Actors - Magical people

I have a close, young relative who is more than averagely interested in Harry Potter. According to her, there are people with magic abilities. Most people are muggles, but some are witches and wizards. I have actually spent quite some time trying to persuade her that Harry Potter is a fictional character and that magical people do not really exist. Lately, however, I have come to the conclusion that I have been wrong. Magical people do exist. They are actors, and they perform magic every day.

I work in the film business. I am a Visual Effects Supervisor. Visual effects are the film effects that are produced as part of the post production of the film and may be anything from replacing the sky with another sky to making it look like nighttime even though it was filmed during the day to adding dragons or making something that was filmed in front of a greenscreen look as if it was filmed in space. Being a visual effects supervisor, one of my tasks is to be on set during filming, making sure that everything is done the right way so that we can do our job later on. And that is where I meet them, the actors.

When I work on a movie, I start by reading the script. And even though I read it in a somewhat technical way to find out what effects needed and how we should go about creating them, I try to envision what the movie is actually going to be like. I mean, it is all there in black letters on white paper what is happening and what the characters are saying. The director often adds some information and visions to what is actually printed, but even so, it is rather clinical and sort of dead. It is difficult to be emotionally aroused. The actions and spoken lines remain only printed words on a page. Why? Because I am not magical enough. I am not an actor.

I had read the script for the last movie we did a number of times. A great number of times, actually. I had been involved in the project half a year before anything was filmed. The movie was about characters who walked around and said and did stuff, but they were not real. They had no life. They were not people. Then we started filming and the actors came on set. And suddenly the characters from the script were there, right in front of me. The characters that I had seen on the pages of the script for months had suddenly leapt off the page and started living. They had a personality, a voice and a way of doing things. And all this was born inside the head of an actor who had read the same script that I read, but who had managed to see through the paper and found a living person there.

Ok, so he had also had help from the director, who also is a magical person, but it was inside the actor that the character has been given life. He was born by the writer, had the director as a nanny, but grew up inside the the head of the actor. It is as if a person was born and has had all of his life inside the actor, and now is being released into the world.

And with many actors, this character grows to become more than he was as written words in the script. It is as if what is written is only a point in the life of this character and I get to see the character pass this point and move further. Some actors do not need much of a script at all. A few words on a piece of paper, and the actor can build a whole world out of it. I have watched scenes where the character passes the script point during the rehearsals and have gone on to a much fuller and richer life than anyone had imagined by the time the last take of the scene has been captured by the camera. That is magic. They are magical. They are actors.