Fakingly Real.

I believe that film cannot be truly ever realistic.  If there is a story with characters and they know they are being filmed, they are going to be acting, no matter what. Reality TV isn’t real.  They know there are cameras that are filming every move they make so these people try to make the most drama out of nothing for the sake of the television and drama.  And if you film someone or something in secret, you tend to make it feel secret and espionage-like, thereby ruining the effect of being real. By that, I mean if you film it in secret, the audience knows its secret by the way you film, therefore the curtain of realism is dropped because the audience knows that this is probably edited to pull whatever is being film out of context.  What I am trying to say is that what you put on film is just the camera’s perspective of the world around it and the camera can only film so much area.  There is still so much around the camera not being filmed.  For instance, if you film something in a fixed position, and people walking notice a camera, they will instinctively act, whether they know it or not.  Also, behind the camera there could be something interesting going on but on the other side, the side with the lens, there could be nothing. If you film the nothing, then you aren’t showing the whole picture and you have on the spot edited your film to not show the interesting thing.  Its impossible to capture the real world because there is just so much to capture. You would need to have a personal cameraman for every person on earth, just so you could capture everything that every happened.  Filming only one thing pulls it out of context and you wouldn’t know what is really happening.  Let’s say you film people walking out of a building, but give no context as to why.  That isn’t realistic, because it is up to the audience to interpret and when the audience can interpret something, there isn’t a clear hard fact about why something, in this case people walking out of a building, is happening, therefore it isn’t realistic. And for all we know, that walking could be staged.

from http://vi.sualize.us/akvalley/funny/