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Those five minute on-repeat videos they show at WWII museums as you walk through the exhibits have better production quality than this show.
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Jan 30, 2024 22:51
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To be fair band of brothers isn't perfect, the strength of the episode depends on the strength of the subject. Famously it goes from Dick Winters the super Charismatic Leader to Blithe the guy who dies but didn't actually die in real life which makes the third episode somewhat of a buzz kill. None of the masters of the air episodes have felt like they are about anything just a collection of anecdotes from the war. Hopefully it ties together. Still enjoying it though, but that's just my thoughts.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:06
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Rewatching The Pacific and Band of Brothers in between episodes of this. Noticed a few things: The crop of actors in this show seem impossibly young compared to the people who played e.g. Leckie and Guarnere (although Sledge will always be the kid from Jurassic Park). The men doing bombing runs into Germany weren't far removed from kids, but neither were the 17-year-olds jumping into Normady or fighting in Tarawa, so it's still strangely noticeable. BoB has some hard scenes but The Pacific is brutal and gets into the characters in an unpleasant but hugely important way. You could contrast the non-combat eps of BoB with Leckie's episodes away from combat (on libo in Australia and then on medical leave after his issues urinating himself); the first has a wholesome sense of brotherhood, while the second is gently caress-you honest. It was completely accidental, but BoB aired right before and the first couple of months after 9/11, and I think the sense of patriotism and nationalism carried over into the public sentiment for the show. The Pacific came out in 2010 after a decade of war and uncomfortable truths about American brutality and I don't think it's an accident the series reflected that. I'm wondering what (if anything) Masters of the Air will inherit from the present.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:23
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I feel like Tom Hanks hero worship of servicemen has only increased over the years despite the rough violence of The Pacific.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:31
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I think one thing (out of many) that bugged me in the first two episodes is that they seem to be going out of their way to make the Germans "faceless." The enemy fighters never have enough definition. The Ju 88s barely get seen and I'm sure if you slowed things down to a single frame at a time the dedicated fighters would still be unidentifiable blurs. Once again, this doesn't look like it cost a quarter of a billion dollars.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:35
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BIG HEADLINE posted:I think one thing (out of many) that bugged me in the first two episodes is that they seem to be going out of their way to make the Germans "faceless." The other two shows didn't feature much of the enemy either.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:45
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Once again, this doesn't look like it cost a quarter of a billion dollars. Part of that pricepoint would have been affected by significant delays in production due to covid, particularly when two of your leads turn out to be rising movie stars with the leverage to negotiate better deals for themselves when they had their filming time extended. There'd also have been problems around Cary Fukunaga, who at some point was going to direct the entire season IIRC. I also noticed that they got John Shiban in to work on some of the scripts. He's a script doctor, the kind of person you call in when your production is struggling to scrape its scripts together, which also suggests mismanagement or delays due to substandard work. I mean, look at this credit for Part 8: quote:Teleplay by : John Orloff & Joel Anderson Thompson and Dee Rees All of that would have eaten into the budget significantly.
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Jan 31, 2024 00:19
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had the chance to watch the second episode in HD on a regular television and  even the mess hall scenes look like they're composited together. covid surely can't have prevented them from sitting in a hut in a field outside of norwich.
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Jan 31, 2024 00:59
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I'm impressed you guys can see anything at all with shots like this. 
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Jan 31, 2024 01:06
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Cojawfee posted:The other two shows didn't feature much of the enemy either. Hey, this guy was all over an episode! 
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Jan 31, 2024 01:52
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Jerusalem posted:Hey, this guy was all over an episode!
