#appreciate your damn editors and vfx artists fuck you

[evilwickedme]

What are your film degree opinions on the post about why films are different now?

omg yes thank you for asking there's nothing I love more than talking about Things

I want to be very clear in that this post does have valid points to make. The difference between film and digital is palpable, both in the practical (color grading, the types of blacks and shadows you can capture, etc) and in the psychological (grain being added to digital footage to make it seem more "real"). Practical effects and VFX are not the same and computer generated effects tend to age much more poorly than practical ones. Also, not to be very "Tragic, the worst person you know just made a great point" but the midbudget film is dying, and most of what we get nowadays is either very low budget indie films or overly produced extremely high budget Hollywood blockbusters that are extremely formulaic for the most part. A lot of films are sequels or remakes. The rise of TV - specifically, although not clarified in the original post, the rise of Quality TV(tm) as a genre in the eighties - has impacted the way we view films. Save the Cat was an influential book that created a very specific type of screenwriting that has impacted all of film. It's just...

Well, the post sort of implies that any of this is new. And it really isn't. History repeats itself, and specifically when it comes to film, history has been repeating itself for the entirety of film history.

Let's go claim by claim.

Film v. digital. This is just my personal opinion, but I just don't think this matters much. Certain directors still insist on using actual film, but that film still goes through immense amounts of digital post production. The difference in our mindset regarding this is only palpable/relevant in two contexts: 1. VHS tapes. This video essay by HBomb and Shannon Strucci covers the effect VHS has on us pretty effectively, in my opinion. 2. Late 90s/early 2000s digital cameras, that were simply such low quality that you could not do the same things with them, which created what, in my opinion, is actually a fantastic era of unique filmmaking we simply don't have anymore.

The interesting thing here is that digital filmmaking is yet another step in what has always been happening - filmmaking becoming more and more accessible to the average person. It used to be impossible to shoot movies at all without a full fledged studio. (This is also why the natural lighting claim is BS - studios have been used to film pretty much everything in Hollywood forever, and it is only rarely or in very specific artistic movements that natural lighting was regularly used.) Film cameras were big and loud and for a long time (see Singing in the Rain) you had to have them in a separate room to even film with sound. Eventually the portable film camera was invented - this is in the sixties, more or less - and suddenly entire artistic movements were invented, because they could be. If you can carry a camera around with you, you are capable of making art that was simply impossible to make before, and as those cameras got cheaper and cheaper over the decades, more and more people got access to filmmaking. But film still has a steep learning curve, and it is not at all as accessible as the simple digital camera. And nowadays, many of us have HD cameras capable of high quality filmmaking just sitting in our phones. Digital cameras, although originally pretty terrible for many types of art because they were just... well, bad, are now the most reliable way to make moving pictures as art, because you can do anything with them. They are slightly less capable of capturing certain types of shadows, and honestly, that's not even a relevant concern for many of the professional cameras anymore anyway. Which brings us to...

Effects. After effects - including photoshop and color grading - are as old as film itself. Yes, we've gotten better at them. Yes, practical effects do still age better and don't usually have to be "fixed in post". But the use of digital VFX itself is not an evil. If anything, I think it's a good thing. An iconic story is that the reason Jaws is so scary is that the shark simply stopped working when it came to contact with the water, making it so they had to use very few shots of it, building tension. That's a success story. But how many times have practical effects made life so much worse, so much more dangerous? Everyone on the original Who set hated K-9 cause it malfunctioned constantly. If you can just add a digital explosion, you don't have to risk a forest fire. Do you understand my point? There are positive and negative aspects to both choices. And color grading is fucking critical to making movies watchable, as is audio editing. I cannot express this enough. Do not underestimate the importance of this kind of thing. Good editing makes a film, bad editing breaks it.

I have nothing to say against the death of the midbudget film. It sucks and I hate it.

I have nothing to say against the editing thing, either. Trends come and go when it comes to pacing in the editing room.

But the formulaic nature of Hollywood filmmaking? ... Have any of y'all done any research into Hollywood history? Hollywood has been making sequels and remakes and using the three act structure and five act structure and various other theories for its entire history. One of the first films we have a record of is an adaptation of a moral story that used to be told in slideshows. The original A Star Is Born was made in 1937, and there was a remake in the 50s and the 70s before the remake in 2018. While the term would be used until Jaws in the 70s, movies such as Birth of a Nation (racist propaganda that it is) and Gone with the Wind were absolutely blockbusters by today's standards - adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is literally still the most financially successful movie of all time. Experimental filmmaking has existed alongside blockbusters and formulaic movies, and arguably - very arguably - the Hollywood formula actually predates much of what we think of "artistic film".

Finally, the rise of Quality TV(tm) and tv movies in the eighties was absolutely influential when it comes to how we watch movies but like... so was the television set entering 90% of American households by the late fifties. Films have been getting bigger and (literally!) wider and more colorful and more technologically advanced every single time TV has caught up with it. This is just how film has differentiated itself from television - it's bigger, more bombastic, or - in the other direction - somehow even smaller, more intimate, artistic. TV is called the idiot box (which is such BS btw), but movies were being called trash first, and had to prove themselves an art and not a business way before the TV came along and made life harder for them.

In short, there's very few things that are actually, objectively wrong with the original post. It just implies a variety of things that, in context, are just what film intrinsically is. And while I think we're entering the era of television in general, and I like it that way, there is still value in film as it is. Some of y'all just have nostalgia goggles on and no historical context for why these things happen the way they do. And the second one is not your fault - again, I just got my fucking degree in this shit. But the first one... maybe it's time for you to take those damn goggles off.

#film #tv #movies #filmmaking #film history #vfx #appreciate your damn editors and vfx artists fuck you #ask #resplendent-ragamuffin