Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
graphic awareness. Almost from the beginning of the cinematography car-
tographic products were used as a decoration, or better said, to procure
more realistic picture of an intended scene. To this day we can see carto-
graphic products in a variety of movies. A map serves as a symbol of
power when hanging behind the sovereign, marks the leader when held in
his hand, represents planning when lying on a table. In travelogues, maps
were and are used for documentation purposes. Maps play a significant
role particularly in “adventure” type of movies, where reality is meeting
with fantasy and science with art.
The essence of this type of movies is usually a quest in the widest meaning
of the term. As most of these types of movies are adaptations of novels, the
first burden of defining the space and its structure is on the writer's shoul-
ders. The writer delivers more or less detailed map description, which can
also cover a sketched map published inside the topic. From more widely
known we can name R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, J. Verne's The
Mysterious Island or R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Even when the
map plays a significant role in the story, literary description of its look is
usually somewhat sketchy. For example in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter,
there is only one sentence describing the Marauder's map (from Harry
Potter and prisoner of Azkaban:
“… a map showing every detail of the Hog-
warts castle and grounds … tiny ink dots moving around it, each labelled
with a name …”
). The concrete visual appearance of the map is left to the
reader's imagination. Nevertheless, the writer is where the basic idea
comes from. The interpretation and the implementation is work of the
director and his team.
As cinematography has in an essence visual quality, moviemakers are
pressed to deal with the map display by more visual techniques. The visu-
alization of maps in movies varies from simple look on reproduction of a
map to attempts to imprint the feeling of the changing landscape by strictly
movie making tools as are aerial shots, arc shots, tracking shots, zooming,
etc. Film as a medium ideal for capturing the changing space and time is
one of environments with natural inclination to dynamics. Where long dis-
tances are to be overcome, moviemakers are in many cases trying to
“dynamise” maps by visualizing progress of the taken journey by anima-
tion. Maps in these situations serve as visual shortcuts (maybe the most
popular are the Indiana Jones movies (1981, -84, -89), but this type of
visualization could be seen long before - in famous Cassablanca from
1942). Moviemakers in these cases use maps as a tool.
