Why Are Movies and TV Shows So Dark Now?
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
- For years now, you've probably noticed that movies and TV shows have become darker than ever before. It's not just you. But why have color grading trends shifted this way, and is there anything we can do about it? Is it even in our control?
Filmmakers want to create the most cinematic images possible, and new technology has enabled them to do that in ways they never could before. This video hopes to break down what changes in filmmaking have led filmmakers to this point, and why these new dark color palettes are so challenging for us to view. I also go into the "what if" of how these could look with less-aggressive color grades, or how older shows might look if they were graded today.
But that's not cinematic!! Cinema was never so dark! And even when it was, even when 99,5% of the screen was pitch black you always had highlights or rim lights so you know what you're looking at, even when watching in a bright environment. There was CONTRAST.
And i get it, i know about the technology, the trends, the social and psycological nuances of our time, but still those things don't justify the absurd levels of darkness of almost every show and many movies. I may be willing to change my tv settings and block the light from the windows once in a while, for a specific movie, but they want me to be in a dark environment every time i watch tv?
Wow great video. Lot of great insight and knowledge. I'm a director and I'm trying to understand more about colour and colour grading, so this is perfect.
I didn't remember why I was subscribed to this channel, and I think you used to have a series about remakes, right? Saw it posted quite a few times in certain imageboard.
I used to do The Remaker series, so I'm glad you've stuck around! The technical post production side of things has long been my passion, and I'm happy to share some insight when I can.
@@AlternatingLine THE REMAKER. It was very good, why did you remove it?
t fek is with ur hair m8
New color grading trends
It's not just the darkness that's gotten annoying, but also the poor attempts using color to set the mood of the scene. You don't have to change the whitebalance until the entire scene is blue just to show sadness or tragedy just like you don't have to make the scene hotter than the surface of the Sun when things are calm or jovial.
ozark
Godard never did any of this shit and yet his movie have your emotions by the balls
Just because the technology allows you to do something that doesn't mean you should or it even looks good. Same as the saying just because you can do something it doesn't mean you should. I think one of the best looking remasters I've seen was the 1993 Stalingrad film, the 4K version looks fantastic to me with very white snow in some scenes that is almost blinding which is kind of the point and then the fires look fanstic, they look so warm in snow.
Part of it is that darkness hides lazy work better. The viewer's imagination has to fill in the blanks that the creators can't be bothered to show. It's the cinematic equivalent of "Oh, just ship it as is. Modders can fix that problem in the game for us."
Peter Jackson filmed the battle of Helms Deep over four months of night shoots, and you can still see exactly what is happening at any time. By contrast Fabien Wagner used darkness as a crutch.
If I wanted to NOT see underlit TV or movies, I'd listen to the radio or read a book, instead.
It sucks. I have it. Everything is so muted and bland. But what really grinds my nerves is remastering great films. I was watching American Graffiti (a fim I've seen hundreds of times on CRT to LCD), watched it recently and was wondering why it was so dark. It looked great before. Now I can't see the details on faces that were prevalent prior. It really, really sucks they just can't leave shit alone
Folks say Alien vs predator requiem features predalien vs predator action. Wouldve been great if anyone could see it though
Yeah. That movie was essentially black the whole time that Aliens or Predators were on the screen. The main time I even see a xenomorph is when the politician dude has the TV paused on it's mouth.
But Prey seemed like it was going to be good for a Predator movie, but when I tried watching it it was dark and muted, all the gorgeous stone beads, skin, blood, leaves, etc was all muted and it looked terrible. Then it kicked over to night scenes and was just staring at my reflection in the TV
@@oxylepy2 yeah, it was weird, like you had an actually good movie going and then someone fucked up the brightness
I can’t stand day for night scenes!!! Or even worst inside car scenes shoot blue screen…so terrible! Go outside with actors!
no tv settings can fix this ussue all tv series movies went standard digital to 1080 P
way to dark it s awfull
First they destroyed all attempts at enunciation and clarity, so we had to put the captions on. Now they've made it impossible to see, too. They defend it on artistic grounds but that's pretty masturbatory when you've got people complaining the material is utterly inaccessible to two senses. The only two senses that matter in this case! So why bother watching anything new? The old movies and the old shows--you can see the action and understand the dialogue.
