fuzzynormal

For an older guy like me, these examples are the reasons I'm a bit loyal to this EOSHD. It's a website, not a marketing "platform." And the way it's run reminds me of the young-information-super-highway-idealism of what the internet had potential to be. Also, I especially like the irony that the title of the website is now an anachronism...in less than a decade. And that titular company is routinely and harshly critiqued here. That's simply something backwardly pure. That would never exist if it had to get filtered through a corporate system; probably would have ad 3 re-branding launches by now if that was the case. EOSHD, I guess, is kind of like visiting an awesome chef-run-restaurant in a town that only has corporate fast-food franchises in it. You can get fed in both, but you can only get a proper meal from one.

Yup, it was a mediocre film and Patty Jenkins certainly did a mediocre job with a mediocre script. Still, I liked what they were trying to do with the antagonist. Different, at least. But that premise? eh. But that's what corporate creations do, sprinkle in bits and pieces of things they hope will expand their audience. It's marketing. Whether it be two females smooching in Star Wars or a male idiot as a bad guy in a woman-super-hero-film. I'm blase' by it, really. The reaction to the film is more interesting than the film. Bad movies come and go all the time. Welcome to modern life. We're all monkeys being pushed around by algorithms. So much so we just had an insurrection here in the USA that was directly aided by such. That's how serious this sort of stuff is. Anyone that liked gritty 70's/80's stuff like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy was probably on board with those types of films being mashed-up with a super-villian character. I was. Pretty much the same sentiment I'm offering. The thing is a lot of people actually want to forget where they came from. Coming from a crap place ain't exactly anything one should want to continue to emulate. I love my small MI hometown for sentimental reasons, but I preferred to leave behind the BS attitudes that are prevalent in that township. Other things I hold onto.

You're kinda in the biz and from Detroit, yeah? As you undoubtedly know, the industry is populated with creatives from meager backgrounds as well as the affluent. I think the main reason you get an ideological skew is simply that in order to succeed in accomplished merit, one has to get the hell off the farm and into a much bigger world. Rural is conservative and homogeneous, Urban is progressive and heterogeneous. People are attracted and then adapt to those environments and expectations. That's human nature. It's true in many industries outside of entertainment. Also, if the big studio movie industry is anything, it's a barometer of popular culture, or at least striving as a business to hit the balance of lowest-common-denominator-appeal. I consider Hollywood creations to be a pretty accurate mirror to who we are; take that as you will. So....movies are trying to get more woke? Guess what, so is global society. Might be annoying and deserve some push back, but there you go. As for DC "tone" whiplash, when has it been anything but? Not only is it all over the map, they're usually on the north and south poles of a Mercator projection.

And now you see the fruit of this reality.

I’m not implying the US carried the burden of victory in Europe. For that you have to hand it to the Russians and their relentless war of attrition. Of course the Brits holding on and keeping their front a challenge made a big difference. I’m talking about coming out of the thing being in the best shape. Political clout. Natural resources unmolested. Banging economy. A lot of the German scientists. —The post war boom was incredible. The atomic age in the USA was filled with affluence and optimism. The goal in WWII may have been to take down fascism, but we certainly got rewarded in the aftermath. Also, we’re a nation of citizens that are very much isolationists, (not as much as 80 years ago) but our government was certainly emboldened by WWII to change that attitude. Still, insular attitudes by most US citizens is a definitely a fact. Barely 40% have a passport.

Old Canon video cameras used to shoot low shutter too. I remember shooting 15 fps hi-8 video for my "dramatic" moments. That's not really step printing though. I did stumble across a neat little in-camera effect back in the day. Shot 8fps shutter with my XH-A1 and then would ramp up the footage in post. Lots of camera blur, and if you filmed your subject moving in slow-mo, it looked like stop motion animation.

Super common in 80's movies. It kind of came into vogue for a stretch. Think Luke Skywalker facing Ghost-Vader in the Dark Side cave on Dagobah. I'm not sure what popular movie initially leaned really hard into the effect and pulled it off, but I seem to recall Lucas was enamored with the look and that's why we see it in Empire Strikes Back. I just remember seeing it often...war movies, cop movies, dramas, etc. --since I watched a ton of HBO and Cinemax back in the day. Oh god, I just remembered the Tarzan movie made by John Derek! I think they shot a 45 minute movie and decided to pad it out with that effect to reach 90 minutes. That was a "too much cocaine on set need to fix a problem we created" use of the technique, not an aesthetic.

