Haha, not to take anything away from the article but I found it funny that it starts with saying that the colors are "extremely saturated", but the image they chose for the article looks actually somewhat de-saturated to me (or if not de-saturated, at least not unnaturally saturated).
Yeah, that image is definitely not "extremely saturated", as can be verified by saving it, opening it up in GIMP or Photoshop, and turning up the saturation.
Edit: later she complains about "muddy colors", which in my interpretation of "muddy", would mean the opposite of "extremely saturated".
I also thought it was interesting that the article complained about the actors being slathered in makeup, when that's all TV. You can only tell because Netflix shoots in 4k and you can actually see it for a change. But the same thing is true when you see network TV shows in 4k. It's the makeup department using their standard HD techniques because that's what most people have, but it doesn't look so good in 4k.
Exactly akin to how actors in early movies had such dramatic makeup because that was the standard for stage actors (in order to allow the makeup to be visible from the audience).
But is it what the post claims? Dark, overly saturated, lit with neon colors, caked on makeup and puckered seams in the costumes? I don't see any of that in their sole "example"
It doesn't help that their example has, like, 10 pixels. Guess the pixel factory ran out when they got their screenshot.
> I think this is just clickbait... find something popular, trash it,
They don't trash it. This is what they actually say about the overall quality of The Sandman:
> Against all odds, Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman is a very good show.
"A very good show".
They then go on to claim there's a general "look" of cheapness to Netflix shows which means one can usually tell something was produced by Netflix. They describe some general characteristics, and they don't do the best job at actually displaying examples of said characteristics. Though I do know what they mean, having watched a few episodes of the show (which I like).
Every article has an intended audience. When I have a complaint like this, I just assume that the audience was somebody else. Mostly I just move on, but sometimes I'll take the time to do enough research that I understand.
As an occasional writer, I think that's great. I like writing 101-level pieces from time to time, but I'd go mad if I couldn't write for a more specific audience. E.g. I really like commenting here because I can just trust that people, say, know what git is and the constellation of common opinions about it. Not only would explaining all that "take effort", but for people familiar, it comes across as boring filler.
> The lessons learned and art created during that time will remain and enrich the “video” or whatever you want to call the replacement for cinema.
It wont, though. That’s the thing. It’s the same thing that happened to classical animation. A hundred years of technique and mastery passed down from generation to generation, now completely lost.
Does it not live on in all ways that matter in anime? I’m not attached to a production format or a label. The future will not be short of cartoons nor will it be short of films that move people. Sure they may be now alongside a massive scale of what you don’t like but that’s the beauty of the information web.
The good anime production methods were invented in ~the 80s - 60-70s anime were based on looking at Disney once and then figuring out how to do it for much less than a reasonable budget. 70s anime is painful to look at, kind of like if you made a show out of stop motion cardboard cutouts.
So I wouldn't really call them generational. They are suffering though, as they took on too much business without getting paid enough for it, and the studios can't keep up.
Back in the day, you could always tell ABC, CBS, and NBC shows apart by their lighting and coloring. Watch Rosanne and Happy Days (ABC) and compare with old Magnum PI and 60 minutes (CBS) and Cosby Show or Cheers (NBC).
Yes! This was especially obvious to me as a kid watching all the popular 90s sitcoms with my mom every evening.
ABC shows (oddly with the exception of Roseanne, now that you mention, that set really balanced it out) always had a bright, almost washed out look, eg Ellen, Boy Meets World, Drew Carey Show. NBC shows always looked more cozy and lived-in regardless of story location, eg Just Shoot Me, Friends, Seinfeld.
I've always thought so, too! Cool to see it discussed here because I'm not sure I've ever talked to anyone about it other than my wife.
She finds it strange that I can tell what service or channel a show is on and we've joked that its a Letterman-esque "stupid human trick" that I can do it. I can even tell the difference between football games on NBC, CBS and FOX without seeing the score bug.
It's funny to me that Netflix has such strict standards for cameras, but their content delivery is usually such low quality. Maybe my friends with netflix just aren't paying enough to get decent-looking video?
