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SMG is being deliberately disingenuous here. There's a far and wide gulf between a screen capture and actual movement. Something may look ill-defined in a single capture, but thanks to the magic of motion, the eye can pick up and distinguish objects even against non-complimentary backgrounds quite easily.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:01
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I don't remember there being a pumpkin in Pacific Rim.quote:SMG is being deliberately disingenuous here. You don't say. e: Looking at it again, What's-his-name's even moving his arm up into the lights moving down into his hands, the human eye being drawn by light and motion above all else. This is a strange hill for him to die on. RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 20:06
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He's moving his hands up into the light, and you can actually tell where his knuckles are thanks to the row of little orange beads, but his actual hands and body blend pretty smoothly into the background and can't be cleanly picked out. The motion's clear, the figure itself isn't. It doesn't look good! Maybe if the back wall had been brighter or darker, or if the suits had featured more christmas lights or been haloed more strongly by their own glow. Like, put a blue or yellow light right in front of and below the protagonist so that his black armored hands are actually rim-lit completely instead of slightly, boom.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:18
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Maybe I'm a mutant then, I can see it all distinctly. Even in the cropped picture he gave the hands are highlighted. Unlike the other picture SMG has decided to ignore, I can tell exactly what is going on.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:21
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Here's an image of Godzilla being attacked by Mothra. Compared to the previous image of Cherno Alpha being attacked by Leatherback, which is more clear? Here is an image of two shapes: a circle, and a square with rounded corners.  Which of these two shapes is more round? Which of the two shapes is more yellowy?
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Jun 27, 2014 20:24
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quote:Compared to the previous image of Cherno Alpha being attacked by Leatherback, which is more clear? That image taken at that moment in the fight was not very clear. The image you are obsessing on at the moment, however, is. I would like to point out I can't tell where Godzilla's arms are though. 
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Jun 27, 2014 20:27
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RBA Starblade posted:Maybe I'm a mutant then, I can see it all distinctly. Even in the cropped picture he gave the hands are highlighted. Unlike the other picture SMG has decided to ignore, I can tell exactly what is going on.  In this picture the black of the hands is exactly the same as the black of the wall behind the hands, such that there are totally solid shapes consisting of a segment of the wall fused with a segment of Raleigh's palms or backhands. It's like someone used the MSPaint fill tool but forgot to make sure that the hands' blue outlines were unbroken first. It's murky and indistinct. Not unintelligible - but "not unintelligible" is not exactly high praise. Edit: I should mention that we don't even need a total solid outline here or something. If the hands were just lit with a brighter shade of blue than was the rest of the machinery or something, even that would be better than what we've got in that image. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 20:31
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Here's an image of Godzilla being attacked by Mothra. I can't tell what's going on here at all. Is that a giant bat? Why does it just look suspended in the air?
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Jun 27, 2014 20:34
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Ferrinus posted:
This is objectively false even on my phone screen. e: to my eyes Habibi fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 20:35
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DUSK! With a creepy, tingling sensation, you hear the fluttering of leathery wings! BATS! With glowing red eyes and glistening fangs, these unspeakable giant bugs drop onto...
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Jun 27, 2014 20:35
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Paolomania posted:I'm not clear: are you saying that, in a scene where the protagonist's bodies have effectively merged with eachother and their enclosing robot body, it is inappropriate to have a shot where their silhouettes have merged with their surroundings? This is good. Everything else recently has been bad.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:36
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Ferrinus posted:DUSK! With a creepy, tingling sensation, you hear the fluttering of leathery wings! BATS! With glowing red eyes and glistening fangs, these unspeakable giant bugs drop onto... Now if you were to look at this picture of Hobbes holding a snowball...
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Jun 27, 2014 20:38
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Bongo Bill posted:This is good. Everything else recently has been bad. I don't actually think that flies. PR pilots aren't assimilated into their machines such that they become hopelessly enmeshed within them and largely indistinguishable from them. A movie in which Raleigh and Mako just sink into a mass of pistols and cables and then started speaking in a creepy, monotone unison would've been pretty interesting but it's not the movie we got. Jaeger pilots are noble heroes in whom the all the industrial power of the resistance is focused and by whom that power is wielded - it doesn't make sense for us to be forgetting where the robot ends and the human begins. It's not actually inappropriate that PR introduces kaiju as confusing, hard-to-follow horror movie monsters obscured by mist and darkness, either - but the point is that our noble heroes drag them into the light and fight them according to the rules of Dragon Ball Z rather than according to the rules of Aliens. Unfortunately, this only happens once.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:42
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Habibi posted:I can't tell what's going on here at all. Is that a giant bat? Why does it just look suspended in the air? It looks suspended in the air because it is suspended in the air. The composition is such that Mothra's body is clearly separate from the ground, clearly overshadowing the hunched-over Godzilla. Godzilla looks, for the moment, like he is being pushed down and to the left - away from the rubble and towards the ocean in the background. It's clear visual storytelling.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:48
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Habibi posted:This is objectively false even on my phone screen.  As you can see, I've grabbed two blocks of the wall behind Raleigh's hands and moved them over to cover parts of Raleigh's hands. I marked the first one so that you can follow its transfer... but can you find the second???
