Take a Look

A 1-post collection

Please look behind the curtain

Further to yesterday's rant musings, I thought I might encourage you to take your entertainment at more than face value.

Like Dorothy and Toto, take a look at the man behind the curtain.

By which I mean, spend some time watching Making of documentaries. Or even some instructional How to videos. Or ask your nearest artistic hero (if you can) what their process is.

I know, it might bore you to tears. You can be brave for just one day.

I have MeMum to thank for my own addiction to peeking behind the curtain. She'd heard about a lot of kids my age tying red cloths to their necks and leaping off of tall objects in the belief that they could fly exactly like Superman. So she showed me exactly how they made Superman look like he was flying.

It might have shaped my life.

It certainly shaped how I meet my heroes. Instead of gushing or dribbling all over SPG in Tucson [as I feared] we wound up talking shop about makeup and props1.

I can recognise that the people who play a fictional entity are different from their roles. That they're humans just like me [though with a much better skill set, lol] who have things to do and places to be and do not need a little weirdo like me following them around like a brand new duckling.

And for the record, Tucson was a very strange experience for me. I'm used to the conventions where the people you come to see are kept separate from the general goings on. Having heroes just wandering about like everyone else was... something shy of miraculous. I often walked right past them without noticing because my jackdaw eyes had spotted something shiny. Or possibly because I didn't expect SPG to just be wandering around like everyone else.

But I digress. Rather heavily.

Entertainment in general is getting increasingly fake. I often argue that reality television is neither reality nor television. Even documentaries, an old source of learning when I was a child, are edited for the best shots. They even film "nature" scenes in sets to guarantee that they capture the desired behaviour.

Everything that comes to us through a screen is faked. It's edited, or there are several takes, or something else is done... Even "real footage" on the news is edited for maximum impact. It's strawberry fields forever, out there.

And -hey- if you learn a bit about how things are put together, you can spot potential frauds with greater ease. It could turn you into a cynical nerd, but that might be a long exposure thing.

But I can definitely guarantee you'll appreciate the work involved in that minute of animation or that half-hour show all the more.

  1. David seemed to want gushing. He kept asking me things like what I thought of the concert or how I got into the fandom. I can only hope that my ravings were entertaining.