Comment by saghm
9 hours ago
> Duffer’s advice highlights a conflict between technological advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the content.
I know I'm pretty unsophisticated when it comes to stuff like art, but I've never been able to appreciate takes like this. If I'm watching something on my own time from the comfort of my home, I don't really care about what the filmmaker thinks if it's different than what I want to see. Maybe he's just trying to speak to the people who do care about seeing his exact vision, but his phrasing is so exaggerated in how negatively he seems to see these settings makes it seem like he genuinely thinks what he's saying applies universally. Honestly, I'd have a pretty similar opinion even for art outside of my home. If someone told me I was looking at the Mona Lisa wrong because it's "not what the artist intended" I'd probably laugh at them. It doesn't really seem like you're doing a good job as an artist if you have to give people instructions on how to look at it.
The tone might be a miss, but I enjoy having access to information on the intended experience, for my own curiosity, to better understand the creative process and intentions of the artist, and to habe the option to tweak my approach if I feel like I'm missing something other people aren't.
I hear you, artists (and fans) are frequently overly dogmatic on how their work should be consumed but, well, that strikes me as part-and-parcel of the instinct that drives them to sink hundreds or thousands of hours into developing a niche skill that lets them express an idea by creating something beautiful for the rest of us to enjoy. If they didn't care so much about getting it right, the work would probably be less polished and less compelling, so I'm happy to let them be a bit irritating since they dedicated their life to making something nice for me and the rest of us, even if it was for themselves.
Up to you whether or not this applies to this or any other particular creator, but it feels appropriate to me for artists to be annoying about how their work should be enjoyed in the same way it's appropriate for programmers to be annoying about how software should be developed and used: everyone's necessarily more passionate and opinionated about their domain and their work, that's why they're better at it than me even if individual opinions aren't universally strictly right!
If someone told me I was looking at the Mona Lisa wrong because it's "not what the artist intended" I'd probably laugh at them.
That's arguably a thing, due to centuries of aged and yellowed varnish.
You can watch whatever you want however you want, but it's entirely reasonable for the creator of art to give tips on how to view it the way it was intended. If you'd prefer that it look like a hybrid-cartoon Teletubby episode, then I say go for it.
To me it's not about art. It's about this setting making the production quality of a billion dollar movie look like a cardboard SNL set.
When walking past a high end TV I've honestly confused a billion dollar movie for a teen weekend project, due to this. It's only when I see "hang on, how's Famous Actor in this?" that I see that oh this is a Marvel movie?
To me it's as if people who don't see it are saying "oh, I didn't even realise I'd set the TV to black and white".
This is not high art. It's... well... the soap opera effect.
If films shot at a decent enough frame rate, people wouldn’t feel the need to try to fix it. And snobs can have a setting that skips every other frame.
Similar is the case for sound and (to a much lesser extent) contrast.
Viewers need to be able to see and hear in comfort.
So true, everybody else is wrong and you're right.
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If you think this is about snobbery, then I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood the problem.
This is more comparable to color being turned off. Sure, if you're completely colorblind, then it's not an issue. But non-colorblind people are not "snobs".
Or if dialog is completely unintelligible. That's not a problem for people who don't speak the language anyway, and would need subtitles either way. But people who speak English are not "snobs" for wanting to be able to understand dialog spoken in English.
I've not seen a movie filmed and played back in high frame rate. It may be perfectly fine (for me). In that case it's not about the framerate, but about the botched interpolation.
Like I said in my previous comment, it's not about "art".
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