Movies have dark scenes nowadays mainly because it is a trend. On top of that dark scenes can have practical advantages (set building, VFX, lighting, etc. can be reduced or become much simpler to do which directly translates into money saved during shooting).
If I had to guess, the trend of dark scenes are a direct result of the fact that in the past two decades we our digital sensors got good enough to actually shoot in such low-light environments.
Before that film crews were typically shooting day-for-night which meant waiting for a set of specific weather conditions and then hoping that grading things blue-ish would sell the thing as being shot in the night.
Another aspect is the much higher brightness and contrast (=dynamic range) of today's displays and projectors. Back in the day you had to literally use the whitest white and the darkest dark available to create a readable picture (and you had to do a ton of lighting to squash the extreme dynamic range of a real world environment into the small dynamic range of your target medium). As this dynamic range became bigger it became possible to not use the whole range and still have good looking results. So in that line of thinking pictures became darker because they can be.
Not that I defend the whole thing, sometimes dark pictures with a high contrast can be good and very readable, sometimes it is used as an excuse to not do the propper work.
So the same reason basically as for the blue LEDs on every new device since 2010? Something that used to be prohibitively expensive before, and so now communicates high value (until people get tired of it eventually).
Is it also possibly a bit of protest against people watching movies at home on a television? That's assuming the dark scenes are easier to see in a theater.
Danny Boyle's commentary on The Beach specifically includes a discussion of the technique mentioned by OP of shooting in high light and playing with it later. So much to learn from him, Cameron, heck, Bad Santa pointed out that the Coen Brothers were extensively involved early on. Everything from Thurman Merman now, to me, sounds like a Coen Brothers character. I kinda think he is.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure film has a higher dynamic range than digital SDR video? From a quick google search, 13 stops for film vs 6 stops for SDR. Obviously the stock that was used for final delivery to theaters was much worse than the stock that movies were shot on, but still.
It's fundamental to a story - I have to see the actors. I have to hear them say their lines.
When they shoot dark scenes that leave me wondering who is talking, what they're doing, why they said that, it's a profound failure of the Director to make a minimally funcitonal story.
The other failure is mumbling actors. They whisper when they don't understand what emotion to show. They rush their lines to show passion but instead show lack of fundamental acting skill. They turn from the camera so I can't see their face, say something to the wall, leaving me without necessary facial clues, leaving me to puzzle out their accent or whatnot.
I blame it on falling standards of professionalism, driven by an insatiable demand for content.
One would think that movies would be produced for the viewers but apparently the monopolistic landscape of modern entertainment allows film-makers to make insane, ego-driven choices without consequences.
People need to be able to see and hear (the audio side is arguable getting even worse) what is happening. That is the absolute baseline for making a good product.
This is the equivalent of making a website where people struggle to read the text and the designer yelling that it is not made to be viewed on cheap mobile phones. Even in our current world of user-hostile web design, most professional designs try very hard to be accessible on a very large range of devices.
And no "naturalism" has nothing to do with it. I don't think unnatural lighting is such an immersion breaker compared the horrible CGI that people are forced to made on crunch time but sure if you want to only use natural lighting, go ahead BUT you still need to make sure the scenes are well lit. There are lots of avant-garde movies with natural lighting that are well lit.
Audio is great, iff you have a soundbar or a good set of headphones. The problem is that a decent portion of the audience don't and there is no fallback to more classic audio mixing.
This means that you either have to create for the lowest common dominator or accept that what they get is shit. As you said we would expect to be chewed out if we did that, but for some reason films are different.
To be honest I can see it both ways, as I don't have a soundbar or an oled display, but at the same time why should that hold back those who have paid 4 or 5 times the cost of my setup? If what I have is crap, shouldn't I expect that movies are not looking very good?
You can do some truly amazing things with just audio[0], but it does require a certain dynamic range on the receiver.
The "where is the light coming from" complaints in the Scream scene seem completely ignorant of the fact that our eyes have such a staggering amount of fidelity when compared with a camera that the filmmaker must compensate for that by overlighting the scene. You would be able to pick out details of a character's face in a dimly-lit room that only has external light sources because your eyes are incredible devices. To me, it's mind-bendingly tedious for someone to pick this apart and ask where the light sources are coming from when what they are going for is a mood as opposed to objective realism.
