So there's a common complaint regarding popular music that everything's getting mastered increasingly loud, usually referred to as the volume war or loudness war.
I was thinking the other day that using computers to grade the images in contemporary film seems like a similar complaint / concern / shit thing. The whole orange vs. teal thing - making "skin tones pop".
In both cases it's irreparably stripping out detail in the hopes of increasing impact, to seem more dramatic than the preceding thing. Well, maybe "irreparably" is an assumption that future generations will happily counter, but in both cases I feel like it's a bit of a one-way street where somewhere down the track people see the mistakes being made and won't be able to do much about it.
On the other hand, we listen to crackly records and watch similarly crackly movies now - although those are the result of limitations in means rather than shit decisions being made. Still, maybe in the future (if people reject the current mode) we'll just accept bullshit colour grading as a given thing for a particular time period that we have to look beyond?
I was thinking the other day that using computers to grade the images in contemporary film seems like a similar complaint / concern / shit thing. The whole orange vs. teal thing - making "skin tones pop".
In both cases it's irreparably stripping out detail in the hopes of increasing impact, to seem more dramatic than the preceding thing. Well, maybe "irreparably" is an assumption that future generations will happily counter, but in both cases I feel like it's a bit of a one-way street where somewhere down the track people see the mistakes being made and won't be able to do much about it.
On the other hand, we listen to crackly records and watch similarly crackly movies now - although those are the result of limitations in means rather than shit decisions being made. Still, maybe in the future (if people reject the current mode) we'll just accept bullshit colour grading as a given thing for a particular time period that we have to look beyond?