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Jun 27, 2014 20:50
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Pretty sure he was pointing out that the fingers are highlighted (like you said, a blue tone) and visually distinct from the wall (along with that grip thing in each hand), not that a shadow is the same color as black armor.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:54
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What's the point of all this anyway? That the cockpits are dark?
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Jun 27, 2014 20:55
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Something about fascism I think.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:56
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Biff Rockgroin posted:What's the point of all this anyway? That the cockpits are dark? SMG is criticizing the coherence of the film's visual storytelling.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:56
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RBA Starblade posted:Pretty sure he was pointing out that the fingers are highlighted and visually distinct from the wall (along with that grip thing in each hand), not that a shadow is the same color as black armor. The specific line he quoted and called false was "the black of the hands is exactly the same as the black of the wall behind the hands", so I'm retorting with an image demonstrating that more clearly. The problem, I claim, is that the fingers are not highlighted and visually distinct from the wall to the degree they need to be. That's due to a combination of all the colors being the same and the rim lighting on the fingers being really weak. Either change could've made Raleigh's gesture much more distinct than it was. Consider, for instance, this image of US president Barack Obama charging a ki blast:  As is, Raleigh kind of blends into the dark and murky background of the cockpit in the same way that the kaiju kind of blend into the dark and murky background of the ocean. This is kind of interesting in itself, but I'm not sure it makes sense given Raleigh's position relative to the kaiju in the rest of the movie and the context of that scene. Raleigh : Mako :: Knifehead : Gypsy Danger???
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Jun 27, 2014 21:02
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It looks suspended in the air because it is suspended in the air. quote:The composition is such that Mothra's body is clearly separate from the ground, clearly overshadowing the hunched-over Godzilla. Godzilla looks, for the moment, like he is being pushed down and to the left - away from the rubble and towards the ocean in the background. It's clear visual storytelling. It having been decades since I've seen this movie, that's actually not at all what I got out of this still and completely unrepresentative image. Weird. And it was so clear...
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Jun 27, 2014 21:02
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Habibi posted:So it's not flying? It's just suspended? Like what, on cables? The image is still and yet its communicating motion.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:05
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Here's a shot from later in the same film. You can note that the composition is very similar.  Godzilla is again pushed down and to the left. The darker hill(s) in the foreground slope in that direction. In motion, you can clearly see the clouds of dust blowing to the left. Although they are no longer near the ocean, Godzilla is still being pushed back 'underground', into the hills in the background. He is already partially obscured by the hills in the foreground and the clouds of dust. This is clear visual storytelling.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:05
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No it's not!!