One example that I remember is a horror movie where a bogey comes out of a dark doorway. I was totally distracted from the scene by the atrocious brightness levels. I won't even call it "banding", because that implies a sort of geometric layout to the levels - this was more like "blocking". It was even worse than I would normally expect from dark bt.709 content. I assume the issue was something like their compression eliminated any natural dithering that would make dark zones look OK in SDR content.
Hopefully their compression strategy does a better job with dark content using bt.2100 transfers.
SDR video barely has the bit depth to represent dark content uncompressed (16-235 YUV 4:2:0 is quite less than 0-255 RGB 480p). Highly saturated red and blue scenes also can't be represented well.
Higher bit depth video helps here, but it seems like people want to sell you 4K even if all you want is HDR. And nobody wants to pay for the 4K Netflix tier.
Couldn't find the point of this article, like others have claimed. But I did find it interesting they messed with the aspect ratio in The Sandman. I watched the trailer and it's incredibly obvious. A weird creative choice if you ask me. It would annoy me so much to watch that. Reminds me of my dad. Going to his house and seeing his nice large 16:9 TV showing stretched 4:3 content. And me being too polite to tell him that he's being uncivilized.
It's not just changes in aspect ratio (i.e. the shape of the frame). In Sandman, they compress the actual image, so everything looks stretched vertically.
I was exited for Sandman. It had the potential to be very good, good actors, good budget, decently long timeline, etc. Unfortunately it got "Netflix'd" and suffers for it. It's kind of bland and boring. Visually it's not very interesting and the music is alright but could have been lifted from something else entirely. Listen here [1]
The best comparison I can think of is the BBC's Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Similarly fantastic source material, the show had a lower budget but is far more interesting to watch and that comes down to set design, cinematography, editing choice, etc.
It's like the Sandman production crew picked the safest possible choice at every opportunity.
I feel very similar about Disney Plus. The shows are all very safe and bland. Even the hyped ones, at the end, I kind of feel like I just watched the adult version of Airbud, you know?
Yeah; it took about 5 minutes for me to go from initial sign up, to realizing the Miramax catalog is completely missing from Disney+, to deciding to cancel it ASAP.
The Mandalorian was OK, I guess, but meh. Also, they're censoring the back catalog in offensive ways (Daryl Hannah's disturbing case of carpet butt comes to mind.)
Anyway, I'd pay for access to the back catalog they bought monopoly rights to. Since it's not for sale, my money is going elsewhere.
I'm finding The Sandman enjoyable for what it is, so far (3 episodes into it).
Nothing to rave about, and it suffers from some dodgy production issues, but then again the comics (er, "graphic novels") didn't really have amazing artwork anyway! It was all about the novel (for its time) and adult story by Neil Gaiman.
I don't find Sturridge's emotionless face distracting, because the Sandman is pretty inscrutable anyway. What I do find distracting is his youth; it doesn't really convey the agelessness of the character, I would have expected either someone a bit older, or one of those real-life people you can never tell their age.
Yeah, I read they avoided offers for a live action for years but I'm not sure why it's sacrosanct. Maybe it came in "early" qua graphic novels (versus comic books).
In "An evening with Kevin Smith" (which you can buy, or find on Youtube), he details how around the same time Jon Peters was trying to persuade him to make "Superman Returns" which featured a "Giant Mechanical Spider". Neil Gaiman also got this pitch for a Sandman plot. Eventually the giant spider ended up in "Wild Wild West" with Will Smith. We all know how that went.
Well, it's a pretty good fantasy comic for adults. It's not the only one, nor the first, but it's pretty good. And fans tend to be zealous of those. For many of us, it holds a special place in our comics-reading education, and so we would not wish to see it demeaned but yet another low quality adaptation that completely misses the point or dumbs everything down.
Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be the case with this adaptation of The Sandman :)
edit: this is what Gaiman has to say about The Sandman's cultural significance:
"And after 30 years, “Sandman,” at this point, is probably the single best-selling series of graphic novels ever published in the U.S."
I actually had a reverse experience. I expected it to be butchered and unwatchable but it turned out really nice. Much different from the comic but this made be think that Sandman is not an usual piece of text but a kind of mythology and it suites it to be retold differently. So yea, it was "Netflix'd" but I think its a feature and not a bug. Each storyteller tells the story in their way and this is very in-line with the core idea of Sandman. Besides I am genuinely happy to see people watching it after so many years of being a fan.
