ceargaest

[tʃæɑ̯rˠɣæːst]

linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.

since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!


username etymology
bosworthtoller.com/5952

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

if you have ever once in your life watched a TV or film production, a YouTube video, or anything else that was committed to visual recording media, and thought to yourself "wow, this set looks so pristine," it is an ironclad fact that if you turned the camera 3° in either direction it would look like "guys really live like this and think it's okay"


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

one of my favorite bits of Authenticity in media is in the aaron sorkin show (derogatory) Sports Night (complimentary) in which, every single time the cameras turn off for any length of time whatsoever, two women pop out of the woodwork and wordlessly begin attacking both the hosts with lint rollers. they're visibly angry. you know that they were staring at the program monitor for the whole preceding ten minute segment going "hair. hair. there's a hair. there's a fiber" and silently but deliberately rending garments they brought for this purpose


pendell
@pendell

the second you go an inch beyond the intended 4x3 frame you see everything, all the strings, lights, cables, C-stands, everything that makes the show work. Everything is deliberately framed to work in 4x3 and absolutely nothing else, because they were working in tight sets on tight money. Also production started in 1987 so they weren't very concerned about covering for 16x9.

It's very amusing to think almost every frame of the show has all of this just a foot or so out of frame. Of course we all know deep down that's how TV works, but it's a nice reminder to actually see it.

It's like... sonder for media? Something that reminds you of what an insane amount of work goes into every second of what you're seeing.



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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

A truism about photography that I learned and have forgotten the source of is: photography is an art of omission. You create a photograph not by what you include, but by what you exclude.

There's an old joke apocryphally attributed to any of a number of famous artists about how sculpting is simply a matter of taking a slab of marble and removing all the parts that don't look like the subject. The joke is worth a small chuckle, but I like it as a reminder of how the choices of what you include and what you exclude are intrinsically linked and equally important in all forms of art.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

i got taught this learning animation too, if it’s not in the shot it doesn’t exist. even if that means a character is in an ungodly contortion because that’s the only way you can make the shot work.

in reply to @pendell's post:

The obsession with altering the aspect ratio of an already finished show just so you don't get 5 or so people complaining about black bars is utterly insane. At least something like The X-Files purposefully and intentionally covered for both 4x3 and 16x9, so at least there the hard work had already been done in advance, but stuff like cropping Buffy, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, etc is just deranged corporate behavior.

If you want to watch something that's like seeing a stage play, try out some classic Doctor Who. The budgets were so low and the production methods were so primitive (by modern standards) that it really does feel like a taped stage performance most of the time, and if you let yourself accept that they can be super enjoyable and fun.

If you want this taken to a ridiculous degree, try the original Dark Shadows series (it’s on Tubi). For most of its 1200-ish episode run, it was entirely live-to-tape, with zero postproduction. No retakes, no editing beyond what you could do inline on a late 60’s mixer; they didn’t even break between scenes, just cut to the camera on the next set over. If a character was in two consecutive scenes, they had to just book it across the studio while the camera did an establishing pan or something.

Boom in shot? Too bad, keep going. Actor flubs a line? Keep going. Prop falls apart? Keep going. Actor literally runs in front of the camera on the way to their next scene, causing someone offscreen to audibly swear? Too bad, keep going.

It’s great.

Super early black and white Doctor Who, like the Hartnell or Troughton eras, was definitely produced almost just like that. There are famously many line flubs in Hartnell's era especially that the cast just rolls with haha. By the time you get into the color era with Pertwee and so on, they got more complex with the editing, but the spirit remains, and a lot of the on-set filming still feels like a mostly-unedited stage production.

Thanks though, I'll try to check out Dark Shadows sometime!

in reply to @dosmeow's post:

You have to wonder if this accidentally leads to some sort of residuals issue where an actor who didn't appear on screen for an episode of a show but was doing pickup for another episode just got caught on set in the background with these 16:9 conversions. Are they owed residuals now?