I’m glad cinema is mostly past its fling with quick cuts and shaky cam, but the current obsession with drab low-contrast color palette is just as bad.
Another one that irks me is shallow depth of field.
I appreciate the deep-focus cinematography by the likes of Kurosawa and Welles all the more when I see modern filmmakers making 80% of their frame blurry on purpose.
Fads are cyclical, so I was hoping that after Zack Snyder brought the style to its logical unwatchable conclusion with his “Army of the Bokeh”, cinematographers and directors would move on, but I guess it’s not that time yet.
> Another one that irks me is shallow depth of field.
This is even more annoying in YouTube videos. People are so obsessed with shallow depth of field that even in product reviews they focus on the face and leave the product blurry.
I can't find it right now, but there's a video by Tony Northrup where he's reviewing a camera and he's so obsessed with filming himself at f1.4 that his face is barely in focus half the time because of the failed focus tracking.
Personally I don't agree with the take of the article in two ways. The first one is that it gives way too much default credit to realism as a stylistic choice. Movies are works of fiction and the creator has total artistic freedom in what aesthetic to go for, and being 'realistic' isn't necessarily a good thing, you still need to make the case for it.
Secondly I think the bigger reason is a trend towards grittiness, bleakness or a sort of 'scandi-noir crime drama' look. People go for that mood not just visually but also in terms of writing, muted mumbly dialogue, minimalism, and so on.
Villeneuve's Dune that's mentioned in the article is to me, despite the apparent popular appeal, a negative example of this trend. The movie is overly bleak and oppressive, cold, distant in a way that many of his films are and heavy on visual stereotypes. (the hairless, pale, black-dressed 'brutish' Harkonnen's, a caricature that the books deliberately avoided).
> It first materialized in a big way back during the late seasons of Game of Thrones. Episode after episode, people furiously tweeted about how hard it was to see, well, anything going on on screen.
From an enthusiastic GoT fan back then: I don't really know where the author got that "episode after episode" from. I remember exactly one episode, where overdark scenes were an issue, S8E3 "The Long Night" - and in the episode, darkness was a plot device and a deliberate stylistic choice.
There was an unfortunate scene in which the characters were unable to make out whether the enemy was approaching or not, due to intense darkness. The filmmakers chose to visualise this by making the scene almost pitch black, with literally not enough information in the pixels to see the characters. I'm sure that must have looked impressive in a test screening in a cinema, but when streamed, it caused lots of viewers to be distracted by their own reflections and turn up their TVs to maximum brightness - because the scene sort of looked as if you should be able to see something, even though really you weren't.
I think that was a visual experiment by the filmmakers which, frankly, failed - but it was at least a deliberate choice and not blindly following some trend.
There is a segment of the new Dune movie where I feel this happens. I believe it is Paul and Jessica's crossing and their encounter with the worm. The contrast feels so washed out and it distracts me because my eyes start straining for the light... but it seems 100% intentional. It's pre-dawn and the world feels grayscale. I'm complaining about it, but maybe I would miss it if they didn't do that.
Yeah, the whole point of that was that "it's dark as shit, no-one can see anything, everyone is everywhere, no-one can see what's going on, everyone is scared, no-one has a scoob what's happening even a foot away".
I thought it played nicely with the use of light to stylise the rest of the world - Westeros with its bright but slightly murky look, like a busy city in Central Europe, Winterfell, The Wall, and the north with its flat grey shadowless light from an overcast sky, and the searing oranges and yellows of the desert-y parts of Essos that looked and felt hot to look at.
Another factor: If you watch a film in the cinema then the surroundings are almost completely dark, which makes it easier to see what's going on on a dark screen. However we increasingly consume content at home where there is typically more ambient light, especially if we don't choose to turn off all the lights just to watch tv as other family members may be doing other things and find it annoying.
It's not just films, a lot of TV programmes are heading that way too.
One example is the recently released adaptation of Great Expectations[1]. It's not just the overall darkness, but general lack of colour which is striking to me. I think this is just an artistic style and the next stage of colour grading from the Teal & Orange[2] trends of a few years ago.