I guess the Sandman TV show benefited from Neil Gaiman's watching over it. He claims he blocked many a bad Sandman adaptation from being produced, and this one -- with its inevitable changes -- has his approval and oversight. I think it shows.
I found many of the changes to be an improvement. The early comics really hooked into the DC mythos, and while that was cool as a comics nerd to see how all that fit together, it would be unwieldy in a standalone series. I particularly like the changes they made for Dee/Dr. Destiny.
I haven't read the original material, but I really enjoyed the show as well. Though I think I enjoyed American Gods S1 and then lost interest somewhere around S2 or S3, so I'm raising my expectations too much just yet
>>> Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell
I had forgotten about that show. It was really great! Just 2 cents.
Sandman definitely has a feel that will date it. I am enjoying it (having the Sandman go to hell is a great plot mechanism) but I don't know about the re-watchability. I don't think this is limited to Netflix, I feel like there is definitive 2020's mise en scene, which I don't think Truffaut or Godard would approve of.
The strange, weirdly dramatic style…I’m trying to put my finger on it and having a tough time - the tone in general bothered me.
But nothing bothered me more than the actor himself. The way he spoke, his ridiculously teen angst emo attitude…his hair alone.
I just could absolutely not take him or the show seriously whatsoever, because - even though I’d never seen it - I could literally not get the picture of Edward the vampire from Twilight out of my mind almost any time he was on screen.
There were several times I laughed out loud during periods which were supposed to be dead serious moments - and most of those times were simply due to the hilarious emo attitude of the show’s lead.
Was it intentional? He plays off like a character from a Young Adult novel, not from a legendary Graphic Novel author. The lead was just cringe incarnate.
That's true to the comics. If anything, they toned down the hair.
His sister tells him "You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification in this or any other plane!"
In an increasing amount of shows, I won't mention the specific ones as to not stir the pot, I dislike the main character so much that I hope something bad happens to them (in the show, to be clear).
Preachy, melodramatic, immature, one idiotic decision after the other.
>But nothing bothered me more than the actor himself. The way he spoke, his ridiculously teen angst emo attitude…his hair alone.
No that's just Morpheus. In the comics he is overly angsty and gets called out on it by others and that a major plot point him having to get over himself in the comic they will be basing the next season on.
I don’t know how to say it but it feels like it has no gravitas. Like the original lord of the rings had gravitas, battlefield galactic a has gravitas, the wire has gravitas. What’s making this so… bland? It’s not just the writing I presume, I don’t know.
For me the biggest issue in modern movies and tv isn’t the “Netflix aesthetic”, but the overwhelming prevalence of what I think of as the perpetual golden hour.
It used to be that by virtue of the golden hour being necessarily a very short slice of time in which physical sets could make use of that especially dramatic lighting it was only used it some scenes. Now it feels like every outdoor scene in every film is shot with that lighting because it’s all just CGI and they can make the light look however they want. The result is a massively distracting (to me) effect of the lighting looking over-engineered, I guess I’d call it? It seems like every single scene is either a night scene or shot at 6pm on a sunny summer day. It’s more off-putting than badly done cgi.
Yeah seriously, the “perpetual golden hour” phenomenon goes way back. Bruckheimer 80s blockbusters were big on this. Even in the 1970s, shooting large portions of a full movie during “magic hour” was staring to become a trend, see for example 1978’s Days of Heaven[0]:
> Much of the film would be shot during magic hour…
It's not always CGI. They are using LED lighting panels to create the exact lighting conditions they want. Some movies and shows are using giant overhead panels to create hyper-focused idealized conditions.
A lot of times, it is overdone, but in a movie like Knives Out it helped with the indoor scenes.
> For me the biggest issue in modern movies and tv isn’t the “Netflix aesthetic”
For me the biggest issue is not the contents but the Netflix player behavior. You press a Stop button to take a better look at some nice girl’s uhm… face and the frame is covered up for some seconds with “Netflix” and movie title. It can be ok if you pressed Stop to brew some more tea - but when you hit Play the same titles block not just a still frame, but some seconds of a movie! It’s so annoying it’s bordering on deliberate cruelty.
