks that preserve the mystery of the world can be even better.

The truth is, we want magic in our lives. Witness this recent article in the New York Times.

The writer laments the ruination modern media players bring with their pause/rewind features, inviting frame-by-frame dissections, spoiling fond childhood remembrances of shows such “I Dream of Jeannie”.  Yes, Jeannie’s’ magic really was limited to a bunch of crude jump cuts and hokey sound effects.  Not exactly a new revelation.  Though, I can totally understand why a newspaper writer would be looking for some magic right about now.

The article does, inadvertently, lead to another interesting question.  Will today’s generation someday cry over the disillusionment that comes upon learning the blue thingies in Avatar were just CG?  Not likely.  Kids today!  They expect computer-generated wizardry.  Little surprises them, for they already live in a virtual world. Most could give you a pretty clear explanation of how the blue alien is really a mix of motion capture, wireframe and surface modeling. They saw it on YouTube!

Alas, one can no longer expose magic, for the simple reason that it did not seem like magic to begin with.  There are no true tricks to reveal as chicanery, just a mutually shared set of CG expectations with the only points of distinction being the different levels of artistry, money invested and rendering power.  The visual liberation of digital wizardry is quickly turning into the tyranny of the common place.  If everything is virtually stunning, then everything is also virtually questionable.  The magic dies by advent of its own ubiquitous application.

I write this not to lambaste great CG work.  My purpose is simply to offer a little cross-grain posit:  What if we brought back more of the old magic?  Imagine, just for a second, relying less on our graphics artists to simulate magic, and more on our own wits to occasionally deliver illusions where they hit home:  the physical world!

Of course, a good deal of attention-getting work is already going on in this area.  Think of the number of articles you’ve seen questioning whether a great light-painting commercial was actually done entirely in-camera.  Or, consider the host of recent spots picturing some sort of Rube-Goldberg device, with the marketer proudly touting the physicality of it all. Indeed, the Honda “Cog” campaign still impresses, as do all its latter-day imitators.  The Sprint light-painting piece still amazes, as do all its illuminated brethren. The point is, these types of campaigns caught everyone’s attention because they were not CG. We’ve reached a defining moment where the new is old, and vice versa. Campaigns that embrace physicality surprise us.  They produce the unexpected and, in doing so, can sometimes reside closer to magic than anything existing within the wide-open frontier of a render farm (git along little pixels!).

This said, it must be acknowledged that not everyone has Honda-sized budgets. Few of us can afford a brilliant team of artists to burn time and dollars meticulously staging large-scale real world effects. How fortunate for us, then, that the best magic actually happens on a small scale. It could just be a small slight of hand, nothing fancier than using a forced-perspective optical trick to play with a viewer’s sense of perception.  Or, it could be something more akin to the magic caught on a theater stage.  Yes, we see the set pieces moving – in some cases, we even see the stagehands doing the moving – but how wondrous and captivating still, as we see things transforming right before our eyes. The real magic is in asking the audience to join along in a shared dream. It’s an illusion we eagerly buy into. As proof of point, I might suggest revisiting the Google Chrome campaign, which, in concept, is all about revealed magic.

I can’t let this go without stating for the record: I love good CG!  I love it in the way I would love any motivated, properly conceived effect. If it propels a story and conveys the mysticism inherent in creative media, then it’s an awesome thing in my book. It’s just that I don’t see enough out there that truly puzzles and surprises within the digital realm. I see much that is a manifestation of graphics talent, but too little that is a manifestation of those areas where dream take hold. My hope is that we creative types reintroduce ourselves to the physical world in order to more fully realize what’s possible in the digital arena. By marrying the two with more forethought and planning, I believe there are many new looks to be discovered and, more importantly, more magic to be captured.

And, I also think the Segway is cool. There, I said it!

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