I’m watching an episode of The X Files. Muldur has gone to one of the remoter corners of the
Arctic (they never explained how he got there – nor even verified the fact that
the Arctic has corners) and he comes across a
huge submarine with the conning tower eerily silhouetted against a patch of
brightness.
Patch of brightness? Wherefore comes this patch of
brightness? Why, from a light set up behind it, of course. Any photographer knows
that. Backlighting is a common technique. In the studio you use a light; in
outdoor photography you use the sun.
But this isn’t a studio; it’s the bitterly cold Arctic, as evidenced by the thick pack ice in which the
submarine is encased. And everywhere else is pitch dark, so we can reasonably
assume that there’s no sun to warm the cockles of an FBI agent’s heart. So
where did the backlight come from?
This is the point at which suspension of disbelief becomes
difficult. The whole plot is suddenly fractured by the incontrovertible
evidence that we’re actually on a movie set. They routinely do the same thing
with scenes set in woods at night, and I wish they wouldn’t. If you need a
scene to be backlit, at least find a convincing reason for it to be there.
No comments:
Post a Comment