Problems have come this week at CinemaCon which has been taking place in Las Vegas where Warner Bros. showed a montage with 10 minutes of footage. Comments came back saying that the footage looked like a shot for TV movie low budget movie which I’m sure had WB and maybe even Director Peter Jackson a little bit worried.
Saying that, Jackson has now responded to the comments via Entertainment Weekly who tells us that like any new technology, it’s going to take people to get used to and that it’ll ‘keep evolving’.
“At first it’s unusual because you’ve never seen a movie like this before. It’s literally a new experience, but you know, that doesn’t last the entire experience of the film; not by any stretch, after 10 minutes or so,” said Jackson. “That’s a different experience than if you see a fast-cutting montage at a technical presentation.”
“A couple of the more negative commenters from CinemaCon said that in the Gollum and Bilbo scene [which took place later in the presentation] they didn’t mind it and got used to that,” the director added. “That was the same 48 frames the rest of the reel was. I just wonder if it they were getting into the dialogue, the characters and the story. That’s what happens in the movie. You settle into it.”
I’m pleased to see that Jackson has taken these comments on board and I’m really excited to see these 10 minutes of footage so that I can make my own mind up but we won’t really know anything until we see the first movie when it’s released in December 14th.
If you’ve forgotten what to expect, have a watch of the trailer below.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJULoHnwoRI’]
Nice article, thanks for sharing.
I no this wont be good. Its the ‘soap opera effect’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation#Soap_Opera_Effect) that you might notice on modern TV when they insert extra frames between frames.
I cant stand it, its does indeed makes films look cheap. Completely removes the cinematic magic and experience.
🙁
Jackson’s clueless. The complaint was not that the experience wasn’t anything we’d seen before, but that it looked like old video soap operas on TV… something we HAVE seen before, and therefore have something (bad) to compare it to.
I saw a similar problem when viewing one of those new 100+ inch TVs at a electronics store; they were playing a HD BluRay of FAST FIVE and it looked like Vin Diesel was strutting around a set. The hyperrealism not only flattens the picture, the details are TOO crisp, and it looks like a stage play, where the sets are obvious and everything looks like a prop. I could even see the dust in the air of the studio. I can only imagine that 48fps will be WORSE.The people reviewing HOBBIT specifically said that the CGI character scenes — like Gollum — were the only things that benefited, plus the dark lighting helped. That’s because with CGI they can control the level of detail more than filming humans and sets.It has nothing whatsoever to do with people getting used to the experience, or buying into the story. And if you have to tell your audience to “get used to it,” you know you are off to a pretty lousy start.