Worst offenders in the UI for me are the autoplay (why can I not browse in silence
?) and the amount of steps needed to get rid of something so it doesn't turn up in 'continue watching' anymore. But yes frame-by-frame would be neat to have, though realistically: none of the major video platforms really have that right?
That's not entirely related to Netflix, but there is an analogy with when video and filmakers started using photographic prime lens for their videos some fifteen years ago (or so), there was this constant and fast pull focus in every scene that almost made you sick with nausea...
even worse is how they assume everybody watches on a great HDR display in a dark room and make scenes really dark accordingly, so I can't see a damn thing.
While we're listing our Netflix gripes - Why is it so hard to watch the credits? Often there's a good song playing and no simple way to avoid it skipping to some other programme, while the emotional resonance of what I've just watched sits with me.
Yeah, I hate the forced "auto-play" and forced "next episode" functions immensely. Let me watch the credits and enjoy the music without kicking me out of my show! At least on HBO Max you can press the "up" arrow key and it'll let the credits roll.
Or it could be a movie like The Revenant where the one scene took so long to shoot that they could only shoot during golden hour to keep the look the same throughout the multiple weeks of shooting that scene. Lots of stories about crew members getting frostbite and other tales of woe on shooting that flick.
I first heard about network styles listening to Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould on the _Better Call Saul Insider_ podcast. Many studios have them.
A unified style streamlines production at the cost of artistry. A typical television episode has just a few days to film. So the more creative a crew becomes in their framing, lighting, audio recording etc. the less time they have to move through the shot list. It takes a talented (and expensive) crew to make this magic happen within 5-10 days.
It's to the credit of Sony and AMC that they gave Marshall Adams et. al. the flexibility to make a masterpiece out of _Better Call Saul_. But it was expensive and risky. Not every script justifies that risk and expense. Without a style guide to fall back on I think we would see fewer series overall.
"Extremely saturated" as in extremely de-saturated and then highlighted? Looks just awful. Even worse in 4K. That incorrect shallow focus range that does not exist outside N is also a pain.
The screenshot in the article pretty much sums it up. Looks terrible.
I have a different problem: I hate everything shot in Canada as a stand-in for american cities. Everything looks wrong: the streets are clean, there's almost no cars, and everybody is well-dressed. Even the people who are dressed up to look homeless look well-dressed.
I can really annoy my wife by shouting out where something was filmed -- "that's obviously toronto!" and "that's obviously british columbia" but you could easily train an ML to do the same thing.
I used to laugh about the Canada effect on Stargate SG-1. It's a well-written show about traveling to other planets in the galaxy, but almost every planet looks like a forest in British Columbia because that's where it was shot.
I'm watching through SG-1 for the first time right now and as someone who grew up in BC I am actually delighted by this.
It's very fun for me seeing little easter eggs about my home region. And one huge one: They called a planet "Kelowna", which is just the name of a city near Vancouver. But who would know that unless you live nearby?
Ah, yeah, SG-1 is a good example. The 100 is another (post-apocalyptic earth). And Battlestar Galatica.
In retrospect I realized I grew up with a few major styles, including "shot in a back lot in LA" (Back to the Future), "shot on a ranch outside LA" (Little House on the Prairie), "movie set in city actually shot in city by director who loved the city" (the Conversation), and "shot at Elmstree" (Star Wars interiors).
Ultimately I want to watch a movie where I can't tell what forest it was shot it, especially if it's off-planet.
Was watching "Pieces of Her" last night (it's terrible) and there was a rendezvous at Pier 29 in SF, which was obviously not shot in SF. Distractingly so. The worst example I can think of lately.
The only thing worse than something set in SF but not shot there is something shot there, but non-contiguously. See the Bullet car chase scene for an example. How did he get from the Marina to the airport so fast?
I've lived half my life in SF or LA. Movies set in LA are even more maddening than movies set in SF, because movies set in LA seem to aggressively make non-contiguous geography a hallmark of their LA scenes. And if you see an LA-set movie at Graumann's Chinese theater, the crowd will be particularly vociferous about these blatant errors.
There's an infamous (in ireland) bollywood fight sequence which takes place on dublin's luas teams but cut to cut jumps from one line to the other to places there aren't even tram lines
Vancouver can pass for most US cities. Just not LA. The empty streets and well dressed extra is just because everything was purposely removed from area for the shot and nothing natural remains. So shooting in Chicago or Albuquerque has the same result.
