Creative geography, or
artificial landscape, is a film making technique invented by the early
Russian filmmaker
Lev Kuleshov sometime around the 1920s
[citation needed]. It is a subset of
montage,
in which multiple segments shot at various locations and/or times are
edited together such that they appear to all occur in a continuous place
at a continuous time. Creative geography is used constantly in film and
television, for instance when a character walks through the front door
of a house shown from the outside, to emerge into a
sound stage of the house's interior.
A notable and innovative example of creative geography is the
TARDIS time machine on
Doctor Who,
which looks like a police call box on the outside but is much larger on
the inside. The viewer knows that the actors are stepping into a prop,
and then filming at a sound stage that represents the interior, but via
creative geography,
suspension of disbelief, the transition is made seamless.
An extreme example of creative geography occurred in the film
Just a Gigolo
in a dialogue scene featuring the characters played by David Bowie and
Marlene Dietrich. Bowie and Dietrich actually filmed their respective
parts separately, in two different rooms months apart: editing and
shot-matching were employed in an attempt to convince the audience that
these two people were in the same room at the same time. At one point,
Dietrich's character gives a memento to Bowie's character: to achieve
this, she handed the prop to an "extra actor", who then walked out of
frame. In a separate shot, a different "extra actor" (playing the same
person) walked into frame and gave the prop to Bowie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_geography
