The bad monitor

I worked with a supervisor called Michael Owens on a string of Clint Eastwood films. He had been at ILM for years, going back to Return of the Jedi, and he brought a habit with him that I have kept ever since.

Whenever we were close to finishing a benchmark shot, he would ask to see it on the bad monitor.

At ILM they had a proper theatre for reviewing work. They also had a little old computer at the back, the one used to drive the projector. Michael's story was that many times on the way out of the theatre, when everyone agreed the shot was done and looked good, he would glance at that machine and something would jump out at him that still needed fixing.

So we found the oldest monitor in the building and set the brightness far too high. Sometimes it showed us something real. Mostly it was just good to be able to say, put it on the bad monitor. But the instinct underneath it is sound: the conditions you have carefully made perfect are also the conditions most likely to flatter your work.

The deeper problem is memory. There is a study out of Johns Hopkins showing that people cannot hold a specific colour in their heads. Looking at the world we can distinguish millions of hues, but asked to remember one and match it, we drift toward a generic version of it. We remember things as we expect them to be rather than how they really are.

That applies to everything the job asks you to recreate from memory. How big a crowd reads. How fast traffic moves. How a crumbling building falls. What motion blur looks like on this particular camera. You are not comparing your shot to reality, you are comparing it to your memory of reality, and your memory is quietly simplifying.

Which is why comparison has to be mechanical. Two windows side by side is not comparison, and neither is looking at a reference at someone else's desk and walking back to your own. Both of those are memory again. What works is an A/B in the same window at the same scale and the same colour, flipped back and forth until the difference announces itself. A wipe with the line moving across. Flipping the image horizontally to break the composition blindness you have built up over six hours. Setting a shot down for a few days. Borrowing someone else's eyes, ideally someone with no idea what they are supposed to be looking at.

None of this is about taste. It is about not trusting the one instrument you cannot calibrate.

If you want the whole method, breaking down and budgeting a film's VFX on your own, that is what the course covers.