There’s real value however in remaining aware and taking at least a moment every once in awhile to consider what we can do to do less harm. I’ve never thought it was terribly effective to always try to enact positive change by shaming people for everything they do and making them feel miserable. But hey, there were all sorts of color subtleties to be seen - enough to make the finished film look like a TELETUBBIES episode! I talked to the WRINKLE IN TIME DP and when he saw a commercial or trailer for the film, he didn’t at first even realize it was a project of his, the look had been so utterly subverted in post (by not just the colorist but also the VFX house, which stripped his live-action characters out of their ‘real’ locales and plopped them down into virtual ones that didn’t respect the light direction or intensity. And these image manipulation tools wielded by colorists can often distort thing when the DP actually has taken the time to get things right in the first place. The trend now seems to be a digital equivalent to the old ‘movies without movie lights’ ad gimmickry for home amateur shooters 50 years back, and that feels very anti-cinematography to me in most instances, where you’re just recording rather than shaping the image. I even shot Kodachrome asa 40 on interiors most of the time, despite needing more light, because the results were so superior. I still consider Kodachrome to be the film to end all film, for the richness and saturation it brought, even when shooting reversal film, which had no margin for error with exposure. Part of what made movies work for a century was what remained in shadow, along with the richness of said shadow. Although I wasn’t always a fan of his work, I do lovce Lazlos Kovacs’ response when some colorist offered to bring up the detail in the shadow on EASY RIDER: if I’d wanted to see that area (it was like the underside of a rock or something like that), I’d have exposed for it. Let the shadows stay black! Rather than subtlety, there’s a deliberate stark quality to such scenes (and space stuff too for that part), and squeezing more detail out isn’t necessarily helping the drama. With HDR, that’s actually one of the things I consider a mixed blessing - stuff originated on film with extreme contrast, like desert scenes, isn’t supposed to have that kind of detail in the fall-off. I don’t watch and worship movies to get an experience that is akin to human-eye perception.
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