Magic House, LLC (and Magichouse California) are full-service film production companies specializing in narrative shorts and commercial production located in Los Angeles, CA and Austin, TX. The first time I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was sitting in my living room--but for 161 minutes, I felt like I had travelled to the edges of space and time, into the past and far into the fut
ure. When we make a movie, we usually start in a studio space with a large, completely white “set”. We paint wooden flats to create backgrounds, add furniture and create fake props, then set up huge lights to mimic the sun and other sources of light. Actors read pre-written lines (dozens of times), while twenty crew members simultaneously work silently just out of the camera’s view, making sure sound, lighting, and special effects are all perfectly orchestrated to create the illusion that everything happening right before your eyes is both Spontaneous and Real. But it’s all a trick -- an illusion to make you believe you are somewhere you aren’t, while listening to imaginary characters tell make-believe stories. How else can the average person get the opportunity to explore the deepest oceans or unreachable mountains, glimpse into the psyche of great leaders long dead, or bear witness to a future that hasn’t even happened yet? We love the process of imagining these moments and then bringing them to life, moments that can make an entire audience laugh or cry by simply displaying a single image on the screen at the perfect time. At the heart of it all, we are storytellers. We are magicians.
