The Weight of Digital Realism

version

Well-known member
Even with Buster Scruggs, theres a little preening like blissblogger was saying that puts me off. Some shots, especially ones in town, look like they have an Instagram filter on them.
It does have a bit of that weird, fuzzy glow to it.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I cant get over how shitty the marvel movies look, talking purely visuals here. I get thats a hack observation, but Im legitimately taken back every time I manage to catch bits of them. just the absolute worst looking pieces of shit.
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luka

Well-known member
Well if thats the current fitness, then developers have to keep up with it, no?

As opposed to when the current fitness/cutting-edge was far less realistic looking.

Unless someone figures out an alternative direction to push the fitness, I don't see how it goes anywhere but toward increasing realism.

The word fitness here makes me recoil a bit. It's true that all these products aspire to the same standard of perfection, but that particular image of perfection is arbitrary and will change. It is interesting that film and games have been sucked into standards of realism that the rest of the arts abandoned long ago.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's also an interesting tension here between engineer and artist in which you imagine this quest for realism as being engineer driven as a technical challenge as opposed to being subject to aesthetic judgements.

That's a somewhat arbitrary distinction in that engineering problems are a massive part of art but I think you know what I mean
 

luka

Well-known member
The competition is between huge lavishly funded studios of technicians. That's what driving the developments.
 

wild greens

Well-known member
"DJ Quik has a theory that when you record on two-inch magnetic tape, the tape picks up the energy in the room, so it ends up on the actual recording."

Where is this from?

I like the idea & it runs quite well with Stone Tape theory I think;


there was a documentary once about a "ghost" hotspot, castle up North- I will try and find it- where the main selling point or reasoning behind it was that several dozen people all experienced the same scenario in a specific wing of the castle or maybe stately home? Mate of mine pointed out quite rightly that this could actually be energy on loop as opposed to a dynamic experience, why are they all experiencing a non-spontaneous moment or sighting etc
 

wild greens

Well-known member
As for digital realism is it not more a case of films/tv/games becoming a much more sprawling team-driven scenario?

I hate the way a lot of things look in modern media but as you move away from the auteur vision towards focus groups, writing rooms, 100s of digital fx artists, the harder it is to maintain singular vision surely
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
As for digital realism is it not more a case of films/tv/games becoming a much more sprawling team-driven scenario?

I hate the way a lot of things look in modern media but as you move away from the auteur vision towards focus groups, writing rooms, 100s of digital fx artists, the harder it is to maintain singular vision surely
i've been watching films recently, after basically a decade of seeing hardly any. the assemblage has changed, ie, all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes has changed. i kind of wonder if it's also just that people have changed so much in that period as well, there is a sense i get of the voice of the internet in the heads of the directors, writers and so on. i watched a few episodes of this series Beef, it really felt to me like it was both preempting and responding to twitter discourses.

definitely the feedback mechanism has changed for all these people, with access to direct responses and commentary from the audience, as well as the second by second metrics, machine learning / regression analyses etc that streaming allows.

but also, it's unprovable, but i have the sense that the people have changed, both the people who are involved in making films and TV and the people watching it.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
if i can continue to go on about something that i know nothing about, there is something that you see in music as well that's to do with the cheapness of digital production. i was watching escape from new york the other day and there is a sense of rigor to the composition of each shot, which i generally find absent from a lot of stuff (that's probably higher budget) that comes onto my screens now. probably loads of people who are interested in films have written about this, but it just must be different shooting with infinite digital harddisk space as compared to shooting with film.

the paralell in music is the tendancy to chuck all sorts of half-baked stuff out onto the internet, which is a practice that it was only rappers and merzbow doing ten years ago, but which is now the default. the contrast is to listening to albums from 2005 or whenever which feel a lot more considered.

it's not a surprise that these forms of cultural production change when the tools change i suppose
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Maybe it is the visual arts eating itself in the way that p2p file sharing > streaming did to the music

The record labels bought the big streaming app and made it's own product disposable and displaced in the ether, the tv streaming makes the visual uniform and algorithm driven, the digital absorbs the physical and the anodyne hegemony begins

Tbh this is probably exactly what page 1 says but i haven't read it
 

luka

Well-known member
Lighting seems to be one of the big differences in contemporary TV and film. Everything's much darker these days, perhaps a cost cutting thing since digital works in low light.
michael pailn's wife is dead. cant beleive you would be so insensitive
 

version

Well-known member
It's funny reading this after I slagged off Nolan in the original post as he's apparently a film purist and adamant about keeping 35 mm alive.

 

luka

Well-known member
pre digital films look weirdly low resolution to me. it used to be digital would make me feel weird now its the other way round my eye has adapted. i rewatched keliors London and couldnt beleive how low resolution it is.
 
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