Liar, Liar!

The minute you edit two shots together, you falsify reality; and even if you don't edit (to the dismay of your suffering viewers) you still distort reality, just by showing selected parts of a scene while framing off other parts of the shot.
This is old news of course. About 20 minutes after movies were invented, Georges Méliès was already using them in France to bamboozle viewers with special effects. In America, the 1898 sinking of the Battleship Maine was filmed with models in a tub and presented as a straight newsreel. (The battle smoke was produced by two guys puffing cigars just outside the frame.) In 1914, Birth of a Nation caused an uproar, not with camera tricks this time, but with the perceived pro-slavery bias of its content.

For a century now, philosophers and social critics have wrestled with the implications of two intractable facts:
1) Even the most honestly intended movies cannot help but falsify reality.
2) All movies, whether honest or dishonest, have an unusually powerful ability to convince viewers that the shadows on the screen are real.
Let's look at these facts and then see how responsible videographers can keep programs honest in their essentials even though they're unavoidably crooked in their details.
The simplest lie is omission: the viewer can't know it if you don't show it. To demonstrate, let's use a short real estate promo that purports to document a home for sale. You linger over the big master bedroom suite, peruse every feature of the remodeled kitchen, lovingly survey the family room (fireplace, bar, etc.). But the other two bedrooms and the living room are never on-screen (in truth because they're each no more than eight feet square). Did you misrepresent these rooms? Perish the thought! You merely didn't include them. But did this omission misrepresent the property? You betcha.

Fibbing Within the Shot

Even when you do tape something you can still omit unwanted material by using the power of the frame: the border around the screen that acts as an information gatekeeper. Through judicious framing, your video can show the home's lovely front yard, while excluding the roof that needs replacing, not to mention the 1948 single-wide trailer that's rusting away next door.
And while we're framing creatively, let's jazz up the backyard by placing a long flower box out of frame in the foreground. The colorful blooms waving gently across the bottom of the screen conceal the bare dirt behind them; and since you've framed off their planter box, the flowers seem to be growing in the ground.
"Golf course view," says the ad, and sure enough, it's right there on the screen. But viewers can't tell that the fairway's a mile distant because the intervening housing tract is concealed below the frame line.
Scaling reinforces the country club scam. A telephoto lens makes the golf course appear much closer than it is. On the other hand, if you want to scale something farther rather than closer, try a wide-angle view. With an ultra-wide lens to inflate it, you might want to shoot that tiny living room after all. (For a textbook demonstration of this technique, look at the photos of trailer and motor home interiors in RV magazines; then compare them with the ground plans.)
While looking at RV ads, study the exotic landscapes that are supposedly outside the windows of these rigs. Many are inserted by compositing, a technique available to video editors as well as still photographers. In the old days, convincing chromakey was unavailable to consumers; but with patience and digital post you can put your spouse on Mt. Everest.
In short, through framing, scaling and compositing, a savvy video editor can tell big lies within single shots.

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