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Jan 31, 2024 02:14
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I'm watching SAS Rogue Heroes alongside Masters of the Air. Content and tone notwithstanding it is a stark difference between the location shooting in Morocco and the desert compared to the CGI compositing in Masters of the Air. I don't know what the budget for a 6 episode BBC miniseries is compared to an Apple TV Original but they sure as hell knew how to spend it because Rogue Heroes looks incredible.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:17
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In terms of WW2 TV shows, if anyone is trying to scratch that itch, I'd check out World on Fire. A tad too melodramatic at times, and certainly not the best visual effects, but it does tell a decent story.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:28
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Arc Hammer posted:I'm watching SAS Rogue Heroes This is a great watch.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:40
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Eason the Fifth posted:Rewatching The Pacific and Band of Brothers in between episodes of this. Noticed a few things: The actors in this show actually match much better some of their counterparts in reality. In BoB, they tended to be bit too old. The real war had 23 year old majors flying airplanes, which in a TV show would always feel a bit too young.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:57
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BIG HEADLINE posted:I think one thing (out of many) that bugged me in the first two episodes is that they seem to be going out of their way to make the Germans "faceless." Nah if they were going for that it'd just be the Luftwaffe aircraft looking like they'd been lifted from a late 90's flight sim, the whole thing looks horrendous and the physics of it all is off as well. I just re-watched some of the flying sequences from the Catch-22 mini series to compare and it's so much better than this it's ridiculous, there's no substitute for filming the real thing in the air and supplementing that with CGI and they absolutely could have done that with $250 million. I wouldn't really care if everything else about the show made up for it but it's all just a bit... poo poo. Some poor writing and acting, almost non-existent characterisation and the voiceovers feel like they've been tacked on at the last minute to desperately create some sort of narrative because essentially there isn't one. I think they definitely would have been better going with the fictionalised story of one bomber crew inspired by real events route instead or maybe even just focusing on a single individual's experiences for each episode, the fundamental problem is that the subject is too broad to try and repeat what Band of Brothers and The Pacific did so what they're doing is never going to work. Someone also needs to tell Hanks and Spielberg the anti-British stuff is just getting pathetic at this point. Oh and those Ju 88s are actually Bf 110s and I don't think that's a deliberate mistake either, the "190s" in episode one are all Bf 109s (the show is full of this, in that crosswind landing Cleven throttles up the engines on the wrong side of the plane, though since the whole point of that was to show what a hot-poo poo pilot he is maybe he was making it harder for himself on purpose idk).
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Jan 31, 2024 04:10
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I wonder if it really is down to them wasting a bunch of budget renting the volume. I think people are too busy huffing their own farts about what a technological marvel it is to realize that it still doesn't look real and actively looks bad sometimes. Yeah it's really cool that the background is real time rendered from the perspective of the real camera, but it still looks like a sound stage.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:36
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MrMojok posted:This is a great watch. Just finished the series this evening. Very entertaining and of course when a German tank shows up in Africa it's an M60. Some things never change.
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Jan 31, 2024 05:12
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I'll third the SAS suggestion. I first learned of it from a clip on tiktok about the motor pool being french and giving them enough fuel for a 500km trip that was 500 miles. The whole show is amazing and it's crazy that it really was just created from some guy deciding he wanted to do it.
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Jan 31, 2024 06:03
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Arc Hammer posted:Just finished the series this evening. Very entertaining and of course when a German tank shows up in Africa it's an M60. Some things never change. WW2 Movies using the wrong tanks dressed up as the right tanks is dying art. A bridge Too Far using Landrovers and Volkswagens with plastic shells on them should be the gold standard until the end of time.
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Jan 31, 2024 06:13
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I'm already enjoying this series more than The Pacific.
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Jan 31, 2024 06:50
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Stegosnaurlax posted:WW2 Movies using the wrong tanks dressed up as the right tanks is dying art. A bridge Too Far using Landrovers and Volkswagens with plastic shells on them should be the gold standard until the end of time. It'll always be the T(iger)-34s from Kelly's Heroes for me, love it whenever those show up. But really, I was happy to see a Patton in Rogue Heroes because it reminded me of Patton where all the tanks are played by Pattons regardless of whose Patton they're Patton-ing.
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Jan 31, 2024 14:15
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Arc Hammer posted:It'll always be the T(iger)-34s from Kelly's Heroes for me, love it whenever those show up. So many German T-34s in some of the Yugoslav movie footage in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWWLM3xOi9Q
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Jan 31, 2024 15:17
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joepinetree posted:In terms of WW2 TV shows, if anyone is trying to scratch that itch, I'd check out World on Fire. A tad too melodramatic at times, and certainly not the best visual effects, but it does tell a decent story. I'd chip in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_War
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Jan 31, 2024 16:18
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After watching the second episode I feel that it’s pretty embarrassing how the credits sequence tries to recapture the magic of Band of Brothers with random slow motion and sepia toned images. I never watched the Pacific, but did it do the Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan desaturated grainy look? It just worked so well for the story and helped sell some of the cheapness of the sets or effects in BoB due to it being TV. This show is just so sharp and colorful and it makes it look phony a lot of the time.
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Jan 31, 2024 18:48
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It did, but it was themed around drawing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ahVL4u6rmI
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Jan 31, 2024 19:01
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Eason the Fifth posted:It did, but it was themed around drawing: Sorry, I meant the look of the whole show. I was just also noting that the intro for Masters of the Air mimics the look of BoB but not the rest of the show.
