Imperfect Realism

I have a confession to make: I have never seen The Office before. It's one of those shows that, by the time I found out about it, it seemed like such a drag to sit through. It's like nine seasons long, and everyone says that the first season sucks, but so do the last two seasons so you have this narrow window of what you should watch and it's all just too complicated for my tiny brain to keep up with. But I'm not here to have a therapy session about The Office, I'm here to talk about how it revolutionized how we create realism in movies and TV: Intentional Imperfection.

The way The Office did this was by shooting it as if there was a legit camera crew there, filming people going throughout their day, without any retakes. Characters would look directly at the camera, the camera would punch zoom in, characters would occasionally go out of focus, you could see the camera shake as it tracked behind characters, the list goes on and on. All of this was done to create one thing, a false sense of reality. The directors of the show wanted the audience to feel as if they were watching people living their lives, rather than actors reciting a script.

Once The Office started this, it seemed like every movie tried to copy it. Transformers has shots where the robots fall out of frame as if someone is trying to manually track them, Zodiac puts large swaths of dead space in between characters talking as if they are thinking about what to say next, Spiderman: Homecoming recreates terrible school announcements with wooden acting and choppy graphics, etc. All of these work to create a sense of realism by introducing imperfections into their work. We know life isn't perfect, so by intentionally avoiding that perfect picture most movies create, the audience is almost fooled into believing what their watching is true.

To be fair, The Office didn't start this trend. While The Office did expand on it, we have been seeing this for six years prior to The Office with a specific genre: found footage horror movies.

These movies started in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project. If you were alive when The Blair Witch Project came out you probably remember thinking that it was real, and you're not alone. The directors tried so hard to make this movie seem like it was real footage, from posting online to convince people it was a true story, to putting text at the beginning of the movie claiming that they just found this camera in the woods with the footage on it.

They successfully convinced many people that this was a real documentary that they were putting out there. They shot the movie in a way that seemed like it was being recorded by a high schooler, with terrible mixing, wooden acting, and shots that weren't zoomed correctly, it all seemed imperfect, and totally real. They had successfully achieved total realism, something we had never seen before, and likely will never see again.