Yeah the auto-filtering and interpolation that modern tvs do is a crime[quote=“aderack, post:133, topic:2508”]
possibly by association, the smooth framerate tends to feel cheap and tacky to me. Swimmy. Unfinished.
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I can understand this. So far, everyone who I’ve spoken to who was vocally against high framerate was because of association with interlaced TV video, which felt cheap to them
I highly suspect the plasticy look of higher frame rate stuff is in big part because of who is getting the chance to use it. Lord of the Rings for example is already super too touched-up post-production.
TBH I prefer the colour in most cheap PAL TV stuff to most Hollywood/-style films.
Case in point, I guess – classic British TV. Nearly every show is a weird clash between over-lit 50-field-per-second video interiors and grainly, unlit 25-frame-per-second exteriors. It’s so weird when Basil Fawlty runs out the door and everything gets dark and messy, yet suddenly feels more “expensive” for all its production issues.
The Doctor Who Restoration Team did a ton of work in its day restoring old episodes to their original specifications. In the case of episodes that only survived as film recordings, that meant recreating the “video look” for all studio scenes. It was a painstaking process that indeed made the episodes look much the way they were meant to… and yet.
The Tomb of the Cybermen was one of the first serials on DVD. They hadn’t finished the VidFIRE process yet, though they included a processed clip of one scene as an experiment. The original restoration was a bit clumsy; they didn’t have the tools they had later, and had to make compromises on repairing certain kinds of damage. Yet, the whole thing feels of a piece. It all seems to be shot on location, and for all the script issues it’s one of the most atmospheric serials of the original run.
Then they went back and revisited the story. The new version was cleaned up further, repaired better in most cases, had its luma balanced better, had more special features… and was processed to restore the video look, where applicable. And poof goes the atmosphere. Scenes that I had previously presumed were all shot together on location, you can now see where they cut and remounted in studio. You can see those aren’t real rocks and sand, and you notice everyone huddling together to keep on the same small corner of the set. The restoration may more accurately reflect what it looked like at the time, but in so doing it exposes the cheapness of the production.
I suppose this highlights a basic issue with more advanced capturing technology: it’s less forgiving, so it requires the production to be that much more expensive to avoid looking like a local rep company having a lark with a video camera. A higher framerate exposes the reality of the illusion just as much as high-def video.
Which gets to the crux of the issue, for me: verisimilitude. The more realistic you try to make a thing look, the less real it tends to become unto itself. Black-and-white silent film, you don’t question its world. It paints its own reality that you either buy into or you don’t. Color film, sound – they add more points of comparison to the world around us, making it that much more of a task to maintain the illusion of a coherent fictional world.
A while back I watched a totally cleaned-up, glossy version of John Carpenter’s Halloween – and it didn’t work. The atmosphere was gone, and it no longer came across as its own reality. Instead it was clearly a quick and cheap production, using a certain grade of actor, a certain kind of camera. For the movie to work, its reality has to fight against something. You need to fuzz up the portal between our world and the one we’re watching. Grain, grit, bad contrast – all of this signifies the film as its own thing, that one isn’t going to compare to our own world.
I don’t want to set up rules about what you can and can’t do with a medium, or say that one way of doing things is absolutely better than the rest, but there’s a certain wrongheadedness I think to the march of technical progress in terms of what it aims to accomplish. The point of fiction isn’t realism; it’s verisimilitude. It’s in being able to accept the reality of what you’re given, on its own terms. And that just gets harder, the closer you draw to that uncanny valley.
The question then becomes, how do you maintain the necessary illusion when your tools are fighting against you the whole way, threatening to expose the lie? There is maybe a worthwhile challenge in here, but it’s an expensive and totally avoidable problem…
I want a game that is the confounding first five minutes of Shodai Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun with the non-AGTP “English” patch, but stretched out to like 8~10 hours, spent wandering an increasingly unwelcoming and incoherent cityscape full of random brutality where you are nonetheless frequently aided in battle by helpful schoolgirls and salary men.
Well, that’s what the whole game already kind of is, but the charm usually wears off pretty quickly after those first five minutes, and the overall sluggish slugging and under-baked urbanity makes you long for how pure and visceral River City Ransom was. I suppose that’s why the recent Japanese revival of the franchise seems to build from the NES Kunios instead of trying to breathe life into the Renegade-style entries.
Speaking of tags: disappointment, SNES, brawlers, Kunios, RCR, randomness, brutality, sluggishness, kazuo_sawa…
Did anybody here ever try “Shounen Ninja Sasuke”? It obviously really wants to be a Nekketsu game, but it’s missing a lot of things, most importantly the sense of fine character control…
I remember playing Shonen Ninja Sasuke. Didn’t it have multiple game modes that changed how/whether or not you had RPG/RCR-style character growth?
yeah, it’s got a mode with rpg stuff, and a mode that’s just a straight-up beat em up.
I wonder how well this translates.
that reminds me of when I was reading about how they “localized” fawlty towers for different countries and kept changing Manuel’s nationality to something that was looked down upon locally
The only British TV that translates really well is Mr. Bean, that’s probably what comes to mind as iconic British TV in most if not all non-English-speaking countries.
That’s depressing. I don’t get what the appeal of Mr Bean is supposed to be.
i thought mr. bean was hilarious as a kid (i even had the spin-off book “mr. bean’s diary”!), but as an adult, it’s just about an unpleasant man living a horrible life alone in thatcher’s britain.
the best british comedy shows ever are the day today and brass eye, but i’ve unfortunately never heard anyone from outside the uk ever mention them
Never even heard about em, but now I’ll make a note and see if I can check em out
British Office is definitely utterly superior to the American version (not least because it has, you know, an ending).
Mr. Bean’s appeal is physical humor, obviously, which translates best to people who don’t speak the language.
Hey at least a few folks talked about Brass Eye on old SB, myself included
Each has its strengths. Once you get beyond the first season, which is a sort of inept remake of the UK version, the US show very much has its own rudder. It’s more interested in surrealism and a weird empathy than the squirm-humor of David Brent. And seasons 2-7 are pretty great, really. The first half of season 8 is even pretty promising. That promise… is not fulfilled, but.
i like both Offices but for me Parks and Rec is the best result of them existing
i don’t remember that! but still, it’s a rare thing
also john krasinski kind of drives me nuts, he’s got that good-looking boston boy thing that tweaks me on a genetic level, but I agree the US show is better than I originally gave it credit for
It’s easy to dismiss if either of:
But I really think it has some of the smartest writing on a US sitcom. It’s all very… intuitive, relying on the audience making the same mental leaps as the writers.
Oh yes. That part where Michael omits saying a very obviously set-up “that’s what she said!” after estabilishing it for the previous several seasons as one of his gimmicks was beautifully delivered