So if you're building a 100 million dollar skyscraper downtown, you would never take some blueprints and a couple of watercolour paintings, hire 200 people, and start digging.
Would you?
And yet, with film, we regularly start production with a script, some sketches and paintings, maybe a 2D storyreel and then mobilize hundreds of people to start making the film.
In architecture, the idea of the architect wandering around through a building site changing his mind about where the stairwell should go or redefining the shape of a wing or realizing that the foundation structure needs reworking would be abhorrent, preposterous-- an enormous waste of time, materials, and work.
In designing the building, of course everything has been carefully planned... They've done detailed plans, built scale models, previsualized every aspect of the site in the computer. Tested it from a structural standpoint, a technical standpoint, looked at each facet of the practical, aesthetic, and experiential components of the space. Those models have been carefully shaped, analyzed, refined and then broken down and used as a template for budgeting, planning, buying materials, and communicating every part of the vision to the artists and craftspeople tasked with making the building. Construction becomes performance.
Narrative filmmaking is every bit as complex and structural in nature. For a narrative film to really sing, to fully succeed in expressing its intent to the audience, an enormous number of pieces have to come together just so-- it is a magnificent and daunting undertaking. And yet the idea of investing in extensive planning seems to still be relatively uncommon.
Why is that?
Previsualization and virtual production provide a space for incubation, cultivation, and creative exploration. It's the equivalent of exploring your building in the computer, dimensionalizing the blueprint of the script or storyboards into an expression that correlates strongly to the final medium. Examining the story structurally, visually, editorially, cinematically-- working in context, roughly, loosely, to determine the best form. That's integrated preproduction-- what we like to call "prerealization". Imagine it, then make it real. Production becomes performance.
[Example image by tomkeep: architectural previsualization of the St Regis Hotel]
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