SPECIAL CASES
Real people. You can use actors in industrial ¤lms, but I don’t like it. I think it is much more convincing to use real people in real situations, slightly guiding their behavior in front of the camera. This approach is also usually more practical. Engineers know how to use tools, surgeons know how to use scalpels, and so on. If you put an actor in a complex job, he or she stands out like a sore thumb. If I am shooting a ¤lm in a factory and need certain types, I try to get the manager to let me know who is the most suitable, the most intelligent, and I pick up my “actors” then and there. They are usually terri¤c and very cooperative. But apart from very simple direction, it is your job to learn from them and not vice versa. For me, this means two things. First, I don’t ask the actors to do anything they normally wouldn’t do. Second, I rarely script casual dialogue. I give the actors the situation and try to ¤nd out from them how they would handle it and what they would say. I let them understand the point I want to make, but I leave it to them to put it over in their own way. Animation and special effects. Animation, graphic or computer, is a marvelous tool for industrial ¤lms. Often you have a mass of information that you can’t put across by ¤lming in a factory or elsewhere, or a concept that is dif¤cult to illustrate using a physical object. For example, if you want to compare two types of growth over time, animation can be a tremendous boon in making your point simply but effectively. Again, video special effects, if not overused, can make all the difference to an industrial or public relations ¤lm. For example, they are very good at contrasting preparations and results. Let’s say you are doing a ¤lm on agricultural and ®ower research. You know you have to show the scenes in the labs, people looking at microscopes and so on, and you know it looks pretty dull. But if you show that lab scene on one side of the screen while the other side shows a scene shot from a helicopter of dozens of ¤elds of bright ®owers, the ¤lm is transformed. This is the simplest of video techniques; there are, of course, dozens of others. The important point is this: If you are doing video, you have at your disposal dozens of effects that would be too costly to do in ¤lm, but that can transform the look of your picture. Humor. Humor is one of the principal tools of the public relations and industrial ¤lm, particularly in England. There, the makers of industrial ¤lms constantly use John Cleese, who played the befuddled British lawyer in A Fish Called Wanda, to write and star in their movies. One common approach is the nitwit who gets into an awkward situation because
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