I notice that as well. Being from Canada originally, I also immediately spot the Canadian accents, even if they are trying to suppress them or do a generic American accent.
I was re-watching the first season of The X-Files and every episode I was trying to pick out where in the Vancouver the scene was shot. I was laughing when I immediately noticed they were in White Rock, BC, which was supposed to be a small town in Connecticut.
All this is more passable to me, though, than the general trend of having characters so well put together in movies. Their hair, makeup and costume is so clearly done by experts, and they are all attractive. I wish characters looked more like regular people in movies and less like models.
> I was re-watching the first season of The X-Files and every episode I was trying to pick out where in the Vancouver the scene was shot. I was laughing when I immediately noticed they were in White Rock, BC, which was supposed to be a small town in Connecticut.
In the episode "E.B.E.", Mulder & Scully go to Mattawa, Washington. As someone who grew up near Mattawa, I can assure you it looks nothing at all like British Columbia! Pull up the episode, then check out Google Street View near Mattawa for a good time.
(also, they would never get that close to a Hanford building, there are miles and miles of open sagebrush between the fence and any facilities...)
Yeah, this drives me crazy. As a DC local, the worst for me are subway scenes that are supposed to be inside Metro/WMATA stations. Underground DC Metro stations have a distinctive architectural style.[1] They also regularly get the look of DC suburbs wrong. "This character lives in Falls Church" but is shown in a neighborhood that could only exist in Great Falls or maybe McLean.
this is what happens when you're making "content", as martin scorsese described it.
it's like every new show they make feels like the final season of a show that lost it's spark many seasons ago - just made out of obligation to a contract. conveyor belt tv.
I can't help but feel like article kind of beats around the bush with the answer, i.e. that there are tradeoffs between artistic freedom and streaming performance/compression. I'm guessing Netflix did their best to find cameras that worked well with the compression and streaming infrastructure that Netflix has. There's probably no perfect answer, and I can understand why they'd want to specific hardware for their productions.
It's kind of fascinating that it's ended up forming a certain style, but I wouldn't be surprised to see engineering concerns start to permeate other streaming services in terms of style.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadEdit: later she complains about "muddy colors", which in my interpretation of "muddy", would mean the opposite of "extremely saturated".
I think this is just clickbait... find something popular, trash it, and use the backlash to drive ad revenue.
Then again, it is vice.com, so yeah, that's probably a given.
It doesn't help that their example has, like, 10 pixels. Guess the pixel factory ran out when they got their screenshot.
They don't trash it. This is what they actually say about the overall quality of The Sandman:
> Against all odds, Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman is a very good show.
"A very good show".
They then go on to claim there's a general "look" of cheapness to Netflix shows which means one can usually tell something was produced by Netflix. They describe some general characteristics, and they don't do the best job at actually displaying examples of said characteristics. Though I do know what they mean, having watched a few episodes of the show (which I like).
I guess that would take effort though while a rant can be typed out in an hour
As an occasional writer, I think that's great. I like writing 101-level pieces from time to time, but I'd go mad if I couldn't write for a more specific audience. E.g. I really like commenting here because I can just trust that people, say, know what git is and the constellation of common opinions about it. Not only would explaining all that "take effort", but for people familiar, it comes across as boring filler.
Occasionally, there's something good. When that happens, I subscribe, watch the content, then unsubscribe again.
There might be a lot of hidden jewels in there but they're hard to find because they're buried under a mountain of unwatchable stuff.
There's an incredibly detailed set of guidelines that helps them achieve this: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/categories/3...
Normalized colors across multiple filming seshes.
The lessons learned and art created during that time will remain and enrich the “video” or whatever you want to call the replacement for cinema.
It wont, though. That’s the thing. It’s the same thing that happened to classical animation. A hundred years of technique and mastery passed down from generation to generation, now completely lost.
So I wouldn't really call them generational. They are suffering though, as they took on too much business without getting paid enough for it, and the studios can't keep up.
Except that hollywood have only hollywood people and netflix have hollywood people AND the rest of the world producing for it.
Just compare S1 of Game of Thrones against S1 of The Witcher produced 10 years later.
