Geese

geis
pl. geasa
Gaelic lit. vow
alt. spell, taboo, troth, binding force
pronounced "gesh"

The Irish hero Cú Chulainn was a legendary warrior, wielder of the Gáe Bulg, slayer of thousands in the Ulster cycle of mythology. But every hero has their weaknesses.

Cú Chulainn was bound by two¹ geasa: to always accept food offered to him by a stranger, and to never consume dog² meat. Like the biblical figure Samson³, whose great strength endured so long as his mane remained unshorn, whilst Cú Chulainn abides by his geis, he is gifted superhuman battle prowess. Alas, nary a hero without tribulation. Once a hag⁴ baits Cú Chulainn into enjoying roadside dog meat, he falls to ruin as Samson fell to Delilah's shears.

Just as heroes of yore, one's reputation increases with promises kept. But forsaken oaths unmake heroes: break even a small promise and the value of each one thereafter diminishes.

Blessing or Burden?

Why pick up a burden to begin with?

Consider the blind. Forced to rely on their other senses, those with impaired sight develop sharpened hearing, augmented touch, heightened perception. Neuroplasticity is a well-documented phenomenon that lets the brain overcompensate and adapt to the deficit.

In the same manner, artists constantly adapt to the constraints of their medium; limitation becomes identity. Nowhere is this clearer than in art, where each generation of creators has worked against technological, physical, or self-imposed walls, and in pushing back, found unique perspectives greater than they could have imagined.

Cinematography

Before artistic choice, limitations are often simply boundaries of technology. Movies started as zoetropes: static images on a rotating drum. By the early 1900s, theatres projected reels onto lenticular screens coated in silver or aluminium paint to enhance brightness. These vestiges of industry are why studios still refer to movies with the archaic terms "film", which refers to literal celluloid sheets, and "footage" because physical tape ribbon was measured in feet.

Clapperboard⁵

As technology evolved, so did its constraints. Colour was added in the early 1910s with Technicolor⁶. Sound arrived in the late 1920s, with The Jazz Singer (1927) shipping with a separate record disc with audio, and by the 1930s came integrated and synchronised in magnetic tape along the side of the reel. The addition of sound compressed the picture area, changing film from a 4:3 ratio to the 1.37:1 "Academy"⁷ standard.

Aspect ratios

Introduced in 1953, CinemaScope (widescreen 2.35:1, later adjusted to 2.39:1) uses an anamorphic lens to horizontally compress what the camera sees, gifting audiences a wide field of view that previously required stitching three separate cameras together. By shortening the width of film, CinemaScope allowed movies to feature stereo sound. However, with it came noticeable distortion when panning, reflected by directors of that era rarely moving the camera during scenes.

Scaled comparison of the nine common film formats. IMAX 70mm is... ginormous

Jurassic Park (1993), shot in 1.85:1 35mm⁸, astounded viewers with the scale and height of the dinosaurs. The dinos tower over the humans because the frame allows vertical dominance⁹, giving impressive scale to the animatronics. However, sometimes forcing framing to work can backfire. Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) stifles its impressive action scenes in a 4:3 box, starving horizontal movement of room to breathe. While certain compositions are featured better (e.g. when Diana somersaults over Steppenwolf), action movies are shot in widescreen for a reason.

16:9 cleanly bounds the most common monitor aspect ratios

Computer monitors tell a parallel story. Originally designed at 16:10 (the golden ratio), the SMPTE engineer Kerns Powers proposed a compromise between the myriad aspect ratios in 1984. He found that all the common ratios fit within an outer 1.78:1 rectangle and circumscribed an inner 1.78:1 rectangle. 1.78:1 (or 16:9) was the geometric mean between the tallest (4:3) and widest (2.4:1), and was aesthetically pleasing. Additionally, 16:9 panels are cheaper to manufacture (as you can get 10 panels for the price of 9), and so 16:9 won on economics and became the new standard. Today, some manufacturers (notably Apple and Lenovo) are returning to 16:10 for laptop screens in an effort to improve ergonomics.

Digital formats

Decades later, digital animation came with its own unique aesthetics based on the capabilities of computers of the time. Before computers, animations were manually crafted. The Hungarian movie Heroic Times (1983) was painted entirely on oil canvas; Ghibli films Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Whisper of the Heart (1995) were made with traditional hand-drawn animation.

