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The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

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Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#361

Post by djhn »

KaiserPro wrote: post #349
jorlow wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only partially true. The problem with LED lights is that they deviate quite a bit from a Planck and/or daylight frequency curve. So you can end up with colors looking different even if the color chart looks right. And even the best Aari LED lights have ssi scores of only ~75. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a part of the effect the author describes.

if that was the case then teal/orange grades would be "impossible" as most lights don't kick out that much teal (~510nm) Not only that, but you can micro adjust the colour of these lights to suit your needs, which means you can have much richer colours on set and not worry about colour cast. if it was such a burden on the film maker, and limited artistic expression, then we'd see holdouts for tungsten lights (in film…

Whenever I've used the local rental house, it's the massive ARRI tungstens that are being loaded in the production trucks.

Although I guess it's their size that makes them stand out, maybe the LEDs I just don't notice.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#363

Post by dekhn »

dylan604 wrote: post #301
woodruffw wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not wrong, but Kubrick famously used some of the fastest lenses available at the time to shoot the candlelight scenes. I believe the folklore is that he had to borrow them from NASA, so it’s probably a stretch to expect that kind of technical availability in general film productions from the period.

>some of the fastest lenses available at the time ?? more like ever. are you suggesting that we have lenses widely available that are faster today?

probably nobody in a non-classified situation has built such a thing recently. But if you put enough engineering into it, you could exceed those parameters today. Glass/glass manufacture, lens shaping, etc all improved tremendously. It would be obscenely expensive; every lens would be completely custom, you'd probably burn through hundreds of blanks before you had something worth using, and there are other, easier ways to achieve low-light imaging anyway.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#364

Post by mejutoco »

dylan604 wrote: post #284
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.…

Clerks and Cube are other movies where this happens.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#365

Post by Izkata »

LarryMullins wrote: post #350
duxup wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where the leads were largely alone on screen only I feel like that is many movies now. The worlds are small and the consequences / events are just there for the primary actors to respond to and seem entirely disconnected from any kind of universe. Massive events happen just for the sake of having a hero mug for the camera. But no consideration otherwise. At this point in the Star Wars universe I expect the regular…

There does seem to be an absence of "angry villagers raid the wizard's tower" stories in the Star Wars universe. Missed opportunity, probably has something to do with Star Wars primarily being escapist fantasy for people who wish to be the wizard. Maybe the EU novels have such stories, but I haven't read those.

There's a scene in the original movie that kind-of explains this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzs-OvfG8tE

> "Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the rebels' hidden fortr-"

From what I remember from wikis the EU novels expanded on this as: Jedi/Sith/force-sensitives are rare enough that even at the height of the Jedi's power, most people believed them to be a myth, that the Jedi Order was more like a powerful religious group of regular people.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#366

Post by parineum »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #354
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…

>Die Hard With a Vengeance, however, acknowledges this reality and comes up with some very creative scenarios for our protagonists to overcome

I hadn't thought about this before but you're correct and it even extends to the antagonist. As they are unravelling his plot, they come up with the question of "how do you drive that much gold through New York without anyone noticing?".

It's a very interesting perspective.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#367

Post by spookthesunset »

whynotminot wrote: post #253
colordrops wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with higher frame rates is the same as higher resolution. It emphasizes even more the poor quality of the content. The low fidelity masks some of this, leaving more to your imagination (which is how impressionism works). If the content were of higher quality then it wouldn't be as much of an issue.

We need to go back to 480i to increase immersion.

What I find funny is looking at older TV shows that were clearly meant to be shown on old analog 4:3 CRT's but shot in film anyway. Now these shows show up in syndication and all that film got scanned as 16:8 HD. Some examples include Seinfeld, Friends, even Wizard of Oz. Many times it feels like you are watching a play instead of an immersive show. All the props look like props instead of something "real"

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#369

Post by crotho »

orbital-decay wrote: post #278

That can't be the result of using LED ligthing, because modern LEDs are really good and don't require much correction in post, yet movies still look like that. In fact, I don't think you can pinpoint this to a single technical reason. It's just the industry converged onto the same recipe book - some of that is cost cutting, some is just massive amounts of A/B testing throughout the years. Demand leads to optimization…

It's a decision with the grading and it's a zeitgeist.

https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d...

There's another article I can't find on it.

It's got nothing to do with netflix. Digital is not to blame either, but it's certainly a catalyst.

It mostly has to do with insecurity surrounding digital and the bizarre idea that saturation is trying to 'emulate' film, (when color timing films was always just been about trying to emulate reality).

You can correct most of this problem with a decent media player. Just play a film in VLC and touch up the saturation and possibly the contrast in the effects settings.

It really doesn't take much adjustment to makes a film that once had a depressing palette suddenly half decent. I can't tolerate watching films through sunglasses so do this pretty often.

It really is a fashion. I've seen an advert for grading software that had a famous photographer casually showing the viewer how he ruins his pictures with this process of desaturation. I've no why people think this looks good, but it is deliberate.

I asked the cinematography reddit once why people do this and got a lot of incoherent responses about how saturation is just trying to emulate film and that it's just how 'new' things should look. Apparently many new filmmakers experience of reality has been through tea-shades on an overcast day. It beggars belief.

Re: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

#370

Post by why-el »

At first I thought this was about how Netflix arranges movies for you to select, where each movie repeats down a horizontal line and you are forever scrolling right in cardinally equivalent but combinatorially different sets of movies. :D

Things you might like:

A, B, C, D

GREAT MOVIES:

B, C, A, D

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