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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#211

Post by petralithic »

ilamont wrote: post #168
janeway wrote: post #136

This topic is fascinating to me. The Toy Story film workflow is a perfect illustration of intentional compensation: artists pushed greens in the digital master because 35 mm film would darken and desaturate them. The aim was never neon greens on screen, it was colour calibration for a later step. Only later, when digital masters were reused without the film stage, did those compensating choices start to look like cre…

There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if yo…

The same with movie sound mixing, where directors like Nolan are infamous for muffling dialogue in home setups because he wants the sound mixed for large, IMAX scale theater setups.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#213

Post by chrisweekly »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #180
chrisweekly wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

enumerable -> innumerable (opposite meaning)

> (opposite meaning) Funnily enough, e- means "out" (more fundamentally "from") and in- means "in(to)", so that's not an unexpected way to form opposite words. But in this case, innumerable begins with a different in- meaning "not". (Compare inhabit or immiserate , though.)

Yeah, English has so many quirks. As a software dev, the "enum" type cane to mind, making this one easier to spot. (shrug)

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#214

Post by a4isms »

chiph wrote: post #208
ilamont wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if yo…

And now we have the Loudness War where the songs are so highly compressed that there is no dynamic range. Because of this, I have to reduce the volume so it isn't painful to listen to. And this makes what should have been a live recording with interesting sound into background noise. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ If you want a recent-ish album to listen to that has good sound, try Daft Punk's R…

I was obsessed with Tales of Mystery & Imagination, I Robot, and Pyramids in the 70s. I also loved Rush, Yes, ELP, Genesis, and ELO, but while Alan Parsons' albums weren't better in an absolute musical sense, his production values were so obviously in a class of their own I still put Parsons in the same bucket as people like Trevor Horn and Quincy Jones, people who created masterpieces of record album engineering and production.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#215

Post by jedberg »

There is a solution for Toy Story specifically -- the Laserdisc version. If I'm not mistaken, the laserdisc was digitized from the 35mm print.

Toy Story is the only Pixar movie ever released on Laserdisc (along with all their shorts, in the same box set). Disney also released a lot of their 90s animation on Laserdisc.

So if you're a true cinephile, seek out the Laserdisc versions.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#216

Post by dboreham »

ilamont wrote: post #168
janeway wrote: post #136

This topic is fascinating to me. The Toy Story film workflow is a perfect illustration of intentional compensation: artists pushed greens in the digital master because 35 mm film would darken and desaturate them. The aim was never neon greens on screen, it was colour calibration for a later step. Only later, when digital masters were reused without the film stage, did those compensating choices start to look like cre…

There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if yo…

> decent German and Japanese components

Whoa there! Audio components were about the only thing the British still excelled at by that time.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#217

Post by dboreham »

nunez wrote: post #209
ilamont wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era. I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if yo…

I've noticed this with lots of jazz from the 50s and 60s. Sounds amazing in mono but "lacking" in stereo.

Because it's mono?

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#220

Post by the_af »

tsunamifury wrote: post #188
quuxplusone wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not scaffolding in the same way, but, two examples of "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that the original artists might have considered undesirable degradations" are - the fashion for unpainted marble statues and architecture - the aesthetic of running film slightly too fast in the projector (or slightly too slow in the camera) for an old-timey effect

Motion blur. 24fps. Grain. Practically everything we call cinematic

I wouldn't call it "fetishizing" though; not all of them anyway.

Motion blur happens with real vision, so anything without blur would look odd. There's cinematic exaggeration, of course.

24 FPS is indeed entirely artificial, but I wouldn't call it a fetish: if you've grown with 24 FPS movies, a higher frame rate will paradoxically look artificial! It's not a snobby thing, maybe it's an "uncanny valley" thing? To me higher frame rates (as in how The Hobbit was released) make the actors look fake, almost like automatons or puppets. I know it makes no objective sense, but at the same time it's not a fetishization. I also cannot get used to it, it doesn't go away as I get immersed in the movie (it doesn't help that The Hobbit is trash, of course, but that's a tangent).

Grain, I'd argue, is the true fetish. There's no grain in real life (unless you have a visual impairment). You forget fast about the lack of grain if you're immersed in the movie. I like grain, but it's 100% an esthetic preference, i.e. a fetish.

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