You get used to it when watching a programme and forget what full colour actually looks like. Watching old films, something like the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia[3] highlighted it for me, really shows how much colour has been drained from modern film & TV productions.
> Even broad, big-budget blockbusters like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 embraced a look torn straight from indie cinema. Not only are the lights in that film always motivated, they’re realistic.
Did you tried to see anything at night in a winter forest? It is impossible. Maybe full Moon can help to see something, I don't know really, but my experience tells that the only thing you can see without an artificial light is darkness and (if you are lucky) a few stars blinking through branches of trees (which are invisible by themselves because they are totally black over a black background).
I always laughed at a scene where Harry Potter follows silver doe to a river and Ron Weasley finds him without a notice (Harry didn't see any lights coming), and Severus Snape secretly watches them. Ok, I can write off Snape, he is probably using some magic to see in the dark, he is a very powerful wizard after all. But all the seven books say not a word about Harry Potter or even Hermione Granger knowing something like that. When they face darkness they use Lumos that works like a flashlight. And a film shows completely unrealistic forest where you can see the scene. Trees, for example. Screen doesn't turn into a black rectangle, but to be realistic it should.
When I visit my parents we sometimes walk the dog after dinner, and we go one of two routes. In the summer seeing is no problem, but in the fall or winter as soon as we turn of the street with its street lights and past the lit church tower the moon makes a massive difference.
You are right that if we walk on a moonless night it is near impossible to see anything, but on a full moon night the entire world is lit in ethereal silver. I won't say it is as lit as during the day, but I would have zero issue navigating at all.
It also takes only one look to understand why werewolves, silver and the moon are connected in folktales.
That scene had a full moon as a plot point. It's pretty easy to see around you in a sparse forest on a moonlit night. The only real issue is how quickly your eyes can adjust to darkness (e.g. they fire off spells and patronus charms that should be ruining their night vision).
Watching the bright and beautiful trailer for Wes Anderson's Asteroid City reminded me how wonderful it is to have a director who isn't interested in a pointless pursuit of "realism" in an inherently unreal medium, and instead joyfully and unashamedly embraces its artificiality and creates his own style, instead of following the herd. I would take him at his quirkiest and most cliched over another dark and colourless movie.
Sadly, this is a trend too. Lush, orchestral music with memorable themes, harmonic development, etc. is being phased out in favor of minimalist, repetitive, electronic sounds. To understand what that gives up, I recommend the "Listening In" channel e.g. https://youtu.be/iGN_5oNla_8
It's not just movies. There was an episode of The Mandalorian with cave scenes so dark that they were literally unwatchable for me with the shades open. You'd think people would have learned after the mess with Game of Thrones.
The new live-action Star Trek shows have taken to this madness as well. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager were both bright, open shows. But you'd think with Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Picard that we hadn't invented indoor lighting. Babylon 5 in its heyday was visually brighter than any of these three and no one can say that B5 was going for an "optimistic" plot worthy of such luminosity.
It's frustrating to watch and I empathize with people who feel like their cherished shows of before are being "ruined" by spin-offs or reboots.
> You'd think people would have learned after the mess with Game of Thrones.
Given how ridiculously dark House of the Dragon was in some episodes, with the entire season only set in candlelight, I don't think they've learned anything.
You are right, and it works quite well in the dark months to just watch it later when it's dark outside, but that won't work for everybody.
I wonder how many people pull up brightness on their TVs only for that reason and ruin the experience for all that actually bright content just because they have to see something in that darkness.
So dark, I can no longer view them on an Apple iPad.
Couple that with some video streamers (looking at you, Netflix) always defaulting to a different audio track, while it is often in its original film’s language, the audio gets bastardized with commentary overlay and overlaps thereby ruining the original movie experience. Often cannot default to “original movie sound”.
Oh, did I mention that the closed captioning has started ignoring the hard-of-hearing and deaf folks? They only transcribe the foreign language into open-captions. I mean, WTF? We folks kinda want ALL languages captioned.
Just the three kinds of darkness we are descending into … nowadays.
