Depth

Art: Hot River by Edgar Müller

“Depth” is a word that gets thrown around in the art world a lot, and very rarely actually explained. It’s one of those words that art critics really like, because it allows them to sound intelligent without having to actually explain their opinions. Looking at it from the outside, you may see this and assume that depth is just a buzzword. It’s not. It’s real, it’s an actual thing, and I’m gonna explain it here. Buckle up.

So first, the actual word. “Depth”, in the standard english, is simply a “measurement of distance through a medium.”

Well that’s my definition. Merriam-Webster calls it “extending well back from a surface accepted as front”, if you prefer that. I prefer mine. But the point is that depth is just the word you use when you’re talking about how far down a hole goes.

Now I want you to imagine a hole (a deep one), and I want you to imagine the feeling you get when you stare down it. Just a bottomless pit, and you, staring down it. It just keeps going. You can, in a sense, feel how deep that hole goes. You can sense that there’s a lot more (less? It’s a hole.) there than what you can actually see.

Anyways, enough autistically staring down random holes, here’s what this all actually means for artists: when people who aren’t corporate hacks talk about “depth” in an artistic sense, they’re talking about an artist’s ability to create that emotional impression in their audience.

Art is fundamentally an illusion business, and one of the easiest ways for you to tell that something is an illusion is if it’s flat. If, when you move, the image that you’re looking at doesn’t move with you, if there’s no parallax, if the proportions stay the same, if the shadows don’t change, then you know that you’re looking at a cutout instead of the real thing. One of the essential components of good art is that it can passably simulate the illusion that it is fundamentally “more” than what is superficially shown on the canvas/screen/block of stone/etc.. If you want your art to even have a chance at being considered good, understanding depth is an absolute necessity. If you screw it up, especially for more narrative forms of art, people will literally call your work “1-dimensional” (i.e. “no depth”).

Depth is also what you’re really paying for when you hire someone like me. Superfically, there’s not much that I do that you couldn’t do with an iPhone. But you’re never gonna get depth out of your iPhone. You’re never going to make art that pulls people in with that tiny lens, or with your crappy house lighting, or your family friend actors who haven’t practiced their lines and are really just here to have a good time. You’re certainly not going to get a nuanced look at the unique and uniquely compelling aspects of your business, because you as the owner (operating from inside it) can’t see them. Actors have directors for good reason. Creating depth is the real “work” that the artistic industries do. Getting good at it takes talent, decades of practice, and a little bit of controlled insanity.

This idea really does apply to all aspects of the art world:

• Cinematography: all the techniques you see in YouTube videos about creating cinematic shots (rule of thirds, foreground occlusion, leading lines, etc.) are all intended to create a tasteful impression of depth. Composition, in the cinematic sense, is really all about depth. Cinematic lighting is really just the tactic of using the specific placement of shadow to highlight depth.
• Acting: all schools of acting adhere to the same general rule that there needs to be much more going on in the life of your character than simply what happens on screen. In order to give your character the realism of a living, breathing person, you to some degree need to become that person, either via deliberate repetition and practice (classical acting) or by tying the personal experiences of the character to your own (method acting).
• Writing: One of the things that the Harry Potter novels did better than basically anyone was worldbuilding: adding depth to the environment of the story. The novels sold the way they did for that reason: the readers can very easily imagine themselves in that world, because the world is so deep and well-described. The effect translates to the other aspects of the books as well: the characters (deep in their own right) feel even more real, because the world that was written up around them had that convincing depth of reality.

So how do you actually do it? How does any of this relate to combat sports, or building your fighter brand?

Two Ways to Create Depth

The gist: you can either spend a ton of effort, time, and money in exchange for really fine-grain control over the final image, or you can just try to be as real as possible within the confines of “someone is pointing a camera at me”.

If you’re a fighter, this is actually very easy and well defined. You just use and copy the resources and techniques of actors, and now you have a stage presence. Now you’re gonna be method acting, cause it’s not WWE (unless it is, WWE bros and broettes reading this i luv u), but there are still two general ways to do it:

IF

• You have a ton of money, striking skill, and homies, then you can method act like the movie stars. Force everyone to only refer to you by your fighter name. Walk around shirtless (or in a rashguard). Wear your cup to work. Talk constantly about how much you love your fans and how much you live off of the tears of “the haters”.
• You don’t have those things: see Radical Authenticity

Depth is an essential component of any content that you want to captivate people with artistically. If you want to draw people in, there needs to be space in your content to draw people in to. There needs to be depth.

That’s about it. Short piece, but an essential explainer of what differentiates art from iPhone. More content to come.