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Jun 27, 2014 21:08
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Ferrinus posted:I don't actually think that flies. PR pilots aren't assimilated into their machines such that they become hopelessly enmeshed within them and largely indistinguishable from them. A movie in which Raleigh and Mako just sink into a mass of pistols and cables and then started speaking in a creepy, monotone unison would've been pretty interesting but it's not the movie we got. Jaeger pilots are noble heroes in whom the all the industrial power of the resistance is focused and by whom that power is wielded - it doesn't make sense for us to be forgetting where the robot ends and the human begins. I wanted to read somebody saying something about that post, which was better than whether or not hands are plainly visible, and you gave me what I wanted. Thank you. I don't get the practice of making action scenes in action movies hard to see. This bugged me somewhat in Godzilla (2014) as well. In that case, the human characters just plain did not know what the gently caress was going on at any moment, and things only became clearer as the guy gradually came to understand what Godzilla was trying to do - but I still felt like looking at motion pictures of Godzilla destroying poo poo would be a better pastime than looking at motion pictures of poo poo being destroyed while parts of Godzilla are emerging from clouds in the background. In Pacific Rim, the kaiju are like storms and the jaegers are like kaiju, and it's hard to see through thunderheads and pouring rain and pounding surf, but I've seen actual storms, both photographed and in person, that were more readable than these CGI animations that could have looked like whatever Guillermo Del Toro wanted. The city lights at night framed Gipsy Danger's battle in the second act very well, but out there in the open sea, I think it would have been more appropriate to have Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon get their asses kicked by the light of a sunset, because that's some pretty easy symbolism and it introduces the opportunity for lots of good different colors. Del Toro likes good different colors and has used them extensively in the past, and continuity was consciously ignored in terms of scale and color in other scenes. His hands weren't exactly tied. Maybe somebody who's a more visual person than I am can explain what directors are trying to accomplish when they hire ILM to fill fill frame after frame with blotchy gradients, and more importantly why they think that's better than showing two or three enormous awesome things beating the poo poo out of each other.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:09
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All giant lizards should have Life Alert.quote:As is, Raleigh kind of blends into the dark and murky background of the cockpit in the same way that the kaiju kind of blend into the dark and murky background of the ocean. This is kind of interesting in itself, but I'm not sure it makes sense given Raleigh's position relative to the kaiju in the rest of the movie and the context of that scene. Raleigh : Mako :: Knifehead : Gypsy Danger??? If you wanted to make the comparison of the pilots getting visually lost in the cockpit the same way the Kaiju do in the ocean it'd be more like Jaeger Pilots : Jaegers :: Kaiju : The Ocean and the Hurricane, the pilots blending in to the robot, the kaiju blending into the ocean, and the Jaeger being humanity's response and analogue to the kaiju, both being compared to forces of nature. It doesn't fit together 100% though but that's because you can't really force a one to one relation on it. RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 21:10
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I didn't read what you wrote but I automatically agree with it
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Jun 27, 2014 21:11
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Ferrinus posted:
Nope, because you're using an image capped from a GIF that's already suffered color loss and in which your little block comes out to be about 1mm square. We're not even talking about the same ballpark, here, because, by contrast, when I boot up the movie on my laptop, the hands are not only significantly lighter than in that screencap, they're actually blue (from the lights), slightly darker than the wall behind them, and only begin to approach the same color as he is closing them, at the very tail end of the scene.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:14
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Bongo Bill posted:Maybe somebody who's a more visual person than I am can explain what directors are trying to accomplish when they hire ILM to fill fill frame after frame with blotchy gradients, and more importantly why they think that's better than showing two or three enormous awesome things beating the poo poo out of each other. I have no idea what the motivation was for this particular film, but I think in general that's been used to make CG elements feel like they fit into, impact, and are impacted by the spaces around them. Kinda like in Battlestar Galactica (remake) or Firefly/Serenity when the camera zooms in too far on a CG element, obscuring it with blur for the illusion that a physical camera is actually focusing on a real object there.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:15
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RBA Starblade posted:If you wanted to make the comparison of the pilots getting visually lost in the cockpit the same way the Kaiju do in the ocean it'd be more like Jaeger Pilots : Jaegers :: Kaiju : The Ocean and the Hurricane, the pilots blending in to the robot, the kaiju blending into the ocean, and the Jaeger being humanity's response and analogue to the kaiju, both being equivalent to forces of nature. It doesn't fit together 100% though. The visual parallels between the pilots and the jaegers are actually very neat, because in both cases you've got a dark imposing figure whose specific position and stance is highlighted by speckled lights. I'm pretty sure every single kaiju we saw had bioluminescent markings of some kind, so the parallels between the plug suits and the monsters themselves were well conceived. There's gotta be some kind of movement from lurking, obscured menace to heroic clarity, though. Like, maybe if that shot had actually been so dark that it was actually difficult to follow, but right at the end of the gesture the lights come on and you can see Raleigh and Mako silhouetted clearly. Neowyrm posted:I didn't read what you wrote but I automatically agree with it Thank you. Habibi posted:Nope, because you're using an image capped from a GIF that's already suffered color loss and in which your little block comes out to be about 1mm square. We're not even talking about the same ballpark, here, because, by contrast, when I boot up the movie on my laptop, the hands are not only significantly lighter than in that screencap, they're actually blue (from the lights), slightly darker than the wall behind them, and only begin to approach the same color as he is closing them, at the very tail end of the scene. I'm willing to believe that that shot in the movie is clearer than the .gif, I'm just working off what's been posted in the thread.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:16