One thing that always gets me is kind of specific to science-fiction and space-opera genres: why would anyone build a spaceship with a powerplant that can light up a planet (and sometimes does) get skimpy on lighting?
I get it. It's style, but it's the opposite or realistic, or motivated lighting - one would imagine a workplace would be lit properly, use light walls to reflect more direct light and provide diffuse lighting.
On a more fundamental level it seems like the reason that movies are dark [or long, or shaky-cammed, or mixed with near-inaudible dialogue, or…] is the same reason movies are such strong and specific cultural touchpoints: they are largely the vision and decisions of the people in charge, relatively unencumbered by prosaic concerns such as accessibility or even profit (at the very least, this last one is true per movie: a director whose films flop quickly stops being able to find funding, so the profit concern does assert itself, but even that director mostly gets to make the movie they want to make while on set and in the editing booth).
The proliferation of sequels trading on nostalgia, cinematic universes like Marvel etc., may seem like counter-examples but I’d argue they represent a directing team whose specific vision is making a lot of profit. Profit is an internal motive and the directing team’s wide latitude lets them pursue it, rather than profit being an external concern that steps in scene by scene and tells them to add more lights. (Also note that Marvel’s MCU is well-known for the very particular creative vision driving the entire franchise.)
When the decision-makers have a unique vision, we get cult classics, new schools like “lighting realism”, and also awful movies like The Room. When the decision-makers are influenced by trends, we get waves of shaky cam or dark lighting.
It's also the problem of "we'll fix it in post". Applies to sound, too.
Too many movie makers these days assume that any issues can be removed by CGI in post-production. But you can only do so much with the material you're given.
Oh, and post-production time and budget are often an afterthought, too.
You can’t leave projection technology out of it. Frequently the bulb is nearly burned out in the projector or they left the 3D polarizer on or the system is otherwise misconfigured. As for “Home Theater” even people with a nice TV and sound system might not have perfectly controlled light. if you’re a guest in people’s homes you’d better act like it.
I started using MPV or VLC or Daum Potplayer to manually adjust the brightness and contrast of tv shows and movies I'm watching. I stopped valuing the "filmmaker's choice" when I saw the analysis of how dark that beach scene was in House of Dragons was. [1] It's not just that consumer equipment is differently calibrated from color grading equipment, that specific scene was graded to 1 nit brigtness. Hbo later tweeted that it will not be fixed and is absoultely intentional. [2] The offical recommended viewing conditions of HDR according to the ITU and Dolby is an ambient 5 nits.
The artists aren't respecting or grading with consumer equipment in mind. I'm not getting an optimal viewing experience or even getting the artist's creative intent by trying to recreate the intended viewing settings. Dolby Vision still isn't completely supported when playing back a file on desktop. Certain DV profiles can be passed through to TVs that support it, but that's not possible for Blu-Ray Dolby Vision files. Neither the Xbox nor PS5 support Dolby Vision disk playback. Many playback solutions for playback of Dolby Vision from PC throw away the dynamic data defeating the point of caring about DV over HDR10. This is also ignoring how streaming changes colors can change due to compression, and some shows and movies are only available via streaming.
My TV can detect ambient light, Dolby Vision IQ already exists, but in my experience fails too often. Some would argue DV IQ also moves away from filmmarker's intent.
This is something I noticed when I was younger, and I guess I’ve just adapted to it over time.
As a 10 year old, trying to watch a dark movie where the main characters whisper or speak in a low volume was basically impossible. I don’t know why, maybe my senses just weren’t that developed yet, but I struggled so much. I remember watching Harry Potter, and in that scene where Harry stands in front of the mirror with Dumbledore, I could barely see or understand anything, despite watching this in the cinema.
As I got older, I was able to perceive darker scenes and listen to whispered or hushed speech better. But it made movie watching way less enjoyable when I was younger. There were large chunks of movies where I basically just zoned out because they were too dark and or quiet. I’m curious if anyone else experienced something similar.
As an adult who probably has some hearing damage, I always watch with closed captions enabled now. There is SO much material that I have lost from mishearing a word here and there. Reading the script along with the audio helps my to follow the storyline, as those "whispered or hushed speech" remain a cognitive problem for me.
