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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#221

Post by biofox »

cbolton wrote: post #135

There's a similar issue with retro video games and emulators: the screens on the original devices often had low color saturation, so the RGB data in those games were very saturated to compensate. Then people took the ROMs to use in emulators with modern screens, and the colors are over-saturated or just off. That's why you often see screenshots of retro games with ridiculously bright colors. Thankfully now many emula…

The most egregious example is old CGA games that were written to work on composite monitors. Without the composite display, they appear monochrome or cyan and magenta.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7229541/215890834-...

It blew my mind when I finally learnt this, as I spent years of my childhood playing games that looked like the examples on the left, not realising the colours were due to the RGB monitor I had.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#222

Post by wpm »

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…

I've always been a fan of repos that I come across with ARCHITECTURE.md files in them, but that's a pretty loose framework and some just describe the what and not the why.

Otherwise, I wish I worked at a place like Oxide that does RFDs. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer Just a single place with artifacts of a formal process for writing shit down.

In your example, writing down "The greens are oversaturated by X% because we will lose a lot of it in the transfer process to film" goes a long way in at least making people aware of the decision and why it was made, at least then the "hey actually the boosted greens look kinda nice" can prompt a "yeah but we only did that because of the medium we were shipping on, it's wrong"

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#223

Post by tyrust »

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…

> now

Is this still a problem? Your example video is from nearly twenty years ago, RAM is over a decade old. I think the advent of streaming (and perhaps lessons learned) have made this less of a problem. I can't remember hearing any recent examples (but I also don't listen to a lot of music that might be victim to the practice); the Wikipedia article lacks any examples from the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Thankfully there have been some remasters that have undone the damage. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and Absolution come to mind.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#224

Post by the_af »

quuxplusone wrote: post #173
vodou wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some concrete or specific examples of intentional compensation or purposeful scaffolding in mind (outside the topic of the article)?

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

Another example: pixel art in games.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of pixel art and retro games.

But this reminds me of when people complained that the latest Monkey Island didn't use pixel art, and Ron Gilbert had to explain the original "The Curse of Monkey Island" wasn't "a pixel art game" either, it was a "state of the art game (for that time)", and it was never his intention to make retro games.

Many classic games had pixel art by accident; it was the most feasible technology at the time.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#225

Post by BeFlatXIII »

the_af wrote: post #220
tsunamifury wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I suspect 24fps is popular because it forces the videography to be more intentional with motion. Too blurry, and it becomes incomprehensible. That, and everything staying sharp at 60fps makes it look like TikTok slop.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#226

Post by kodt »

pornel wrote: post #193

It's even worse with The Matrix where nobody is even sure any more how it was supposed to look, except definitely not as green as the DVD release. Noodle made a charming video about going mad researching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk

The Matrix is an interesting one because it really caught on with the DVD release. So that was most peoples first exposure to it, not the theatrical release. Even if incorrect, if that was the first way you saw it, it is likely how you consider it "should" look.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#227

Post by mhh__ »

35mm (and even more so with 70mm) looks so much better than digital IMO. The colour looks so much more alive and thorough.

And I don't think I'm even being bitten by a nostalgia bug as per se because it was already a nostalgic fad long gone from any cinema near me when I grew up.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#228

Post by KaiserPro »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #194
KaiserPro wrote: post #114

Aha! I used to work in film and was very close to the film scanning system. When you scan in a film you need to dust bust it, and generally clean it up (because there are physical scars on the film from going through the projector. Theres also a shit tone of dust, that needs to be physically or digitally removed, ie "busted") Ideally you'd use a non-real time scanner like this: https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/n…

> Theres also a shit tone of dust, that needs to be physically or digitally removed, ie "busted" Is that because you're just leaving the film out in a big pile, or because it decays rapidly? I would have expected film to be stored in containers.

It's normally stored in sealed boxes, but every time its taken out to be projected then the whole reel is unspooled and exposed to the environment. Most projectors are pretty good at not blowing unfiltered air on the film, but there is a surprising amount of dust that is just floating in the air.

The room that the scanners used to be in were temperature and dust controlled, everyone was supposed to wear dust jackets when you enter.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#229

Post by kemayo »

charcircuit wrote: post #42
kemayo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one frame they showed from the Lion King really stood out. The difference in how the background animals were washed out by the sunlight makes the film version look significantly better.

To me it's much worse. You can't see all of the detail the artists drew, and there is noise everywhere, even specs of dust.catches. Whenever I watch a film based movie my immersion always gets broken by all the little specs that show up. Digital is a much more immersive experience for me.

> You can't see all of the detail the artists drew

That's the point in that Lion King frame, though. They drew it planning for it to get washed out by the sunlight effect, and when it's not it absolutely ruins the "vast crowd" effect they were going for because you can clearly see there's no more animals in the background and it's just 20 guys standing there.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#230

Post by causality0 »

Ever since raytracing graphics cards came out I've wondered why no game studio has ever tried to recreate the look and feel of Toy Story. There's something about the combination of detailed lighting, high-poly models, but low-eyes textures and primitive animations that really appeals to me.
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