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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."
Reading all press it sounds like too much generalisation - in fact, it *feels* like Peter Jackson was more angry about backslash and calling a "cheap TV movie" just because you are used to different frame rate. So he decided that discussion about "be or not to be 48 fps" could actually overcome discussion about movie itself. I think it was wise decision and not Hollywood fear about CC. Come on, they *love* CC - it's amplified publicity with fans all around the world. What a better way to get movie going buzz rolling?
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Just give me a great story with great acting in the old school format and I'm fine with that. No 3D, no 48 fps.
People will go back to theaters when the social experience is positive again. No cell phones, more comfy seats, etc. Maybe I'm getting old but the experience these days seems to have been taken over by thugs.
it was not even in 3-D
GOOD!
Everything is better with chainsaws.
It's so that after you go there once, you go back again...
Or perhaps more buck for bang.
-Dave
Thought Hollywood had butchered the books aiming at teenage action movies and introducing new characters and subplots. Also a terrible fight over royalties.
I admire the one son who spent decades publishing his father's voluminous papers. This may be the son's only major press interview in his life. The rest of family has gotten a free ride on royalties. Especially through the efforts of Jackson.
It's a convention hall, not a theater. Bad acoustics, no projection room, no good audio system, folding chairs. Here's what the screens look like. Look at the screen size and quality. They have to have auxiliary screens around the room so people in the back can see. Some of the auxiliary screens are dim around the edges. That's a setup for a marketing presentation. Of course you don't introduce a new movie technology there.
Movies with new technologies are typically previewed for critics in venues with ideal conditions, like the Technicolor Theater in Hollywood or the screening room at Dolby headquarters in San Francisco.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/business/media/hollywood-acts-warily-at-comic-con-fearing-bad-publicity.html And I was at this panel. The highlight by far was hearing from Andy Serkis, and listening to him act out a dialogue between Gollum and Smeagol. I'm not sure about the rest of the movie, but they showed footage that proved they hit the riddle game scene out of the park.
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.
Remember: If Hollywood makes one movie out of a book, they suck because they cut out all those important scenes. If they make two movies, they suck because they are just trying to cash in.
That is why Jackson is shooting at 48 fps
He is shooting 2 movies at the EXACT SAME TIME.
Once the first film is "finished" they extract every other frame so they get TWO movies @ 24 fps!
Brilliant!
I like microcars
He did a previous demonstration of some footage at the 48fps rate at a convention, and it did in fact result in backlash.
http://www.studiodaily.com/2012/04/the-hobbit-the-soap-opera-effect-and-the-48fps-and-faster-future-of-movies/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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!!"
That density is what gives it its gravity.
Good-bye
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.
Or most people over 35 can spot when they are being sold gimmicks at ridiculous markup?
I was involved in a phone system rollout where we rolled out high definition voice that gives noticeably better quality on calls within the office.
Many people hated it - said the voice quality of the new phone system was terrible and wondered how could we possibly put in a new system that sounded noticably worse than the old.
But a year later, we did a test with a few of the more vocal complainers and had them do side-by-side comparisions with the high def codec and the lower bandwidth codec used by the old system and now even they admit that the new system sounds better.
So even if 48fps is technically better than 24fps, many people will think it's worse because it's "different" but if it becomes a standard, at some point kids will wonder how their parents could ever stand watching 24fps movies.
. If the Lord of the Rings books each got a single film, I don't see how the Hobbit needs to be stretched into two.
They did cut a lot of what was in LotR books for the film, though.
If we go all the way back to Labyrinth the few well lit puppet scenes looked like crap and ruined the suspension of disbeleif. Dark Crystal solved that by being dark. Toy Story got around that by using CGI for simple plastic objects that are supposed to look fake. Recent anime with shitloads of CGI gets around the "uncanny valley" that plagues things like Tintin by still having people drawn in a 2D cell animation style even if the backgrounds are photorealistic.