Typically, a documentary has its major amount of work in searching and investigating, long before cameras are set to work. Depending largely on the character that the project has in its authors’ mind, whether more visual and artistically evocative, such as filming wilderness and nature in general, or a more factual disclosure, such a piece of investigation on industrial world or on its entanglements with political and financial interests.
Showing a chosen piece of reality to an audience always entails a work of documentation. It is the basis onto which the whole project can stand on its own in terms of credibility, ability to illustrate, ability to make people understand an aspect of our real world.
Less known is usually the amount of work for search and documentation in technical and/or scientific terms for purely fictional works. If considering documentaries, such work is, or should be, unavoidable. But for fictional films, even on historic themes, most people think that background search on scientific terms (including historic scientific terms) is somehow a minor aspect. There are quite some examples around that are the results of this conception (or “misconception”, if you will follow these lines further) according to which, we must assume, only nosy specialists and nerdy scientists will ever notice the mistake, the poor rendition, or even the utter nonsense, in a film.
As a scientific advisor I’m talking against my own interest, but let’ face it: a scientifically inaccurate film can still sell, and sell a lot, and even become a blockbuster.
Examples? There are many around, films where a technicality has been lightheartedly forgotten, a detail simply overlooked, usually because no attention has been paid, or just because, as Ed Wood would put it (at least what Johnny Depp would have him say in that marvellous rendition by Tim Burton in 1994), people will never notice it, they’ll just enjoy the bigger picture..
You have an X-Wing rocketing through the airless spaces in Star Wars after that the cockpit gets closed with the tightness (even the feel) of a candy box. You have the ever persisting gravity in any space ship no matter how far from any planet. Sounds, even echoes! reaching through the darkness of airless space . You have people wandering in the space around their module and suddenly …they’re falling. You have a young dynamic Leonardo Da Vinci professing himself atheist and skilfully dismissing any supernatural cause of death by devilish possession by pulling, straight out of the future, scientific names of a pathogen (Clavyceps purpurea) about a century before the disease Ergotism was described and two centuries before Karl Von Linné came to his idea of taxonomic bi-nominal nomenclatures. Add another century before C. purpurea is associated to Ergotism and another couple of centuries or so before the fungus and its role in the disease are recognised and you have a pretty darn perspicacious Leonardo, able to get his science from reading into the future nonetheless.
There are many other examples, but as you will concede for these ones above, it is in fact the main big wider picture that has to get the audience trapped in its emotional journey. Still any perceivable inaccuracy will inevitably break the magic.
Once the mistake is uncovered, it becomes a negative example on how things should NOT be done, regardless of how lasting the reputation of the production can be and how enduring the love from the audience will be. Also, if you don’t come up with a blockbuster, scientific nonsense will only make your work more prone to criticism, to say the least.
Setting things right on the science side will also help your work become a reference point for future ones, whether from you or from other authors.
TERRÆ INCOGNITÆ 