It’s Just a Movie

I’m a big movie fan. I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a movie geek but I try to keep up to date with movie news and reviews and I probably watch more movies than the average person. When I meet people that aren’t as interested in movies as me, it can be a bit of a shock until I remember it is what I do for a living. They probably care more about accountancy, teaching, computer code or whatever it is they do for a profession than I do.

It’s not that they don’t keep up with all the latest releases that bothers me the most, but that a lot of people don’t care as much about the movie watching experience as I do. They are happy to watch a highly compressed download on a laptop with crumby speakers rather than going to the cinema to watch it on a big screen with full surround sound. They don’t notice that the aspect ratio on their TV is set wrongly. And they are happy to talk through a movie without paying attention to the dialogue.

I’m not going to tell these people that they are wrong to watch a movie however they want (unless it’s in a cinema and they are disturbing others). It’s up to them and I do have a few movies which I have watched over and over, that I will put on as background eye candy while I do other things. But when I spend weeks poring over the smallest details of three seconds of a film, it makes me want to watch a new movie in the best possible conditions. But hey, as long as they enjoy themselves…

When I think about it, the fact that I spend so long working on the tiny details of a shot, only for it to just pass other people by, is the same as a software developer spending loads of time on a piece of code that optimises the website they are working on, which the user may never notice. When you are doing something at a professional level, it’s all the little extras that make the difference.

The biggest shock I have when I meet someone that doesn’t care about movies so much is that it reminds me that what I work on so hard is just a movie. Sometimes I forget that and it’s good to get some perspective.