The Virtual Space Theory

A TV commercial that aired recently is yet another good example of the irrelevance of the popular notion of trying to determine what’s real in pictorial images:

This commercial’s success in creating a buzz, apart from its considerable humor, wit, and boldness, comes from the fact that it also sparks a discussion among its viewers regarding the inevitable question “How did they do that?” or, more specifically, “Is it real?” As already discussed in two earlier posts, the answer will challenge our notion of what’s real once again.

Among the many events that are packed into this commercial, I would like to focus on its continuous transition between three locations: a bathroom, a boat deck, and a beach. According to The Virtual Space Theory, since we see all these places through a pictorial image, they are all virtual places in virtual space – regardless of whether they might have an equivalent in the physical world or not. Therefore, in such a context, one part of the question “Is it real?” is whether these virtual places truly reflect physical places in the physical world, or whether they were computer-generated. The other part of that question is whether the visual transition between such physical places indeed happened while the commercial was shot, or whether it was stitched together after filming.

The answer is that – apart from the transformation of objects in the actor’s hand – everything you see happened in front of the camera in one shot: this whole commercial was filmed in a single physical location. Its production crew built a section of a full-scale boat on a beach, along with a mock-up of a bathroom suspended from above by a crane, as well as a hidden mechanical system for sliding the actor onto the back of a horse. These were then all set in motion as the camera was rolling, and after three days of repeated shooting, they finally managed to get it all to work properly in one continuous sequence (you can check it out for yourself in an interview with the people who created it).

What this means, in popular terminology, is that “Yes, it’s all real!” And yet, there’s a catch. If we expand our notion of what’s real by just a bit, we realize that to seriously consider what we see in this commercial as being real is actually quite absurd. Even though the places we see in this commercial do exist in the physical world, the beach is the only one of them that is real. The bathroom has a physical existence, but it is not a real bathroom – it has a missing wall, and it is not part of any real house. The boat has a physical existence, but is not a real boat either – it is only half-built, and it can neither float nor sail.

The point is that what actually interests us in watching this commercial is not to see bathroom mock-ups hovering over half-boats, but to observe a virtual world where a man can seamlessly switch locations to match his mood and speech. Our curiosity may make us wonder how it was made in the physical world, but only because we were charmed by what we saw in virtual space. Therefore, in that sense, the only real bathroom, real boat, real beach, and real transition between them are the virtual bathroom, virtual boat, and virtual beach in virtual space – as seen in the virtual world of this TV commercial.

One of the most common techniques for producing a virtual place for the medium of film is to shoot the film in an already existing physical place. In cinematic terminology, this is called filming ‘on location’. If we follow The Virtual Space Theory’s principle of distinguishing phenomena from techniques, however, we will discover that knowing where the camera was rolling does not necessarily tell us much about the nature of the virtual place which was created as a result.

Let’s start with straightforward cases first. The music video for the song Style, which was mentioned in the previous post, was clearly filmed on location: One of its ways of conveying its rock-star style was indeed to film it in stylish places designed by contemporary star architects. Similarly, though with a completely different attitude, the film Der Himmel über Berlin (or in its English-language title, Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987) was also filmed on location in the city of Berlin, before the fall of the wall. As mentioned in the book, the story of this film may be fictional, but the virtual place of the city of Berlin as presented in it clearly reflects the physical city in which it was shot, as it was at that time.

In sharp contrast, another film which was shot in the city of Berlin is the film Æon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005). Even though this film ended up disappointing many fans of Peter Chung’s original animated TV series which inspired it, the result nevertheless remains an interesting one from a design point of view. The story it tells takes place in ‘the last city’ in a post-apocalyptic Earth several centuries in the future. For the creation of this virtual place the filmmakers chose to film it mostly on location in a series of specifically selected sites in the city of Berlin. Yet when shown together in the film, it resulted in the creation of a virtual place that is not Berlin at all.

Some examples of filming locations which can be seen in this film trailer are the House of World Cultures by Hugh Stubbins Jr., the Spandau Lake Bridge by Walter A. Noebel, and the Mexican Embassy by Teodoro Gonzaléz de Léon and Francisco Serrano Cacho. A list of filming locations is available here.

Another example of a film which was shot on location yet resulted in a virtual world that is very different from the physical places in which it was made is the film The Fall (Tarsem, 2006). This film revolves around a story which is told by a man to a little girl, and what is shown in the film is the mental vision which the girl generates out of her storyteller’s words.

To create this virtual world, the filmmaker carefully selected numerous beautiful places from 28 countries all over the globe as his filming locations, which were then filmed over the course of 4 years. A list of these filming locations is available here. And yet, the way these places are presented together creates a separate virtual world of its own which is clearly distinct from our world and any of the physical locations it was actually filmed in.