Work Submission: Ethics

Ethical implications in filmmaking, especially at such a low level as we're operating at, have a snowball effect. A scene that seems simple in the imagining will give rise to some problems, which will require extra consideration to avoid, which will then generate more implications and problems until the project soon becomes unfeasible due to the amount of effort needed to make it ethically secure.

For example, filming in a public place, by a road. First you have to consider the bypassers, can and will they all give permission to appear? If not, how can you stop them? Are you able to stop them? What about cars? Can the road be temporarily blocked off? Is this feasible? What other options do you have? Does the size of the crew support such operations?

And so on and so forth. So yes, it does impose boundaries on creativity, but half of creativity is the ability to adapt to problems like this, either through overcoming them with the proper measures, or by adjusting the plan to the point where the concern is sidestepped entirely.

In higher-level filming, these problems can increasingly be phased out with CG. Using live animals is problematic, ethically, requiring a large amount of care to ensure the animals are treated according to standards. But a CG animal needs none of this treatment. Massive crowds are hard to organise and require a lot of care in terms of keeping the filming safe whilst using so many people, but if the first few rows of a crowd are human, and the rest are well done CG, it'll be hard to tell the difference without trying.

This progression will likely mean that scenes that would previously only be possible in massive-budget A-movies will become more possible in cheaper and lower-budget films over time, as it always has. Going back to the start, hopefully this will mean that instead of finding ways to avoid a problem, which often comes at the expense of losing the original vision of the scene, that these problems will be much more easily dealt with, allowing filmmakers more freedom.

Long story short, I believe ethics are likely to become a less and less restrictive element in filmmaking as technology progresses that allows easy workarounds.