My kids got to watch Elf for the first time tonight (since there’s no Thanksgiving in Australia—U.S. or Canadian—we started celebrating Christmas right after Halloween…). I’ve loved that movie ever since it came out, and it’s been a staple of my wife’s and my Christmas-movie watching every year. But every year I’m also reminded on […]

Occasionally, it is the job of special effects artists in film and television to manipulate reality in order to present an image that audiences believe they would see, as opposed to what they would actually see in real life. This concept and practice incorporates not only the mathematics and engineering of special and visual effects, but the psychology of what people expect to be reality as well as the art of filmmaking. Together, these fields create images that make a story more believable, even though it is now actually further from reality than before. However, this procedure leads us to question whether it is right to continue to propagate incorrect expectations in audiences’ minds, as opposed to the reality of what actually exists. Which is correct: the accurate presentation of reality, or what the human mind expects to be reality? In due course, the two may be resolved in a fashion appropriate to the nature of visual effects for entertainment.