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Habibi posted:Nope, because you're using an image capped from a GIF that's already suffered color loss and in which your little block comes out to be about 1mm square. We're not even talking about the same ballpark, here, because, by contrast, when I boot up the movie on my laptop, the hands are not only significantly lighter than in that screencap, they're actually blue (from the lights), slightly darker than the wall behind them, and only begin to approach the same color as he is closing them, at the very tail end of the scene. Just in case there is any question as to whether this post is accurate:  (right click, "view image") Incidentally, when I opened up the film, I clicked to the exact scene on my first try, so there you go.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:19
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Ferrinus posted:There's gotta be some kind of movement from lurking, obscured menace to heroic clarity, though. Like, maybe if that shot had actually been so dark that it was actually difficult to follow, but right at the end of the gesture the lights come on and you can see Raleigh and Mako silhouetted clearly. It's not for the pilots, but for the Jaegers themselves wouldn't that come at the very end, when Gipsy Danger is surrounded by the colors of an alien world/between universes thing (before self-destructing)? I didn't consider that the lighting on the suits was comparable to the lighting on the kaiju though. Neat! RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 21:19
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Lord Krangdar posted:The image is still and yet its communicating motion. And this is important because the previous still of the Kaiju on the Jaegar didn't convey any motion whatsoever? SuperMechagodzilla posted:Here's a shot from later in the same film. You can note that the composition is very similar.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:23
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Habibi posted:Nope, because you're using an image capped from a GIF that's already suffered color loss and in which your little block comes out to be about 1mm square. We're not even talking about the same ballpark, here, because, by contrast, when I boot up the movie on my laptop, the hands are not only significantly lighter than in that screencap, they're actually blue (from the lights), slightly darker than the wall behind them, and only begin to approach the same color as he is closing them, at the very tail end of the scene. I used the example of the circle and rounded square to explain the concept of 'more'. The image could be 'more' clear. The silhouette could be 'more' defined. There could be 'more' contrast. It's okay to admit that 'extremely dark blue' and 'black' are nearly the same colour. The movie's honour will not be hurt.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:24
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quote:Note that, just like in the previous image, the characters' bodies - their silhouettes - are borderline illegible against the same-coloured background. The hydraulic robot chair, however, is perfectly visible in light blue. In this image, the two protagonists are looking at their hands. Can you see the hands clearly? So, could you see anything in the shot clearly SMG?
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Jun 27, 2014 21:27
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Bongo Bill posted:Maybe somebody who's a more visual person than I am can explain what directors are trying to accomplish when they hire ILM to fill fill frame after frame with blotchy gradients, and more importantly why they think that's better than showing two or three enormous awesome things beating the poo poo out of each other. I make no claim to being more or less visual, but it seems to me they are trying to balance realism with storytelling (of which realism can be a part). On the one hand, you could make everything incredibly easy to follow by eschewing textures completely, or painting the Jaegars and Kaiju solid colors, removing shadows, weather effects, water, etc... So at some point you have to balance the "I want what's happening to be clear" with "I want it to look like it's actually happening," because the two aren't always (usually?) the same, but both are obviously important to the storyteller.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:28
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RBA Starblade posted:It's not for the pilots, but for the Jaegers themselves wouldn't that come at the very end, when Gipsy Danger is surrounded by the colors of an alien world/between universes thing (before self-destructing)? I didn't consider that the lighting on the suits was comparable to the lighting on the kaiju though. Neat! Coincidentally, Raleigh's fall through the psychedelic alien hell dimension was my other favorite part of the movie. I felt cheated, though, that the entire final boss fight was darkness and hidden menace, only to be followed by the light show payoff. What if, I don't know, the nuke goes off and somehow Gypsy Danger engages the category 5 kaiju in some high-speed, well-lit kung fu while inside the pocket of empty air that the thermonuclear blast temporarily created.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:28
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I used the example of the circle and rounded square to explain the concept of 'more'. Yes, I had noticed that you had moved the goalposts from "clear" to "relative degrees of clear," but wasn't going to point it out.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:28
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S-Alpha posted:SMG is being deliberately disingenuous here. There's a far and wide gulf between a screen capture and actual movement. Something may look ill-defined in a single capture, but thanks to the magic of motion, the eye can pick up and distinguish objects even against non-complimentary backgrounds quite easily. Sort of like how awful 3DS games look in screenshots, till you see them popping out in 3D and full smooth motion.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:32
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Habibi posted:And this is important because the previous still of the Kaiju on the Jaegar didn't convey any motion whatsoever? To me that specific still doesn't convey much of anything except confusion. Although to be fair its not a very good quality screenshot and, as pointed out, its only one frame of a sequence which is in motion in the actual film.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:33
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