[+] [-] atoav|3 years ago|reply
Movies have dark scenes nowadays mainly because it is a trend. On top of that dark scenes can have practical advantages (set building, VFX, lighting, etc. can be reduced or become much simpler to do which directly translates into money saved during shooting).
If I had to guess, the trend of dark scenes are a direct result of the fact that in the past two decades we our digital sensors got good enough to actually shoot in such low-light environments.
Before that film crews were typically shooting day-for-night which meant waiting for a set of specific weather conditions and then hoping that grading things blue-ish would sell the thing as being shot in the night.
Another aspect is the much higher brightness and contrast (=dynamic range) of today's displays and projectors. Back in the day you had to literally use the whitest white and the darkest dark available to create a readable picture (and you had to do a ton of lighting to squash the extreme dynamic range of a real world environment into the small dynamic range of your target medium). As this dynamic range became bigger it became possible to not use the whole range and still have good looking results. So in that line of thinking pictures became darker because they can be.
Not that I defend the whole thing, sometimes dark pictures with a high contrast can be good and very readable, sometimes it is used as an excuse to not do the propper work.
[+] [-] actionfromafar|3 years ago|reply
Thing is, the eye adapts to dim light very well. So an old school scene "night" scene may actually better represent what it feels like being there.
While a modern "night" scene might look what a dim area looks like the first 10 seconds before your eyes adapt: dim, gray-ish.
Curve-ball:
what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
[+] [-] leobg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] formerly_proven|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokweom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3np|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
When they shoot dark scenes that leave me wondering who is talking, what they're doing, why they said that, it's a profound failure of the Director to make a minimally funcitonal story.
The other failure is mumbling actors. They whisper when they don't understand what emotion to show. They rush their lines to show passion but instead show lack of fundamental acting skill. They turn from the camera so I can't see their face, say something to the wall, leaving me without necessary facial clues, leaving me to puzzle out their accent or whatnot.
I blame it on falling standards of professionalism, driven by an insatiable demand for content.
[+] [-] cardanome|3 years ago|reply
People need to be able to see and hear (the audio side is arguable getting even worse) what is happening. That is the absolute baseline for making a good product.
This is the equivalent of making a website where people struggle to read the text and the designer yelling that it is not made to be viewed on cheap mobile phones. Even in our current world of user-hostile web design, most professional designs try very hard to be accessible on a very large range of devices.
And no "naturalism" has nothing to do with it. I don't think unnatural lighting is such an immersion breaker compared the horrible CGI that people are forced to made on crunch time but sure if you want to only use natural lighting, go ahead BUT you still need to make sure the scenes are well lit. There are lots of avant-garde movies with natural lighting that are well lit.
[+] [-] tomjen3|3 years ago|reply
This means that you either have to create for the lowest common dominator or accept that what they get is shit. As you said we would expect to be chewed out if we did that, but for some reason films are different.
To be honest I can see it both ways, as I don't have a soundbar or an oled display, but at the same time why should that hold back those who have paid 4 or 5 times the cost of my setup? If what I have is crap, shouldn't I expect that movies are not looking very good?
You can do some truly amazing things with just audio[0], but it does require a certain dynamic range on the receiver.
As an example: https://darkerprojects.com/lostfrontier/st-lf-season-1-ep-00..., which is a podcast radio play.
[+] [-] heleninboodler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfortuny|3 years ago|reply
http://rubenrevecoarte.blogspot.com/2016/02/un-poco-mas-de-r...
[+] [-] fauxpause_|3 years ago|reply
It was so genre savvy and ahead of its time imo.
You can’t make too many movies like Scream though. It has to be the oddity that exists apart from the rest to really shine.
[+] [-] Krasnol|3 years ago|reply
The frame displayed there is obviously too bright, and this is the point.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] actionfromafar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mypastself|3 years ago|reply
Another one that irks me is shallow depth of field.
I appreciate the deep-focus cinematography by the likes of Kurosawa and Welles all the more when I see modern filmmakers making 80% of their frame blurry on purpose.
Fads are cyclical, so I was hoping that after Zack Snyder brought the style to its logical unwatchable conclusion with his “Army of the Bokeh”, cinematographers and directors would move on, but I guess it’s not that time yet.
