Effective movies do smoke and mirrors to make you think it is Luke Skywalker aboard an Imperial vessel telling Princess Leah he is there to save her, when in actuality, it is actor Mark Hamill talking to a piece of masking tape on a piece of plywood paint flat black.
If done effectively, we interpret it as taking place on an Imperial vessel instead of a Hollywood set.
That small kernel of truth enables all that follows.
If the set was poorly done, people would think it was in a set in Hollywood.
Yes, that’s right.
Anyone who is involved in photography knows that much of what we see is a perspective that can change just from looking at anything from a different angle or distance.
My husband had the pleasure of working with some videographers to piece together something for clients to help them understand how a warehouse distribution center works, with racking, conveyors, and machines that read labels.
One thing they did was to show the robotics that a company can use to help with retrieving orders. In real life, it was a robot on a platform on wheels. It was nonfunctional but eventually can be programmed to do this particular job (or something else if the client needs). It was cheaper and faster to use one that wasn’t programmed yet. So it was placed on a little platform on wheels, attached to rope that someone else on the ground pulled to make it move. The people moving the robot weren’t in the frame, so no one watching the edited version had any idea that it was a non-functional robot. It looked real.
The 5 minute video did a great job of showing prospective customers what their warehouses could look like. The facility shown was also only in drawings, but they looked so real, that you couldn’t tell it in those clips.
Only when you saw the unedited version of the different scenes would you have any idea, just like you said with Luke Skywalker. All the extraneous stuff is edited out and scenes are sewn together.