All that said, art thrives in chaos, as it should. That too is human nature. Whatever models exist to help create that art might change, but it'll happen. Yes, in the brave new world it will have a harder time to rise above the noise, but the good stuff will be always be vibrant and endure. Always remember when looking back into the past and considering art that what survives also existed amongst a sea of mediocrity. We recognize the good stuff because previous generation have curated it for us.

"personal attributes above don’t stand out in a modern show-biz style argument on TV news, let alone in a tabloid newspaper, which is how we decide who we elect." As it is in all democracies. We endure the mood swings of populism. I do think we've basically drifted away from the solemnity of attitudes that affected culture after WWII and we're leaning hard back into humanity's default mode. Your anecdote about Germany supports this argument, I believe. Their culture reflects the gravitas of a nation that learned lessons in a very hard and disturbing way. From my perspective in the states, Americans are isolationists so we have an unfortunate ability to be narcissistic, knee-jerk-contrarian, and insular. We're doomed to have non-serious people elect other non-serious people until that way creates a crisis and tragedy....then we'll all be like, "damn, we can't do that anymore." A few generations will pass, rinse-repeat. WWII interrupted this cycle and also heaved a victor/spoils unto us right at the height of the industrial revolution, so we've been on the happy side of the scale for a short stretch. We're spoiled children, to be it bluntly --and now our toys are breaking or have broken. Throw in a pandemic that basically is trying to steal our last lollipop and you see how the Boomers react to it. Also, the whole lock-down thing exposes a flaw I can't stand regarding a global economy. I'd much more prefer micro-economies regionally based that would create more local employment in the trades and food distribution, but that model is an unfortunate fantasy and has many flaws as well. Eh, that's a tangent. Like you said, it's always a choice of trying to decide what's the lesser of two evils. Nobody likes doing that. We here, unfortunately, have been conditioned to think we're entitled to the best of anything we want.

Here's a fun anecdote. In 2019 I did a "4-wall" tour of a doc my wife and I made. I'd set up screenings with theaters in the area that were willing to rent out their auditoriums. Basically we took it on the road to a bunch of local meet-ups with groups that supported the theme of the film. We did this in conjunction with our film fest run so we were able to bounce in and out of region where the film was accepted. The story had a niche appeal so we were able to pull about 50-75 people, on average, into the theaters wherever we sold tickets. As such, I made a DCP. Not the first time I did that, but it was the first time I traveled with the DCP and watched it on multiple screens in multiple theaters. Here's the deal. It looked different in almost every theater I took it into. The variable of sound quality was even more intense; usually in an unfortunate way. With DCP visuals at least , theoretically, you should be getting a standardized visual experience -- as the projectors and media are supposedly tightly controlled. Well, nah. Far from it. For every theater that had well informed skilled people working the projection, just as many were kids with the priority job of selling popcorn. Sometimes it was a struggle to to explain the concept of aspect ratio to the projectionist. The state of their DCP equipment was all over the map too. Although, there was one grand old theater in upstate New York that not only sounded amazing, but had the best color rendition, biggest screen, and the sharpest resolution of them all. That one? They didn't have a DCP projector. I played the film from a PC laptop off a 8-bit 1080p .mp4 usuing a high-end consumer projector. I don't know who their technician was at that theater, but they REALLY had it dialed in. Restored my faith in the movie-going experience, that show. Point is, you can round and round about standards and whatnot, but you can't really adjust for the chance of what's going to happen in the real world. After all, you can't really overcome ignorance you can only hope to alleviate it a little bit here and there. So, yeah, fight the good fight if you want, but it's a war of attrition and the other side has more troops.

You build what you want to an acceptable baseline that satisfies you and then release it into the wild. What happens after that is anybody's guess. If you think video is bad, you should try making music recordings and then giving it over to the world.

Guess I missed the sarcasm? It was just a joke?

No he won't. Sheeesh. Welp, I stand corrected, yet again. I'm pretty good at falsely thinking I've got a handle on stuff only to be proven otherwise by the informational super highway. Curse you technological marvel that's paving the road to humanity's latest ruin!

Well help me out here a little bit then. Are we somehow entitled to not having to hear about someone else's opinion? Am I misreading the implication? People form opinions by thinking with their free mind, so what are you getting at? Someone holds a contrarian view to someone else doesn't cancel opinions. It's a disagreement in a market full of ideas and opinions. Say what you want and deal with the repercussions. As it should be. You don't often get to fling unfettered rhetoric on the internet without some push back from people with different ideas on things. And this article isn't anywhere near any sort of rhetorical bomb anyway.

