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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#281

Post by bitwize »

I want to talk about the blandness of the acting in Netflix shows. As part of the young-adultification of everything, they tend to have this po-faced life-and-death fake gravitas. They're full of scenes like "a vampire coven takes a vote on whether to excommunicate, kill, and devour one of their own because she fell in love with a human". But the characters seem like children or young teenagers, despite being played by, and even representing, adults. It's like watching a precocious, somewhat psychotic 10-year-old making her Barbies plot to murder each other.

Contrast that with, say, Beverly Hills, 90210, which aged remarkably well for a 30+ year old series. It too gets rather self-serious at times, but the acting talent was really good and well-directed and they play their parts with a sort of relaxed, open California swagger that makes them seem honest and likable. 90210 has some interesting cinematic choices as well: the colors appear saturated but both the video and audio are soft and fuzzy, for what I guess is sort of a wistful look that seems less like how things actually happened and more like how the main cast's older selves remember it happening.

Some exceptions exist, of course. Stranger Things is incredibly well acted and goes for 80s verisimilitude, right down to authentic Tandy props and making the bedrooms look like they came out of E.T. with the lighting and set decoration. I Am Not Okay With This has a real honest feeling to it as well. They shot on location in Brownsville, PA, and really tried to capture the feel of the town in the background.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#282

Post by davidmurdoch »

tshaddox wrote: post #102
matt-attack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic,…

It’s more like complaining about higher resolution reproductions of a Van Gogh, because you grew up with dial-up internet and could only view highly compressed JPEG reproductions of Van Gogh so “that’s just how Van Gogh is supposed to look, these high fidelity digital reproductions look like desktop wallpaper.” No one is saying that filmmakers couldn’t use lower frame rates as a deliberate stylistic device, similar t…

Playstation 2 and it's games were designed to look its best on Sony Trinitron TVs. When viewed on modern TVs, the games don't look like they used to, and the games can seem kinda dull in color but jagged in detail (anti-aliasing seems to have been in part the responsibility of the CRT itself). If the console was redesigned for today's TVs they'd look better.

I think the problem today is that the art of cinematography and technology evolved together up until ultra high-def digital came about, and now the art isn't keeping up with the advances in tech.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#283

Post by b112 »

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.

24 FPS looks like garbage. Panning shots are a stuttery mess.

100% that's your TV, or media player making the mess, not 24fps.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#284

Post by dylan604 »

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…

This is one of the things that made The Breakfast Club such a great example for low budget filmmakers. Very small number of people on camera, low number of locations, yet it does not feel weird within the context of the script.

There have been others that are great examples of it being odd. The TV show The Good Guys was shot on empty streets in a dead part of town because of low budgets, and it comes across that way. Was the crew so small that they couldn't send a couple of the grips or PAs to walk down the side walk? Another of the low-budget examples I like is in Queen of the South's first season, they used the production's grip truck as the bad guy vehicle in an episode. Maybe it was the pilot? It was just one of those hung head in shame moments for me

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#285

Post by nvarsj »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #225
nvarsj wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High refresh rate makes people feel sick. It's "too real", such that the brain can't synchronize what it's seeing to what it's feeling motion wise. Ultimately a 2d plane is not optimal for a realistic experience. By it's very nature, film is impressionist.

Do you have a citation for that? Lots of people play video games on big screens for hours at a time and don’t get motion sickness.

There were lots of reports of this with the hobbit, e.g. https://theweek.com/articles/469863/why-isthe-hobbit-making-....

Being on a big screen probably makes it much worse.

Also I’d conjecture video games are different. It’s like driving a car. Since you are directly controlling the camera usually, I think this helps your brain avoid nausea. Although there’s plenty of people who can’t play FPS either because it makes them feel sick.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#286

Post by b112 »

mort96 wrote: post #108
matt-attack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is equivalent to: "Impressionism is objectively worse than realism. Look at a Van Gogh painting, there's hardly any detail. It looks coarse, and grainy and the brush strokes are so wide I can hard tell what's what. Starry Starry Night would be objectively such a better painting if he had just reach for a finer brush and included more detail. Adding more detail would have made it far more realistic,…

I have no problems with non-realistic art forms. I think 12 FPS hand animation can look amazing, and the 12 FPS is part of the artistic expression. You're right, realism is absolutely not always the goal, and being unrealistic is sometimes the point . But for the kind of movie that's supposed to take place in a world very much like ours? The kind where it's just a camera filming actors in a street or whatever, and th…

An "impressionist" frame rate is totally inappropriate in such a context.

Start with the shakey cam effect, often added post production, which does what no human head/eyes do during fast movement.

(And often used to cover up poor quality fight scenes)

Second using an incapable camera person, the camera jumping around like my grandma doing video on her phone. Steady cams, and gear, and booms, are a century old!

While I am open to looking at all modern issues, I'd prefer getting rid of purposeful garbage first.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#287

Post by dylan604 »

noisy_boy wrote: post #277

I'll take this thread to plug my totally subjective hare brain theory/bias. I've noticed that I like movies that are shot with the blue filter (or atleast thats what I call it) - everything has a tinge of blue (the filters are almost closer to blue-grey; something like #374358). For some reason, I have noticed that, to me, they also turn out to good movies. Example would be Margin Call[0] (though in some scenes the b…

It wasn't shot with a blue filter. It was graded in post to have that look. Before RAW, it wasn't unheard of to have a "blue filter" from shooting with the wrong white balance setting, but it was a totally different blue filter look.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#288

Post by prmoustache »

dontlaugh wrote: post #68
mort96 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even 48 is barely enough for panning shots to not cause headaches and nausea, I want at least 60. It’s only at 120 that diminishing returns really begin.

Headaches and nausea?

Panning shots typically only last a few seconds.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#289

Post by mattigames »

jackothy wrote: post #231
Godel_unicode wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to argue that it’s an intentional artistic choice if the overwhelming majority of compositions use it. It would be like saying a Monet being viewed through oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere is an artistic choice.

And even more so when it was 100% driven by technological limitations. The original Hollywood filmmakers of the early 1900s didn't choose not to film at 1000 FPS. There was simply no feasible way at the time to get above 20-30 FPS. The current standard was never chosen .

Many paintings were too "never chosen" and were made in that medium because photography didn't exist back then, Henry VIII probably would have hired a professional photographer instead of a professional painter if it had been possible, despite all that painters still exist alongside photographers in modern times.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#290

Post by newsclues »

noisy_boy wrote: post #277

I'll take this thread to plug my totally subjective hare brain theory/bias. I've noticed that I like movies that are shot with the blue filter (or atleast thats what I call it) - everything has a tinge of blue (the filters are almost closer to blue-grey; something like #374358). For some reason, I have noticed that, to me, they also turn out to good movies. Example would be Margin Call[0] (though in some scenes the b…

Certain camera/sensors and lens have distinctive visual aesthetics and also in the colour grading process, and much of it is a mix of art and science and the artistic vision of colour is embedded in the creative and technical aspects of film making from sets to costumes to what camera sensors and optics combination look like and how to change or enhance it in post production.
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