[+] [-] xdennis|3 years ago|reply
This is even more annoying in YouTube videos. People are so obsessed with shallow depth of field that even in product reviews they focus on the face and leave the product blurry.
I can't find it right now, but there's a video by Tony Northrup where he's reviewing a camera and he's so obsessed with filming himself at f1.4 that his face is barely in focus half the time because of the failed focus tracking.
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
Personally I don't agree with the take of the article in two ways. The first one is that it gives way too much default credit to realism as a stylistic choice. Movies are works of fiction and the creator has total artistic freedom in what aesthetic to go for, and being 'realistic' isn't necessarily a good thing, you still need to make the case for it.
Secondly I think the bigger reason is a trend towards grittiness, bleakness or a sort of 'scandi-noir crime drama' look. People go for that mood not just visually but also in terms of writing, muted mumbly dialogue, minimalism, and so on.
Villeneuve's Dune that's mentioned in the article is to me, despite the apparent popular appeal, a negative example of this trend. The movie is overly bleak and oppressive, cold, distant in a way that many of his films are and heavy on visual stereotypes. (the hairless, pale, black-dressed 'brutish' Harkonnen's, a caricature that the books deliberately avoided).
[+] [-] xg15|3 years ago|reply
From an enthusiastic GoT fan back then: I don't really know where the author got that "episode after episode" from. I remember exactly one episode, where overdark scenes were an issue, S8E3 "The Long Night" - and in the episode, darkness was a plot device and a deliberate stylistic choice.
There was an unfortunate scene in which the characters were unable to make out whether the enemy was approaching or not, due to intense darkness. The filmmakers chose to visualise this by making the scene almost pitch black, with literally not enough information in the pixels to see the characters. I'm sure that must have looked impressive in a test screening in a cinema, but when streamed, it caused lots of viewers to be distracted by their own reflections and turn up their TVs to maximum brightness - because the scene sort of looked as if you should be able to see something, even though really you weren't.
I think that was a visual experiment by the filmmakers which, frankly, failed - but it was at least a deliberate choice and not blindly following some trend.
[+] [-] ycombobreaker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
I thought it played nicely with the use of light to stylise the rest of the world - Westeros with its bright but slightly murky look, like a busy city in Central Europe, Winterfell, The Wall, and the north with its flat grey shadowless light from an overcast sky, and the searing oranges and yellows of the desert-y parts of Essos that looked and felt hot to look at.
[+] [-] tragomaskhalos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steve44|3 years ago|reply
One example is the recently released adaptation of Great Expectations[1]. It's not just the overall darkness, but general lack of colour which is striking to me. I think this is just an artistic style and the next stage of colour grading from the Teal & Orange[2] trends of a few years ago.
You get used to it when watching a programme and forget what full colour actually looks like. Watching old films, something like the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia[3] highlighted it for me, really shows how much colour has been drained from modern film & TV productions.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2023/great-expectations-ai...
[2] https://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-h...
[3] I think the recent remasters release may have some colour grading in too though, just looking at some scenes they are darker!
[+] [-] ordu|3 years ago|reply
Did you tried to see anything at night in a winter forest? It is impossible. Maybe full Moon can help to see something, I don't know really, but my experience tells that the only thing you can see without an artificial light is darkness and (if you are lucky) a few stars blinking through branches of trees (which are invisible by themselves because they are totally black over a black background).
I always laughed at a scene where Harry Potter follows silver doe to a river and Ron Weasley finds him without a notice (Harry didn't see any lights coming), and Severus Snape secretly watches them. Ok, I can write off Snape, he is probably using some magic to see in the dark, he is a very powerful wizard after all. But all the seven books say not a word about Harry Potter or even Hermione Granger knowing something like that. When they face darkness they use Lumos that works like a flashlight. And a film shows completely unrealistic forest where you can see the scene. Trees, for example. Screen doesn't turn into a black rectangle, but to be realistic it should.
[+] [-] tomjen3|3 years ago|reply
You are right that if we walk on a moonless night it is near impossible to see anything, but on a full moon night the entire world is lit in ethereal silver. I won't say it is as lit as during the day, but I would have zero issue navigating at all.
