Creative geography

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Creative geography, or artificial landscape, is a filmmaking technique invented by the early Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov sometime around the 1920s. 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.

The least-subtle example of creative geography is probably the TARDIS time machine on Doctor Who, which looks like a police call box on the outside but is a tremendous space ship on the inside. An aware viewer knows that the actors are stepping into a prop on a street corner, and then driving across London to a soundstage that represents the interior (sometimes filming the interior shots much later, or even before the outside shot), but via creative geography, suspension of disbelief, and the occasional character commenting "why, it's bigger on the inside than on the outside!" the transition is made (more or less) seamless.