Serendipity vs. Intellectualizing

Listening to an interesting podcast from American Cinematographer and heard something that struck me. It was about the difference between having to intellectualize the entire movie ahead of time when working in animation/computer graphics on the one hand and on the other being able to capture spontaneous moments and serendipitous events when recording live footage and actors, even after many takes. About the only thing left in animation where you can do that is voice recording.

Machinima, at least in some cases, can give you some of that back (depending on engine, and puppeteered vs. scripted recording). Not much, but a tiny bit.

I was also fascinated to find out that Kubrick would do many, many takes in order to find that magic moment, that perfect take that could then be dropped into the movie during editing whereas Werner Herzog is like "if it's not done in 5 or 6 takes, then there's something wrong" and he would jump into the situation and mix things up in order to get it right.