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Hollywood Acts Warily At Comic-Con
gollum123 writes "Peter Jackson wowed the crowd with 13 minutes of highly anticipated footage from the first of his two ultra-expensive Hobbit movies. But he also played it safe — very safe — by not so much as mentioning, much less demonstrating, the filmmaking wizardry at the heart of the project. That left big questions about the movie industry's future unanswered and added to a theme of this year's Comic-Con: Hollywood has come to fear this place. Mr. Jackson is shooting his two Hobbit movies, the first of which is to arrive in theaters in December, at an unusually fast 48 frames a second, twice the standard rate. But an estimated 6,500 fans did not have that experience when they gathered in Comic-Con's cavernous Hall H moments earlier to see the new footage. Still, Mr. Jackson, one of Hollywood's boldest directors, made the unexpectedly timid decision to present The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in a standard format here — it was not even in 3-D — because he feared an online outcry that could hurt box-office results."
Well who can blame him? I couldn't make any sense of the comments on /. about how 48fps looks "too real". Isn't that kinda the point? To make the TV show or movie look like just a window on another world? It's supposed to look real. (This reminds me of those persons who claimed CDs or lossless AACs were too perfect, and they'd rather hear the sizzle of downloaded MP3s. Illogical.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Edison was one of the inventors of motion pictures. The cynic might say that would double his company's film stock sales. But Edison said the film viewing experience improved to that point. Hollywood decided on the less costly half-rate standard.
I couldn't make any sense of the comments on /. about how 48fps looks "too real". Isn't that kinda the point?
Perhaps 48 fps pushes the animation into an uncanny valley.
It's supposed to look real.
I thought it was supposed to look just real enough (and conversely, just unreal enough) for your brain to suspend disbelief.
48fps is awful because the objective of film is NOT to look 'real'. The objective is to create a dream-state.
The dream metaphor for film viewing is one of the most persistent in both classical and modern film theory.
Think about it: Nothing about film is particularly 'real': Sudden cuts, temporal jumps, non-linear sequences. Film doesn't simulate reality, it simulates the dream state. Everything that technology is now doing to 'improve' the cinema experience and make it more 'realistic' is destroying the dream-state of the medium. Movies are getting less absorbing the more 'realistic' they become.
Regular, traditional 24fps gives everything a subconscious dream-like quality. But 48fps makes everything look like television - or worse. It breaks us out of the dream-state.
The same goes for high-def and 3D. These so-called 'improvements' to film actually wreck the medium because they present a reality that has no analogue. What other reality that you know of looks anything like HD film – where in reality can you see people's pores without a magnifying glass? Where in reality do you see the equivalent of the kind of 3D shown in modern movies?
Shooting a 'movie' in 48fps is like shaking a dreamer awake and shouting in their face, "The dream is over!!"
I remember when I first saw a Blueray Disc movie, it was that godawful G.I. Joe movie, I dunno what the frame rate was on that but the image looked absurdly crisp and sharp. It was the clearest cleanest image I had seen on a movie, and it looked disgustingly fake.
For a moment I thought it was because the lack of camera artifacts made it look unauthentic, kinda like how lens flare is now added to movies because people expect it. However after a while I realized that I only had problems when there was CGI on the screen. So in fact it wasn't the sharp image what was bothering me, is the that, the sharper the image, the more obvious CGI imperfections are.
Image quality reveals fake scenes for what they are.
For a movie with a shitload of fake imagery like the Hobbit, I can already see why people would complain. I'm pretty sure those 60fps instructional videos you shot didn't have any CGI in them did they?
But... the future refused to change.