The electric was out all day, I couldn't watch a downloaded movie on my phone cuz I couldn't see anything. Outlines only.
I always think about the sets and lighting in Starship Troopers. So clear and bright but not too bright. I always liked it but no one does that anymore; just the opposite.
HDR is in mind. I didn't watch your video. But that is the answer. HDR content is future content, so they create content that would benefit on only OLEDs and high contrast displays that can show HDR. Nice 26 minute video?? Do you just like to talk? Okay bye. You only need like 10 min for monetization.
"... HDTVs and HDRTVs allow for a much darker picture to be visible overall." Wait, the whole point is that the dark picture is NOT visible. We can't see what's going on! Can't make out details. What's so great about digital this or digital that?
Great video brother.
I was looking at the purple rim light, than i realised it's a part of your hair 😅
Even with a oled and qled! Dark scenes cant go away really sucks. Hollywood is doing this! To our TVs!
i have to watch movies in standard picture mode so i can at least see the movie!
Speaking of creative choices… Your purple Johnny Bravo hair is extremely attention grabbing, and seems to be designed to shine the light back into the camera. Is this some meta level statement?
Lol I wish I thought that far ahead.
@@AlternatingLine I mean, it does look cool. But it’s hard to ignore on screen.
Love the video! I like that we have the capability now to get true cinematic experience at home. But ya, content for a wide variety of tv settings and environments should be focused on.
The problem is even worse in HDR, they just make it darker, and it is extremely unfriendly to miniLED monitors.
Why do you have purple hair?
(Partially leaving a comment because I can't believe there are more comments complaining about your hair style than actually praising your work, absolutely ridiculous)
This is such an extremely well made video!! A lot of effort went into describing all the factors that go into the filmmaking and editing decisions (and in a way that's still understandable to the average person!) and you were really kind in being fair/neutral to the artists and assuming they had the best intentions! The edits you made to make dark scenes from modern shows look like how shows and films used to handle dark scenes was especially brilliant, it made both the scenes and your points so much clearer!! :)
I have to fully agree that the creative trend that permeates so much modern cinematography - and is possibly causing a kind of creative dead-end for cinematography - is the currently reluctance to crush blacks. The plague of mono or tinted greys that are supposed to represent the blackest levels in any frame from today's media has created, not only, a murky aesthetic that is as cringey as the pro-mist look was for the 1970's but also profoundly limited the ways DOPs and colorists produce images.
The much maligned 'Netflix Look' that seems to be everywhere is replete with murky grey shadows and blacks that hover well above 000. And, as a result, images are getting murkier and harder to see and it seems that even great DOPs are tying together less-lighting and modern cameras ability to 'see in the dark' to produce low-contrast imagery that undermines story and even production value. These images DO look good in stills, but in motion you just feel like everything was shot in a light mist.
I honestly think it's making cinematography worse and more homogenized as a result. I mean Greg Frasier is a fantastic DP, but THE BATMAN is hard-to-see, hard-to-follow and hard-to-emotionally invest into because instead of focusing on the characters and story, you're constantly searching the frame to make sure you're not missing any plot details. And THE BATMAN is very low-contrast, with grey black and pulled-down whites that just don't look good in motion. In stills, it's a beautiful film. In motion, it's cream-of-mushroom soup. And that desire to pull down the highlights and whites make it unpleasant to look at as a film instead of unpleasant to look at as a setting for a story.
Many of the DPs I work with - who are in TV and look up to cinema DPs - are obsessed with emulating the looks on bigger shows. They fear having pure blacks or creating high contrast. Super-saturated colors make them wrinkle their nose in disgust and even their references for a "film look" always come with the caveat that "oh its too contrasty, too crushed, I want to see more information in the shadows". I just want to roll my eyes sometimes.