It also takes only one look to understand why werewolves, silver and the moon are connected in folktales.
[+] [-] ummonk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chilmers|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharmakom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcsommer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yiyus|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
See rule 2.
[+] [-] crooked-v|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techsupporter|3 years ago|reply
It's frustrating to watch and I empathize with people who feel like their cherished shows of before are being "ruined" by spin-offs or reboots.
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
Given how ridiculously dark House of the Dragon was in some episodes, with the entire season only set in candlelight, I don't think they've learned anything.
[+] [-] bombolo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Krasnol|3 years ago|reply
I wonder how many people pull up brightness on their TVs only for that reason and ruin the experience for all that actually bright content just because they have to see something in that darkness.
[+] [-] rokweom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thevagrant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egberts1|3 years ago|reply
Couple that with some video streamers (looking at you, Netflix) always defaulting to a different audio track, while it is often in its original film’s language, the audio gets bastardized with commentary overlay and overlaps thereby ruining the original movie experience. Often cannot default to “original movie sound”.
Oh, did I mention that the closed captioning has started ignoring the hard-of-hearing and deaf folks? They only transcribe the foreign language into open-captions. I mean, WTF? We folks kinda want ALL languages captioned.
Just the three kinds of darkness we are descending into … nowadays.
[+] [-] rbanffy|3 years ago|reply
I get it. It's style, but it's the opposite or realistic, or motivated lighting - one would imagine a workplace would be lit properly, use light walls to reflect more direct light and provide diffuse lighting.
[+] [-] fwlr|3 years ago|reply
The proliferation of sequels trading on nostalgia, cinematic universes like Marvel etc., may seem like counter-examples but I’d argue they represent a directing team whose specific vision is making a lot of profit. Profit is an internal motive and the directing team’s wide latitude lets them pursue it, rather than profit being an external concern that steps in scene by scene and tells them to add more lights. (Also note that Marvel’s MCU is well-known for the very particular creative vision driving the entire franchise.)
When the decision-makers have a unique vision, we get cult classics, new schools like “lighting realism”, and also awful movies like The Room. When the decision-makers are influenced by trends, we get waves of shaky cam or dark lighting.
[+] [-] illiarian|3 years ago|reply
Too many movie makers these days assume that any issues can be removed by CGI in post-production. But you can only do so much with the material you're given.
Oh, and post-production time and budget are often an afterthought, too.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knaik94|3 years ago|reply
The artists aren't respecting or grading with consumer equipment in mind. I'm not getting an optimal viewing experience or even getting the artist's creative intent by trying to recreate the intended viewing settings. Dolby Vision still isn't completely supported when playing back a file on desktop. Certain DV profiles can be passed through to TVs that support it, but that's not possible for Blu-Ray Dolby Vision files. Neither the Xbox nor PS5 support Dolby Vision disk playback. Many playback solutions for playback of Dolby Vision from PC throw away the dynamic data defeating the point of caring about DV over HDR10. This is also ignoring how streaming changes colors can change due to compression, and some shows and movies are only available via streaming.
My TV can detect ambient light, Dolby Vision IQ already exists, but in my experience fails too often. Some would argue DV IQ also moves away from filmmarker's intent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D83SXcguwBU
https://twitter.com/HBOMaxHelp/status/1576793465010135040
https://www.trustedreviews.com/explainer/what-is-dolby-visio...
[+] [-] dinobones|3 years ago|reply
As a 10 year old, trying to watch a dark movie where the main characters whisper or speak in a low volume was basically impossible. I don’t know why, maybe my senses just weren’t that developed yet, but I struggled so much. I remember watching Harry Potter, and in that scene where Harry stands in front of the mirror with Dumbledore, I could barely see or understand anything, despite watching this in the cinema.
As I got older, I was able to perceive darker scenes and listen to whispered or hushed speech better. But it made movie watching way less enjoyable when I was younger. There were large chunks of movies where I basically just zoned out because they were too dark and or quiet. I’m curious if anyone else experienced something similar.
[+] [-] ycombobreaker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brokenmachine|3 years ago|reply