Like Andrew mentioned, the director wanted to invert gender conventions. Since it's a POV of the characters that are flipped from the societal norm we start to see how the norm is kind of perverted to begin with. That the movie is pure trash, has horrible narrative flaws, AND sucks hard in most areas of movie making is actually weirdly highlighting this inversion. That's typical "Hot Take BS," but it's a big super hero movie so we talk about it. Also, we're used to females and minorities begin treated as non-serious silly characters all the time. The fact that WW84's antagonist is a campy-white-guy-emotional-train-wreck-doofus is one of the few things I actually liked about the movie. Is it progress that woke-shit can be be disposable storytelling nonsense just like all other cultural pop nonsense? Aside from that, I found the move horrible. My wife liked it. She;s more tolerant of superficial trope'y silliness. And, tbf, shit movies made by guys and gals get ignored all the time. We're still in the novel stages of big-event pop culture flicks being more accepting about gender, so maybe it just seems like WW84 is somehow more important than it is. No he won't. Sheeesh. He might get challenged for his opinion, yes. Unless Andrew feels like he's somehow entitled to an assailable opinion, enduring online slings and arrows shouldn't really be a problem. Not all people are fragile and afraid of debate from strangers. I don't know Andrew personally, but from all I've read from him over the past 8 years I don't think being afraid of debate is part of his nature.

Is this a variation on post hoc ergo propter hoc?

FWIW, he is the boss. His company is making that film.

Therein lies your answer. Mitigate the threat seriously (which we do not do in the USA) and continue on as much as possible. A new disease is going to wreak havoc. Decent leadership tries to help minimize the trauma of it. Bad leadership makes it worse. Brasil vs. New Zealnd for example. USA vs. Japan.

Ya new to the internet? 😉

Most of my work is documentaries, and the ability to store hundreds of hours of source/proxy footage on CHEAP slow portable hard drives --and edit with footage off those slow drives is a wonderful reality of proxies editing. The few times I've wished I could jump right into it without any transcoding are few and far between. However, when it happened I was certainly desperate for a fast machine, no question. I'd also have to admit that having powerful PC's are just kind of fun. Still, the fact that I can effectively and productively edit on very modest gear is pretty amazing to me...a guy that used to edit on rigs costing over a half a million dollars.

For someone that says he doesn't want to build, sure seems like you jumped through a lot of hoops to get that PC! Not that I'm not impressed, and you got a HP supported Enterprise System, just seems like a chore. I'm transitioning off of PC editing and will just pay the "Apple Tax" for their computers. Yeah, it's more expensive, but oh well. The biggest concern with a new Apple is getting the thing out of the box. OTOH, I might Hackintosh my old PC just for grins...but I'm not going to rely on that sort of futzing around to be my main editing rig. (which, honestly, my editing is not THAT demanding anyway. I'm a make-everything-proxies-kind-of-guy, so powerful editing rigs aren't a necessity)

I'm not worried. The tools'll always be there. It's simply the beginning of the end of an era. I grew up with camera-bodies-and-lenses...as did those experiencing 150 years of camera technology before me. As that model steps back from the forefront of the market it's just a bit unfortunate as it's something that's not going to be as important as it used to be. I imagine computational photography will exist within 10 years that allow you capture hi-res images from a FF equivalent of 12 to 150 mm FOV, maximum DOF, and then you can literally choose how you want that to look in post. 75mm with a shallow DOF of that emulates f1.2? No problem. Dial it up in your phone, you're good to go. You want anamorphic bokeh? Be sure to tick that box while you're at it. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a 360 camera and you literally can crop out whatever image you want during the time the camera was capturing. You don't even have to compose framing on location, just have the camera in the space you deem appropriate then make the more nuanced choices later...all on a 1" sensor capturing 384MP per frame, or something crazy like that.

From a POV of admitted ignorance I feel this to be true. I'd be curious what your website visitor analytics say as a sort of weather vane to the industry --and if it confirms such opinion.

This jibes with my uneducated opinion of the psychology of nationalistic folks. I personally believe they actively seek out ideological reassurance more so than others. Derived from insecurity? These are my anecdotal observations, anyway. I think it's why they'll flock to rallies and enjoy them while other citizens are incredulous, if not appalled, by that behavior. Ironic to me that those that claim to be the most stridently individualistic often seem not to be at all.

We're all monkeys, but we used to be monkeys tempered by everyone living lives wherein a majority of time was spent in social interaction. Real, face-to-face social interaction. I'm all for a marketplace of ideas, but when it's anonymous poop flinging, the normal governor of behavior is off. That's bad news. Add to the fact that, as a form of commerce, media companies are very sophisticate delivering curated bags of poop to people....? In very broad strokes, this is what happens when you decide to manipulate biology for profit.