Gigolo Joe
Posts: 24
Joined: 30/9/2005
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Creative implications of making it into 3 films aside, the aesthetics of increasing the frame rate is the most worrying sign of cinema's future, much more so than 3D.
It's already difficult to find a 2D showing of new releases, the inferior and cheaper brand of digital projection is also becoming the norm. But 48 frames per second is a fundamental departure from the the established language of cinema. The 'film look' which used to be the holy grail of independent filmmakers and is what we've all grown up regarding as a mark of quality (contrasted with tacky TV soap opera video etc) - is all of a sudden being sacrificed by an industry scrambling to make up for the creative deficit ingrained in the vertically-integrated movie franchise "product".
The multi-national corporate structure of today's Hollywood realises that they are running a production line with a business model centred around high short term sales and repeat business coming from a marketable range of products (movie sequels/prequels/spinoffs). It's a risk averse approach to maximise profits as quickly as possible before the punters realise no-one will be watching these products 10 years from now. Transformers anyone?
Films like Lawrence of Arabia are treasured and re-released 50 years later continually making a profit, this risk taking approach to epic filmmaking probably ended 10 years ago - Lord of the Rings being the final example of the old Hollywood.
Now we have a media industry so deeply integrated - one division buys advertising from another division of the same company - promoted on their own TV networks and creativity disintegrates.
The marketing 'experts' are so important that the story/script cannot proceed without extensive market analysis.
The art of Filmmaking is reduced to a brochure of cinematography, editing, music and design styles, so much that every genre, every story, has the same colour template, applied to it - ever notice the orange and blue look nearly every movie has? - not to mention the shaky cam etc..
Add to the mix the obsessive paranoia of piracy and you have an industry that will continue to clamp our eyelids open with 3D 48fps HFR technologies - desperately trying to convince us that it will blow your mind. Clearly with some morons this approach works.. Not to mention the casual film goers who don't know or don't care about the aesthetic implications.
The fact is though - a great many people cannot stand 3D - it does cause visual problems in a significant number of people. Also many people already hate the look produced from 100hz or 'pure motion' or whatever crap is shoved into most TVs but marketed as an essential new feature - just so they can sell the latest model. Fortunately in most cases you can turn these things off. But it is depressing to see Directors such as Peter Jackson falling into such an obvious trap and implementing these gimmicks at the production stage.
This demonstrates an ignorance - or a contempt for the cinema language we all know and love. You don't hear anyone complaining about a properly filmed movie projected in the way perfected over a hundred years - so why are these filmmakers alienating a huge percentage of people, potentially forcing them out of cinemas for good? My guess is that they're only really counting on teenage boys to flock to blockbusters aimed squarely at them. Particularly James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Michael Bay have all but given up on adults anyway. The rest of Hollywood will follow..
24 frames per second is part of film's visual language and it's beauty - you subconsciously register this as familiar to how we see the world (motion blur, judder from eye and head movements) but slightly removed from reality - almost like a dream. This elementally helps you suspend your disbelief at what you're seeing, blending perfectly with narrative storytelling.
48 frames per second breaks this illusion in the same way as nearly every TV show ever made looks hyper-real which, in the same way that digital effects tend to render everything in focus, ignoring depth of field, draws attention to itself - breaking the illusion. Of course, many US shows, despite the TV signal being 50/60 frames per second, 24fps is still chosen because of it's aesthetic superiority. The alternative is everything looking like a soap opera.
Most of the Hobbit will look like a behind the scenes feature - or a live broadcast version of a movie, but it's guaranteed that a chunk of the audience will convince themselves that they don't need to adjust their eyes - what they're seeing is not a shameless gimmick but spectacle.. Surely this is the intended effect, because when you throw away your creative voice, spectacle is all you have left!
Maybe we'll only have the art-house scene tempting anyone over 25 back but personally I'm still waiting for another great Die Hard, grown up sci-fi or even another Star Wars or Spielbergian adventure (Star Trek is the closest there's been for years)
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