ABC shows (oddly with the exception of Roseanne, now that you mention, that set really balanced it out) always had a bright, almost washed out look, eg Ellen, Boy Meets World, Drew Carey Show. NBC shows always looked more cozy and lived-in regardless of story location, eg Just Shoot Me, Friends, Seinfeld.
She finds it strange that I can tell what service or channel a show is on and we've joked that its a Letterman-esque "stupid human trick" that I can do it. I can even tell the difference between football games on NBC, CBS and FOX without seeing the score bug.
One example that I remember is a horror movie where a bogey comes out of a dark doorway. I was totally distracted from the scene by the atrocious brightness levels. I won't even call it "banding", because that implies a sort of geometric layout to the levels - this was more like "blocking". It was even worse than I would normally expect from dark bt.709 content. I assume the issue was something like their compression eliminated any natural dithering that would make dark zones look OK in SDR content.
Hopefully their compression strategy does a better job with dark content using bt.2100 transfers.
Higher bit depth video helps here, but it seems like people want to sell you 4K even if all you want is HDR. And nobody wants to pay for the 4K Netflix tier.
The best comparison I can think of is the BBC's Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Similarly fantastic source material, the show had a lower budget but is far more interesting to watch and that comes down to set design, cinematography, editing choice, etc.
It's like the Sandman production crew picked the safest possible choice at every opportunity.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2gCRK-f1pM
The Mandalorian was OK, I guess, but meh. Also, they're censoring the back catalog in offensive ways (Daryl Hannah's disturbing case of carpet butt comes to mind.)
Anyway, I'd pay for access to the back catalog they bought monopoly rights to. Since it's not for sale, my money is going elsewhere.
(Edit: had the wrong actress...)
I didn't find the production values as distracting as Tom Sturridge's eternal, "Blue Steel" face.*
*My wife insists it's actually "El Tigre".
Nothing to rave about, and it suffers from some dodgy production issues, but then again the comics (er, "graphic novels") didn't really have amazing artwork anyway! It was all about the novel (for its time) and adult story by Neil Gaiman.
I don't find Sturridge's emotionless face distracting, because the Sandman is pretty inscrutable anyway. What I do find distracting is his youth; it doesn't really convey the agelessness of the character, I would have expected either someone a bit older, or one of those real-life people you can never tell their age.
https://variety.com/2022/tv/features/the-sandman-premiere-pr...
Basically - lots of proposed adaptations with stupid plots, bad directing, etc.
Ahhh, no it was this article:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220803-the-sandman-how...
In "An evening with Kevin Smith" (which you can buy, or find on Youtube), he details how around the same time Jon Peters was trying to persuade him to make "Superman Returns" which featured a "Giant Mechanical Spider". Neil Gaiman also got this pitch for a Sandman plot. Eventually the giant spider ended up in "Wild Wild West" with Will Smith. We all know how that went.
Well, it's a pretty good fantasy comic for adults. It's not the only one, nor the first, but it's pretty good. And fans tend to be zealous of those. For many of us, it holds a special place in our comics-reading education, and so we would not wish to see it demeaned but yet another low quality adaptation that completely misses the point or dumbs everything down.
Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be the case with this adaptation of The Sandman :)
edit: this is what Gaiman has to say about The Sandman's cultural significance:
"And after 30 years, “Sandman,” at this point, is probably the single best-selling series of graphic novels ever published in the U.S."
I guess the Sandman TV show benefited from Neil Gaiman's watching over it. He claims he blocked many a bad Sandman adaptation from being produced, and this one -- with its inevitable changes -- has his approval and oversight. I think it shows.
Sandman definitely has a feel that will date it. I am enjoying it (having the Sandman go to hell is a great plot mechanism) but I don't know about the re-watchability. I don't think this is limited to Netflix, I feel like there is definitive 2020's mise en scene, which I don't think Truffaut or Godard would approve of.
But nothing bothered me more than the actor himself. The way he spoke, his ridiculously teen angst emo attitude…his hair alone.
I just could absolutely not take him or the show seriously whatsoever, because - even though I’d never seen it - I could literally not get the picture of Edward the vampire from Twilight out of my mind almost any time he was on screen.
