The Environment Is Not a Background

There is a tendency in filmmaking to treat location as the place where the story happens.

We believe the environment is part of what happens.

A room changes the way people behave inside it. A landscape changes how vulnerable a person feels. Wind interferes with conversation. Darkness changes movement. Heat makes people impatient. Distance creates isolation. Architecture determines where someone can hide, where they can watch, and whether another person feels close or impossibly far away.

These things are not production details added after the story has been written.

They are storytelling.

At Open Eye Films, we think of environment as another character. It has behavior. It has limitations. It can comfort someone, threaten them, expose them or completely overwhelm them.

That is one reason we believe natural and practical environments should be used over special effects whenever they create a more believable emotional reality.

The goal is not realism for realism’s sake.

The goal is for an audience to believe that the people on screen actually inhabit their world.

And when the environment feels alive, something interesting happens.

The actors stop performing against a background.

They begin responding to a place.

And the audience begins experiencing it with them.