This is something I've been working through while developing a project in Unreal.
The world begins from a fairly strict rule: the geography needs to feel physically real. Roads have to lead somewhere. Buildings need a reason to be where they are. People work, travel, trade and defend the place. I want the audience to become comfortable enough with that physical reality that they understand the geography without consciously thinking about it.
The interesting problem comes when that geography eventually does something impossible.
My instinct is that the camera shouldn't suddenly start telling the audience they're watching fantasy. I don't necessarily want the dramatic lens change, strange camera angle, enormous musical cue or visual language that says, “Here comes the supernatural event.”
I'm leaning toward doing almost the opposite. Keep the established visual grammar. Keep the motivated lighting. Keep the camera physically believable. Let the impossible thing simply exist inside a frame the audience has already learned to trust.
I'm curious how other cinematographers would approach that.
Would you preserve the established visual grammar and let the contradiction do the work, or would you begin subtly changing composition, focal length, movement or lighting as reality starts to break?
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I’m not sure I understand the question. We might need to know more specifically what the scene is doing.
If there’s a story beat where characters notice and react to the impossible geography, then you make a meal out of it with the cinematography.
But if it’s just a normal sight for your characters, shoot plainly, matching your style from before.
The comp that comes to mind is Avatar, with its floating islands. Most characters take them for granted, but our lead character might see them as special. I would have to go back and see how they approached it visually.
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Thanks Mike Boas. That distinction actually gets right to the problem I’m working through.
In this case, the impossible geography is completely normal to the people who live there. There isn't really an audience-surrogate character arriving and telling us that something is extraordinary. If a road crosses terrain that shouldn't physically connect, or part of the landscape behaves in a way our physics says it cannot, the people using that road have used it their entire lives.
That’s why I’m leaning toward your second approach. Shoot it plainly. No visual announcement, no sudden change in lens language, no camera reaction telling the audience what to feel. Ideally they understand the geography first, trust it, and only gradually realise that something about it should be impossible.
Your Avatar comparison is useful because I think the difference for me is removing Jake from that equation. What happens if everybody in the scene treats the floating mountains as completely mundane?
That’s really the visual problem I’m trying to solve.
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I suppose it’s more like Star Wars then. The environments are rarely commented on, they just exist.
Lucas didn’t want to dwell on alien vistas. Even if we’re looking at a twin sunset for a while, it’s because Luke is feeling longing, not awe.
Christopher Hannon What kind of audience experience are you aiming for: wonder, awe, unease, disbelief, dread, or a sense that the impossible is completely normal? And what type of Fantasy?
Dwayne Williams, honestly, a mixture depending on the moment.
I want wonder and awe, but also that slight sense of unease when the audience sees something extraordinary and the characters barely react because, to them, it is completely normal.
That is a big part of the visual language I want for Echoes. Sometimes the impossible is just sitting in the background while people carry on with their lives.
As far as the type of fantasy, I would describe it as grounded historical fantasy. The starting point is: what if the people later remembered as the Norse gods actually existed as a civilization before they became mythology?
The fantasy is absolutely there. I just want the people inside that world to treat it like home.
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I'd keep the grammar too, and the same goes for color. If the grade suddenly turns cold or desaturated when reality breaks, it tells the audience "fantasy" before the story does. What works better in my experience is to hold the established palette and let the impossible thing obey the same light, then, if anything, drift a few points in contrast or temperature over the following scenes, so the audience feels something is off before they can name it. Arrival and Children of Men handle that beautifully.