Personally it makes no sense to me that we tweak daylight all the time to look dramatic for story purposes, but when it comes to night sequences so many DPs are more interested in capturing the "realness" of the darkness and the night-time. Even for the famous GAME OF THRONES battle sequence -- the storytelling is supposed to impart how hard it is for the CHARACTERS to see in the dark. At no point should you be wondering whether you - as an audience member - are supposed to see in the dark too or not. That is the failing of that creative decision: the audience is never 'really there' in a movie and they subconsciously know it. Audiences always understand that films and TV are representative and they get confused when the whole thing becomes too real or too subjective because they can't tell if what they're seeing is meant to be that way or not.
also why are all action scenes shot at night nowadays?
like I know you got expensive toys and so you suck at picking up the foundation skills needed as filmakers...oh, well I guess that explains it..
I guess filmaking is also a dying skill now...shit!
Can’t watch dark film at all! Not in joyed!
I watched that GoT episode on my IPS laptop in a semi dark room, and while I thought it was dark I didn't have that big of an issue with it apart from the compression that made it a bit harder to see. I mean it was supposed to be dark and you saw enough. Sure they could have pulled up those highlights while keeping the midtones and shadows to get a bit more readable contrast.
The HoD episode though just looked really bad. I mean it was just bad grading that combined with the bad compression mad it look even worse.
Don't know how good the comparison with Army of Darkness is though, I mean it's pretty badly lit with lots of hard unnatural shadows all over the place, most probably because of what you explained with how bad film is with darkness (no pun intended). This is something that have been a problem with sooo many older series and films with so extremely unnatural lighting.
Though having that said many modern movies also have quite unnatural lighting, but instead it's just that they want it to look as "cinematic" as possible so they overdo it. Then add to the problem with badly integrated CG which makes everything look really unnatural in other ways. If only every cinematographer would be Roger Deakins..
Btw, I think Ted Lasso is a good example of something modern that is quite dark. It's of course a pretty light hearted show so it's not supposed to be dark in a dark sense, it's just graded dark that together with the HDR at least to me and my OLED made it look really good. Don't know what other people thought about it though, but I haven't really seen any criticism of it so I guess it was fine?
Good walkthrough though, you had some good points :)
Yeah, I was unsure about comparing to AoD since it's tonally so different, but I went with it because it felt amusingly similar in the content of the scene, and it's much older. Both scenes are basically supernatural castle sieges staged at night. LOTR is probably a better comparison, but using AoD also gave me the ability to compare its brighter scenes to the much-darker Evil Dead Rise.
It's true though that older stuff had incredibly unrealistic lighting. Personally, I find it charming most of the time, though I can understand why it's jarring for a lot of people. I like some of the artifice to show through, because it reveals the effort and labor that went into creating the look. I think there's a balance to be had with going fully motivated vs. staged when it comes to lighting.
I've only seen glimpses of Ted Lasso, and it looked like standard primetime network style to me. Not as high key as some other shows, but still more evenly lit than a cable drama. I can't say much more.
The hair though.
Yeah, and they will continue to get obligatoray 1 star reviews from me. The rest of the media stops mattering if I can't see anything on screen.
Like Goosebumps, the lit stadium was super under lit, and then it kicked over to a hospital that looked like a closet, and the school that somehow wasn't using any interior lighting. Dunno what stadiums, hospitals, or schools these people went to, but all of these things are heavily lit in real life.
It's because cheap tvs don't get bright enough for hdr. They only have hdr to check a box on its features page.
Interesting video, but your hair is ridiculous.
Great video. But that weird purple fur hat on your head was distracting.
That’s his hair. His hair is dyed purple
Okay, so digital easily blows out. Wouldn't that basically be solved with ND filters?
Digital blowing out isn't as much of a problem with modern cameras. ND filters will of course help as well, but I don't think these productions are worried about blowing out most of the time anyway. They have the equipment to shape the light as they please, so it's more of a creative decision these days.