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Jan 31, 2024 19:07
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Mullitt posted:Sorry, I meant the look of the whole show. I was just also noting that the intro for Masters of the Air mimics the look of BoB but not the rest of the show. Oh I gotcha, sorry I misread. The Pacific did do the washed-out look too, and sometimes it didn't always work. Not giving MotA a pass since it's 14 years later and much more money, but the Pacific had some particularly bad-looking CGI shots: 
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Jan 31, 2024 19:16
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Eason the Fifth posted:Oh I gotcha, sorry I misread. The Pacific did do the washed-out look too, and sometimes it didn't always work. Not giving MotA a pass since it's 14 years later and much more money, but the Pacific had some particularly bad-looking CGI shots: Yeah, even movies sometimes have bad compositing. I'm usually pretty forgiving of those sorts of things on TV - the Eagles Nest in Band of Brothers had some terrible CGI but it was the background of one scene so who cares. Masters of the Air both has a very clean and bright look to the visuals which makes everything super noticeable and has extensive storytelling through CGI due to it being about planes. The crash in Scotland looked like a cartoon - I felt it had no tension when it should have been an exciting, scary scene. I feel like I'm just seeing too much in every scene, everything is too defined and sharp. It makes the costumes look weird too.
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Jan 31, 2024 19:31
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I wonder if any of the Spanish Buchons will make an appearance as 109s intercepting the bombers. It would be nice.
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Jan 31, 2024 19:59
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Eason the Fifth posted:Oh I gotcha, sorry I misread. The Pacific did do the washed-out look too, and sometimes it didn't always work. Not giving MotA a pass since it's 14 years later and much more money, but the Pacific had some particularly bad-looking CGI shots: Yeah there are a few terrible shots in The Pacific, my main gripe with the effects shots in MotA is that there are some great environment shots but any shots with planes on the ground is glaringly bad....in a show about planes.
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Jan 31, 2024 21:42
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Batcat posted:in that crosswind landing Cleven throttles up the engines on the wrong side of the plane, though since the whole point of that was to show what a hot-poo poo pilot he is maybe he was making it harder for himself on purpose idk). He puts rudder left, right wing low, and then adds more thrust on left side to help counter the leftward movement on ground track. That appears to be a physics workable solution to it if I remember the steps correct.
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Feb 1, 2024 05:32
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Has anyone read the source material book this is based on? The show just feels so disjointed and quick.
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Feb 1, 2024 05:47
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Arc Hammer posted:I wonder if any of the Spanish Buchons will make an appearance as 109s intercepting the bombers. It would be nice. Can't be many of those suckers flying around, there was only 6 in 2016 George H.W. oval office posted:Has anyone read the source material book this is based on? The show just feels so disjointed and quick. Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Feb 1, 2024 06:00
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BBC make Len Deighton's Bomber challenge.
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Feb 1, 2024 06:25
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jisforjosh posted:Yeah there are a few terrible shots in The Pacific, my main gripe with the effects shots in MotA is that there are some great environment shots but any shots with planes on the ground is glaringly bad....in a show about planes. Yeah, those ground shots in particular really stand out for some reason, which is bizarre because there's endless amounts of reference footage of grounded B-17s from airshows. The Scotland crash landing in particular looked atrocious. It's funny because when BoB came out I fantasized about how cool it would be to get a similar show that dealt with the air war but I figured it wouldn't be viable any time soon given how expensive CGI was and that Hanks and Spielberg wouldn't attempt it without rock solid FX. A quarter of a century later and it's still not viable, apparently!
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Feb 1, 2024 09:56
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A quarter century and the systematic destruction of the VFX industry does that.
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Feb 1, 2024 13:10
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One would think that all the postponement due to covid would have given the fx studios time to polish the cgi. That said, I can't say the cgi is bothering me much, or the shows quality in general.
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Feb 1, 2024 13:26
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Remember when Peter Jackson was going to get Weta and the Wanaka warbird restoration guys to build a full size Lancaster for a Dambusters movie? And it got kiboshed because the commander called his dog the N word
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Feb 1, 2024 13:28
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Laughing Zealot posted:One would think that all the postponement due to covid would have given the fx studios time to polish the cgi.. I dunno if this is how it works. From how I understand it the FX company would make a bid and have to complete it within a certain time frame as a part of that bid, the show being delayed wouldn't mean more time to work.
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Feb 1, 2024 13:44
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