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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#351

Post by thewebcount »

kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

> There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up.

This isn’t actually a new problem. I guess the new part is this:

> It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary.

I saw an interview with the director of the 5th (I think?) of the original Planet Of The Apes movie, Battle for the Planet of the Apes. (It might have been a DVD extra, I don’t recall.) It’s supposed to be a war between the humans and the apes, but they didn’t have the budget to hire enough actors, so they had to rely on using particular angles of the camera and various props to make it less obvious how few people there actually were in the movie.

Later I saw a review of the movie Jumper which is also supposed to have a war between normal humans and humans that can teleport, basically. The review was talking about how there didn’t really seem to be that many people involved in this supposedly worldwide war.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#352

Post by Godel_unicode »

kyleyeats wrote: post #256
Godel_unicode wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had this discussion enough times to know that this is a minority opinion, but the battle of winterfell is a masterpiece. The darkness in that scene does so much to add to the tension that it’s essentially another character. Watch it on a good screen in a dark room, and come away wishing other nighttime shots were done that way. Edit: darkness is like a good score. It adds a ton but it doesn’t degrade well and pe…

GoT had several nighttime battle scenes with great lighting. I think that was the problem. They had to go darker than the fights they already showed.

I don’t understand the reasoning here, are you saying that GoT was a tech demo? To me it made sense that as the show got further along and the situation grew more dire that it would be visibly darker as a metaphor.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#353

Post by LarryMullins »

mort96 wrote: post #20
gigaparsec wrote: post #11

The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. It looks like a cheap gaussian blur filter applied in post production and adds to the fakeness. This is probably due to the optics in some of the latest Red digital cameras, but it's still not convincing. Kinda like 48 vs 24 FPS.

I will never accept the hate for 48 FPS. 24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess. 24 FPS looks somewhat okay when the camera is still and only the people in it are moving, but the ridiculous choppiness ruins any moment with camera movement. A higher refresh rate is simply an objective improvement. I don't care that you associate it with bad soap operas.

> Panning shots are a stuttery mess.

It's worse in some movies than others. I don't know all the photography lingo, but from what I understand it looks worse when the shutter speed is high, giving each frame a very short exposure and therefore little motion blur in each frame. With longer shutter times, each frame has more motion blur and therefore a 24fps pan doesn't look nearly as bad.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#354

Post by Slow_Hand »

kzrdude wrote: post #241

Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is. There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary. Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely mor…

I often think about Die Hard With a Vengeance. The city of New York is a huge part of the movie's texture. The movie actively engages with all of the people on the street and in the cars, and who are watching from their office windows. Characters who could have very easily been left out of the movie, but their inclusion make it so much richer. You see and feel their days get ruined because of the carnage. It actually feels like New York City.

There are so many different side characters who only have two lines, but each of them were cast with care and feel like real people who are living through their day and intersecting with John McLane. I love this movie for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RVVJmuoAQ4

On the other hand, I just watched Michael Bay's Ambulance, which is a prolonged police chase through downtown Los Angeles and the only people who seem to be on the street are criminals and dozens of police cars. At no point are we in touch with anyone who isn't directly contributing to the story. The reality is that downtown LA is packed full of traffic and the story would have taken a very different (and interesting) angle if it reckoned with the fact that getting through the traffic is it's own game.

Die Hard With a Vengeance, however, acknowledges this reality and comes up with some very creative scenarios for our protagonists to overcome, and it makes for a far more compelling movie as a result. It feels far more realistic, even in a movie as heightened as this.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#355

Post by fullstop »

agentwiggles wrote: post #341
fullstop wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't associate it with bad anything. I just don't like the way it looks.

I agree wildly and I'm seriously shocked that the guy above is arguing in favor of it. I can't stand the weird motion smoothing on modern TVs and would not buy any TV where it can't be turned off.

I get it, maybe, if the source material was filmed at that rate. Interpolation of 24 FPS content to higher rates just looks unnatural.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#356

Post by pram »

epolanski wrote: post #82
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #28

One aspect of this I’ve talked about before is the phenomenon of the “permanent golden hour”: what used to be a narrow sliver of time when you could get the most dramatic lighting is now easily replicated in post. So as a result tons of movies have all their outdoor shots set in this incredibly unnatural-looking light that really pulls me out of the movie. Like I remember the banker in Switzerland scenes in The Wolf…

The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie that would surprise most people by how much special effects it has: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfRVAH9yU

Some of these just seem completely pointless lol

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#357

Post by ulizzle »

hgsgm wrote: post #77
ulizzle wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you look at the chart two years, you'll see how even if it's building up, it's still a steep drop compared to their high point circa in 2021.

That's because of the change in interest rates and the dollar, economy-wide. If you think a stock is doing poorly, you have to show its alpha vs the market. Also, Disney is more than a TV channel.

Disney being more than a TV channel is obvious, but if you bring that up, you also have to square up that the theme parks have been bleeding money

On the first point, then why are analysts still bearing on Netflix and given it a "no-invest?"

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#358

Post by jjeaff »

zuminator wrote: post #267
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism Type 'art' into google, how many pictures are impressionism, 1 in 10? Pick a movie at random, what are the chances it's made in 24 fps? 99.9%? Why do you thin TVs have motion smoothing? Because, we, normal people, are sick of you impressionist-obsessed people controlling everything.

TV as a medium is different from the big screen. People watch sporting, talk shows and live events on TV, rarely at the movies. And the convention is for those types of things to be viewed at higher frame rates. Films can be viewed at higher frame rates but then they tend to have a TV-ified look. Which is ok, if you personally dislike the film look and prefer movies to look like daytime television. But for many peopl…

>He thinks that younger people, brought up on big screen TVs, 120 fps oled smartphones, and 240 fps gaming action

This might be true farther in the future. But the vast majority of kids now were certainly not brought up on 240fps games and 120hz smartphones.

The iPhone 14 is still 60hz and the Galaxy s21 is the first Samsung phone to have 120hz and it was released in 2021.

And 240fps gaming monitors are a thing, but not really mainstream yet.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#359

Post by ryeights »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #238
munificent wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Moonshot still is CLEARLY using color with great intention. It's not a realistic scene. It's a carefully designed shot. The characters, the coffee, and the table are yellow. The background is green. That's interesting. I would be much more inclined to agree with that if every fucking movie in the past twenty years wasn't also using the exact same gold-cyan two-color palette: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p…

Well, first of all, this scene is clearly green and yellow, not orange and blue. This is not a common color palette. It's not a completely new color palette, because that's a dumb concept, but it's not common. Green and yellow are analogous whereas blue/orange are complementary. Second, the orange / blue contrast is more of a film trailer / film poster thing than the actual films themselves. Most people will agree th…

I’m gonna have to totally disagree with you and say that the scene is definitely amber and teal, not green and yellow. Look at their skin tones, and the plates/walls.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#360

Post by alphabet9000 »

gigaparsec wrote: post #11

The number one thing that bothers me the most in the "netflix aesthetic" is the weird looking background bokeh that every scene seems to have. It looks like a cheap gaussian blur filter applied in post production and adds to the fakeness. This is probably due to the optics in some of the latest Red digital cameras, but it's still not convincing. Kinda like 48 vs 24 FPS.

some thumbnails of television commercials exhibiting this slightly out of focus background https://i.jollo.org/jiWn4jTj.png
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