Aardman Animations specialised in claymation, using stop-motion with clay models that are manually repositioned between shots, giving Chicken Run (2000) an earthy aesthetic. Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006) used rotoscoping to emulate the dizzying, disorienting haze of drug addiction. The backlit glow in cel¹⁰ animation seen in Tron (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) achieved a luminous quality that digital editing struggles to replicate.

The glow effect in Tron shines a sheen seldom seen on the silver screen

Early Pixar is a case study in letting the constraint pick the subject.

Why was Pixar's first feature a film about toys? Because that was the limit of 1990s tech. Toy Story (1995) is full of hard plastic surfaces, simple geometries, and controlled lighting. Even then, individual frames took over a day¹¹ to render.

It took six years for Pixar to tackle fur¹², modeling the translucency and texture for millions of hairs on Sulley in Monsters, Inc. (2001). Finding Nemo (2003) took on water and caustics (refraction, reflection, attenuation). Each film was the company picking its next frontier, writing custom physics engines and shaders at the forefront of animation technology. Because Pixar and other studios embraced challenge and fought against their limits, they created class-defining movies still beloved today.

Practical effects

Before CGI (computer-generated imagery), filmmakers invented what they needed in the physical world, coming up with creative solutions to emulate sci-fi into real life.

During the production of Jaws (1975), Spielberg's mechanical shark frequently malfunctioned. Forced to cut its screen time to a minimum, Spielberg created a monster that was far more terrifying when it lurked unseen and lent an air of mystique and tension. The film's identity is artefact of a failed prop.

Half a century earlier, Buster Keaton grew famous for his stunts, like standing in the exact spot of an open attic window as a whole house facade fell around him in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928). An inch off and it would have been the end of his career.

For his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Kubrick built a custom 38-foot rotating set for the spaceship's centrifuge interior; the shot of Frank jogging around the full ring of the spacecraft was filmed in a single take, with the camera bolted to the rotating structure. The scene looks more real than most contemporary zero-gravity CGI shots because it was real.

Dramatic times call for drastic measures

Twister (1996) used industrial-grade wind turbines to fling real props at its cast. The actors' terror on screen is genuine because they were genuinely afraid of being hit by debris; the production team dropped entire harvester combines from a helicopter.

Authenticity matters for realism.

Voluntary vows

Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

Poems are a foundational example of constrained writing. Japanese haiku rely on strict prosody, adapted into English as a rigid 5-7-5 syllable¹³ structure. Shakespeare's sonnets strictly adhere to iambic pentameter and an ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG rhyme scheme with a volta (turn) at the end. Six-word stories are an extreme example of brevity ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.").

Minimalist movements across various media have repeatedly proven that artificial boundaries often birth the best art.

In 1969, Georges Perec finished his novel La Disparition, a 300-page lipogram which never uses the letter E, the most common letter in French (and English). Gilbert Adair produced its English translation, the 1994 A Void, under the same rule. Perec was a member of the OuLiPo, a collective of writers and mathematicians devoted to constrained writing techniques.

In 1995, directors Vinterberg and von Trier created the Dogme 95 "Vows of Chastity". They swore away artificial lighting, non-diegetic sound, optical filters, and mandated using only handheld cameras. Their manifesto is a geis in its most literal form: a voluntary, self-imposed binding. Vinterberg and von Trier believed that stripping away modern conveniences would force the remaining elements (acting and story) to overcompensate into greatness.

Blessing in disguise

Filmmakers and writers don't create masterpieces in spite of their limitations; masterpieces are made because of them. Under the tightest bounds, you force yourself to become better. Constraint is the mother of innovation.

To take advantage of this, musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created the Oblique Strategies deck in 1975. The cards offer random, disruptive instructions (e.g. "Use an old idea," "Reverse," or "Abandon normal instruments") designed to break creative blocks, functioning as a portable geis generator.

So the next time you find yourself staring blankly at a canvas or a blinking cursor, consider imposing a geis of your own. Unlike the ancient hero Cú Chulainn, whose geasa were vows that destroyed him, you, the artist, can thrive precisely because you choose the terms of your own binding.

Pick up a burden, and see how strong you become carrying it.

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