Cinematography of “Andor”

Perhaps you're confusing planning with execution.

All the things you're describing -- in the spirit of tickets, sprints, etc. -- do happen. They're called pre-production. It takes years (months if you're lucky) to set up how everything will run on set. Producers have a huge list of actionables (tickets), and there is constant iteration (sprints) of parts of the script, of what the film's visual look will be, the tone, figuring out the budget, the crew, etc. And there are huge differences in responsibility between producer and director. A producer doesn't "run around speaking in precise terms" when that would step on the feet of the director, the cinematographer, etc. That would be micromanaging and unprofessional. The producer does very much stick to "user stories". When film crews want to change something, they don't "just do it". They very much do check in with the director or showrunner.

I suspect you're talking about execution, where everyone does "just do" things. When filming, every minute counts and shit needs to get done. Yes, every single person is tremendously empowered to do what's right, within their remit. But that only works because preproduction already worked out most of the kinks, and they should all basically be on the same page. But even then, things constantly go south. Shots take hours to set up and then turn out to be wrong for an infinite number of reasons. There are endless compromises. And during that process, only one person is in charge -- the director -- because they have to make a ton of decisions to compensate for all the things going wrong. So it's teamwork... but it's also a dictatorship and once the director makes a decision after collecting the input they want you do not argue.

You seem to be under the impression that film production is somehow more individually empowering or trusting than software development. It's not.

I had the opposite opinion of Andor's cinematography. On a nice OLED, everything looked so gray and flat because most scenes were devoid of true dark blacks or bright whites or vivid colors; like every detail on every scene had to be softly uniformly lit so it could be seen. All the beautiful shot composition was defeated by the color grading and lighting that just screamed that it was targeted towards lower common denominator streaming quality screens and not theaters.

Whole time I thought there was really no point watching on an OLED or in HDR cause it's not taking advantage of either.

You can even see it on the photos in the article. The BTS photographs have contrast and blacks while the stills from the show are muted and gray.

The whole series basically looked like it was trying to recreate the "Shot on Google Pixel" look and completely opposite of HBO's black on black on black.

In film, they say "we'll fix it in post" as a joke. In software development, they treat it as a reality, except they never get around to it.

This is how software development compares to other fields: https://xkcd.com/2030/

Software development really has gone off the deep end. In any other field, people actually document what they do, and verify that it works, before releasing anything. Restaurants have recipes and food handling requirements, manufacturers have tolerances and verification, architects have building code, warehouses have inventory management, and so on and so forth. Because non-software development relies on products that actually work, and are not built around the meta game of abusing arbitrary metrics, workers can rely on other departments to make sensible choices.

Fun fact: Waterfall development never existed; it's a straw man argument against the common sense idea of finishing what your working on, before starting something new.

AI is going to pop the bubble of software development, not because it's good at it, but because because the entire field is too broken to compete against it.

I echo the sound/dialog complaint for Andor as well. I think it's one of the few high production budget shows in recent memory that sounded like it was mixed for 2.0 audio.

Watching on my 7.1 setup was actually more annoying than watching on my computer with 2.0. There's a very obvious bass-boost as if they assumed there isn't subwoofer in the setup, and dialog didn't get any clearer with a dedicated center, it was still kinda floaty across the front. Surround channels just sounded like they echo'd the L/R channels.

Not OP but Andor is definitely "up there" for me.

My two favorite shows ever are Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (w/ Alec Guinness), The Wire, The Simpsons seasons 1-8.