Today I spent a good part of the afternoon in Everquest 2 on the Isle of Mara taking multiple screenshots of the scenery to use as a header for the character portfolio page I’m creating for this website. I wanted to capture the sky at just the right time, so I had to wait through at least one cycle of the night and part of the day, and took screenshots throughout those cycles.
I was reminded of the time I watched the extras on the DVD of Hero, one of my favorite movies. The director, Zhang Yimou, wanted to create a lasting impressions with audiences even if they forget everything that happened in the actual story. He created an emotional blend of color, sound, and mood, and wanted this blending to be perfect.
One example is in a blue water scene that took place in an obscure part of China. Zhang would only agree to shoot when the water was perfectly still, and it was only still within a window of two hours each day, between 10am and noon. Crews had to start setting up in preparation before 5am. It took 20 days to film this scene.
Another example is even more astounding. Zhang had a camera crew stationed at an oak field in Mongolia so that they could monitor the leaves changing color. When the leaves turned a precise shade of yellow, he raced everyone to that location so that they could gather and sort through all of the leaves. The leaves were blown past the cameras in front of the actors, and then they were gathered up once again, resorted, and individually cleaned so that they could be used in the next pass. Since the leaves only kept for three days, they had a very mininal timeframe to complete this scene.
Zhang thought that even if the audience forgot the story, they would remember two ladies in red in a sea of golden leaves.
While I wasn’t in the process of making an epic film like Hero, I could have easily just snapped a couple of screenshots and just used what I had at the time I entered the game, just like Zhang could have used whatever was in the oak forest at the time. The leaves were probably still beautiful just like Mara in Everquest 2 is still charming at any time of day.
But that perfectly still water and the perfectly golden leaves created a much more profound effect than just whatever was just good enough that day. It made the difference between what was just good and what was spectacular.
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