Representing reality

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Representing reality

• Contents and media

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What is reality?

• Materialist notions of reality
• A unique, external, physical universe
• Subjectivist notions of reality
• A purely imaginary concept projected from
  consciousness with either no physical referent or
  an unknowable one
• Interactivist notions of reality
• Posits reality as a collision between an only
  partially knowable physical external world and
  the mental constructs that give it meaning

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Ontology

• Our culture accepts a materialist vision of
  reality
• While we may not have a perfect notion of
  reality, it is based on mistakes we make in
  recognizing the true nature of reality
• Though human ability to understand/ perceive is
  limited,
• The Truth is Out There

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Representation

• Media provide words, icons, pictures, etc. that
  stand in for features of the real world
• The veracity or validity of the representations
  is judged according to their reflection of
  those real things they are supposed to represent

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Representation

• But what if the representation is itself what is
  real and there is no thing it represents?
• What if there is a physical thing but it has no
  meaning until it is represented, that is, worked
  on by consciousness so that it becomes something?
• Does reality become something different if our
  sense organs change?

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What reality does a media text represent?

• The real world as it is
• Real time, geography with unreal characters and
  events
• A plausible imaginary world and characters
• A fantasy world with plausible characters
• A fantasy world with fantastic characters
• Concepts that do not fit our notions of people
  and places

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Two concepts of realism

• The relative veracity of the story with regard to
  its representation of a materialist reality
• A set of conventions in the production of a text
  that influence the awareness of the audience
  member of the process of narrative construction

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Realism is not always seen as a good thing

• On occasion, the attempt is made to present the
  story as fantasy
• Want a sort of magical feeling
• Want the audience to experience the narrative as
  pure escape
• Could want the natural and mundane world to be
  seen as fantastic

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Media artists often go to great effort to make
their texts realistic

• Hire historians, cops, members of groups
• Continuity
• Pre-testing
• Special effects

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Features of the presentation that affect its
realism

• Continuity
• Technical quality
• Characteristics of the medium
• Modalities of perception Sound, video, motion,
  linguistic, etc.

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The Reelization of Reality

• The drive behind the need to create a strong
  perceptual reality, particularly in referentially
  unreal productions, is difficult to pin down.
  Charles and Mirella Affron discuss what they term
  the Reality Effecta notion of perceptual
  reality which asserts that sets must look real
  enough that people who have been to the actual
  location they replicate might think the films
  were shot on location.
• vast majority of feature films seek reality
  effect
• Speaking historically of several movies about
  New York, they suggest that in these films the
  narrative would have suffered drastically had
  the sets not seemed true to life.

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• Jurassic Park drew upon both visual references
  and plot elements the audience would be familiar
  with. The dinosaurs werent just the same size
  and color as the viewers might have expected from
  their childhood trips to museums, but had their
  computer-generated skin (designed after everyday
  lizards) carefully mapped to interact with their
  computer-generated muscles and bones. To breed
  further familiarity with the audiences
  experience with actual animals, the dinosaurs ran
  and moved in patterns carefully copied from
  real-life quadrupeds.

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• The visuals were not the only element to benefit
  from perceived reality cues Spielberg said, The
  credibility of the premisethat dinosaurs could
  come back to life through cloning of the DNA of
  fossil mosquitos trapped in amberis what allowed
  the movie to be made.

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Jim Cameron

• In T2 and Jurassic Park, computer animation was
  being used to solve a real-world photographic
  problem, and so the audience didnt question the
  reality of the images. Film is inherently kind of
  not real, and the films that succeed best are the
  ones that start by creating a world or characters
  or whatever that say this is real, this is real,
  this is real--and they keep coming at you every
  moment the actors are working, and every bit of
  production design is trying to underline in red
  that its real.

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Technology and realism
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• Virtual reality will prove to be a more
  compelling fantasy world than Nintendo--but even
  so, the real power of the Head-Mounted Display is
  that it can help you perceive the real world in
  ways that were previously impossible. To see the
  invisible, to travel at the speed of light, to
  shrink yourself into microscopic worlds, to
  relive experiences--these are the powers that the
  head-mounted display offers you. Though it sounds
  like science fiction today, tomorrow it will seem
  as commonplace as talking on the telephone.

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Are natural and real the same?

• The real in realistic presentation has as much
  to do with culturally learned expectations as
  with capture of true or natural action,
  objects, etc.
• Color, sound effects, etc. may need to be
  enhanced in order to generate a realistic
  representation
• Time is often distorted (compressed) to make it
  more compatible with audience expectations as
  well as to work with the story
• Actually, natural presentation (start the
  camera and walk away) often is experienced as
  less real than doctored
• It is often hard to hear dialogue, etc. because
  of ambient sound

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Realist presentations

• Representation is supposed to stand in for the
  actual events and objects
• The work of representation is hidden from view.
• That is, you should not be aware of all the
  technology, decision-making, etc. that went into
  telling the storyit should seem as though you
  are a fly on the wall actually watching real
  events unfold.

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• Judith Mayne points out that the cinema depends
  upon an unquestioned relationship between image
  and the real, as the novel depends upon a similar
  relationship between language and the real.

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Features of realist presentation

• Third-person narration
• Narrator/audience omniscience
• Camera work edited to be unobtrusive
• Actors, etc. never directly address audience
• Fourth wall
• Treatment of actions as displaying certaintyno
  discussion of likelihood, probability, etc.

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Halls dimensions of reality

• Alice Hall studied college students evaluations
  of the realism of media texts
• Focus groups
• Identified 6 means of evaluating the realism of
  media texts
• Plausibility
• Typicality
• Factuality
• Emotional involvement
• Narrative consistency
• Perceptual persuasiveness

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Beliefs about the impact of media realism

• Enhances audience involvement
• Emotional connection with characters
• Increases learning
• Increases enjoyment
• Increases effect
• Violence
• Attitude change