There were several times I laughed out loud during periods which were supposed to be dead serious moments - and most of those times were simply due to the hilarious emo attitude of the show’s lead.
Was it intentional? He plays off like a character from a Young Adult novel, not from a legendary Graphic Novel author. The lead was just cringe incarnate.
Preachy, melodramatic, immature, one idiotic decision after the other.
No that's just Morpheus. In the comics he is overly angsty and gets called out on it by others and that a major plot point him having to get over himself in the comic they will be basing the next season on.
This isn't really any different than traditional movie producers or record labels developing cohesive content.
The issue lies elsewhere.
It used to be that by virtue of the golden hour being necessarily a very short slice of time in which physical sets could make use of that especially dramatic lighting it was only used it some scenes. Now it feels like every outdoor scene in every film is shot with that lighting because it’s all just CGI and they can make the light look however they want. The result is a massively distracting (to me) effect of the lighting looking over-engineered, I guess I’d call it? It seems like every single scene is either a night scene or shot at 6pm on a sunny summer day. It’s more off-putting than badly done cgi.
> Much of the film would be shot during magic hour…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Heaven#Principal_photo...
A lot of times, it is overdone, but in a movie like Knives Out it helped with the indoor scenes.
For me the biggest issue is not the contents but the Netflix player behavior. You press a Stop button to take a better look at some nice girl’s uhm… face and the frame is covered up for some seconds with “Netflix” and movie title. It can be ok if you pressed Stop to brew some more tea - but when you hit Play the same titles block not just a still frame, but some seconds of a movie! It’s so annoying it’s bordering on deliberate cruelty.
Except the one named “Torrents” - all others that I tried do not care much about my preferences, yes.
Another one I use all the time is "J" and "L" to seek by 10 seconds.
I can watch almost anything just fine: regular TV, sports, the like. Netflix? Nope, not even on max brightness. And this in the shadow.
A unified style streamlines production at the cost of artistry. A typical television episode has just a few days to film. So the more creative a crew becomes in their framing, lighting, audio recording etc. the less time they have to move through the shot list. It takes a talented (and expensive) crew to make this magic happen within 5-10 days.
It's to the credit of Sony and AMC that they gave Marshall Adams et. al. the flexibility to make a masterpiece out of _Better Call Saul_. But it was expensive and risky. Not every script justifies that risk and expense. Without a style guide to fall back on I think we would see fewer series overall.
The screenshot in the article pretty much sums it up. Looks terrible.
I can really annoy my wife by shouting out where something was filmed -- "that's obviously toronto!" and "that's obviously british columbia" but you could easily train an ML to do the same thing.
It's very fun for me seeing little easter eggs about my home region. And one huge one: They called a planet "Kelowna", which is just the name of a city near Vancouver. But who would know that unless you live nearby?
In retrospect I realized I grew up with a few major styles, including "shot in a back lot in LA" (Back to the Future), "shot on a ranch outside LA" (Little House on the Prairie), "movie set in city actually shot in city by director who loved the city" (the Conversation), and "shot at Elmstree" (Star Wars interiors).
Ultimately I want to watch a movie where I can't tell what forest it was shot it, especially if it's off-planet.
I was re-watching the first season of The X-Files and every episode I was trying to pick out where in the Vancouver the scene was shot. I was laughing when I immediately noticed they were in White Rock, BC, which was supposed to be a small town in Connecticut.
All this is more passable to me, though, than the general trend of having characters so well put together in movies. Their hair, makeup and costume is so clearly done by experts, and they are all attractive. I wish characters looked more like regular people in movies and less like models.
In the episode "E.B.E.", Mulder & Scully go to Mattawa, Washington. As someone who grew up near Mattawa, I can assure you it looks nothing at all like British Columbia! Pull up the episode, then check out Google Street View near Mattawa for a good time.
(also, they would never get that close to a Hanford building, there are miles and miles of open sagebrush between the fence and any facilities...)
1 - https://ggwash.org/images/posts/201410-012227.jpg
-Vancouver
it's like every new show they make feels like the final season of a show that lost it's spark many seasons ago - just made out of obligation to a contract. conveyor belt tv.
It's kind of fascinating that it's ended up forming a certain style, but I wouldn't be surprised to see engineering concerns start to permeate other streaming services in terms of style.