SuperMechagodzilla posted:

In any case, it's obvious that the predominant color is black. That little gif screen is essentially a black rectangle with spots.

Vermain posted:

Honestly, rudimentary is good when it comes to mecha. What matters the most is conveying the key moments of the pilot, rather than trying to inform the audience of every action that they take.

Here's the (untranslated) fight against Shamshel in Evangelion 1.0. The cockpit is incredibly simple: it's got a viewport and a pilot's chair, and that's it. The design of it falls apart if you think about the basic premise behind an Evangelion (it responds primarily to your conscious thought), which begs the question of why you'd even bother having the chair with the controls sitting there. The controls are merely meant to give intuition to the movement of the Evangelion. No one has controlled a robot with their thoughts, but they have driven a car or an airplane or something similar, and understand the connection of a set of controls with the movement of the machine. It's rudimentary, but very effective at conveying the control that the pilots have over their machines.

The match cuts here work well to express the mood of Shinji, though they generally abstain from actually showing him performing an action matched by Unit 01, aside from when it's intimate (e.g., as he's brutally stabbing Shamshel at the end). Generally, match shots go from Unit 01 to Shinji (Unit 01 gets knocked to the ground, Shinji is flat on his back...), representing piloting one as a terrible alien trauma (rather than him gleefully moving the Evangelion around, with it reacting according to his will).

The viewport's also critical, because it creates a direct connection between the events outside with the events inside the mecha itself. There's a fantastic set of shots during Asuka's battle with the Mass Production Evas where she picks up a gigantic, unwieldy sword. The viewport gives a view to the outside to see just how much weight is being put behind each swing, accurately conveying its force.

I think match shots work quite well for mecha, but that it's dependent upon cockpit design that establishes a clear, intuitive connection between the world "inside" and the outside world, as well as between the pilot and the machine. I'm not sure that split-screen would work well for mecha, simply because it would create a severing of what's supposed to be an intimate connection between the pilot and their machine by representing them as two separate characters.

Neowyrm posted:

hahahahahahahahaha holy poo poo dude

Habibi posted:

Haven't seen a single PR avatar either, but maybe that's an issue of cinematography. Cheers guys.

Habibi posted:

Haven't seen a single PR avatar either

Hbomberguy posted:

SHISHKABOB posted:

From the way a lot of people react to SMG I don't think your second option is too far fetched.

Habibi posted:

Boy I sure am glad you found all these people that you were talking about.

quote:

My monitor's contrast is slightly off (it's a knockoff taiwanese thing) so I actually had to stand at an angle to see the hands against the background with any decent clarity.

quote:

SMG makes a lot of interesting points when he criticizes this film but it here really feels like he's making some kind of point based on his personal experience that wasn't true for me and I guess a bunch of other people.

Hbomberguy posted:

You claimed not to have seen 'a single' PR avatar. You were wrong. Let's not make a song and dance about it.

Habibi posted:

Boy I sure am glad you found all these people that you were talking about. Job well done.


I find his posts hilarious. How anyone can take 'let's compare this picture of GWB holding a pumpkin' seriously is beyond me. Is it really difficult to parse his bullshit? Amazing.

Y Kant Ozma Diet posted:

You said people with PR avatars were defending the film. You spotted one person with a PR avatar (who wasn't really arguing anyway). I get that you look up to and admire SMG and defending him is your gimmick here but you're flatly wrong here. No need to make a song and dance about it.

thatbastardken posted:

Sorry for being a big dumb corporate shill or whatever but I really don't know how to debate this point? Arguments about fascism or other perfectly valid readings make sense to me, and I love reading them. But being told that a movie I watched and was able to quite clearly see the action in is actually really dark and muddled when it just wasn't is massively confusing.

It's like trying to have (or at least listen to) a conversation with an otherwise intelligent and interesting person who suddenly starts insisting the sky is green.

SMG makes a lot of interesting points when he criticizes this film but it here really feels like he's making some kind of point based on his personal experience that wasn't true for me and I guess a bunch of other people. And of course his cheer squad leap in the second anyone suggests maybe he's wrong, which is nice.

Yaws posted:

It works better as a satire of kaiju films.

Vulich the Subtle posted:

He's using childish graphics and obviously talking down to you because you're not grasping one of the most basic concepts of cinematography. The film obfuscates the action with alarming regularity, and the cinematography is noisy.

Hbomberguy posted:

Multiple posters with PR avatars have emerged to 'defend' the film from SMG in the past.

Maxwell Lord posted:

And yet some members of the audience were able to follow the action without much problem. Clearly there is a level on which it's legible to some and not to other.

Plus there's a certain fatigue going on here. This is not a good faith inquiry into how different viewers respond to different approaches to cinematography. This is "Pacific Rim Is A Bad Movie, Part 812". It's wearying to defend a movie you think is legitimately good against this level of scrutiny for this long. I've tried, I've said my piece many times, I am tired. Can you blame me for being the tiniest bit snippy?

Tezcatlipoca posted:

when someone says "this is unclear" and a bunch of other people say "I disagree" and then the first group acts like a bunch of twats trying to belittle the second group those people are going to get annoyed.

Vulich the Subtle posted:

It isn't a value statement. The film is obviously not clearly shot. The fun is arguing whether it's due to ideology or bad work.

thatbastardken posted:

SMG maybe you should get your eyes checked? None of the poo poo you are saying about clarity or colour makes any sense to me.

Vulich the Subtle posted:

It isn't a value statement. The film is obviously not clearly shot. The fun is arguing whether it's due to ideology or bad work.

Maxwell Lord posted:

Except the ideological angle has also been a line of attack, so it's heads-I-win-tails-you-lose. Either it's horrific fascism or just plain incompetence, we aren't allowed any other answers.

RBA Starblade posted:

This is why I mentioned his nonsense about believing himself Absolute Truth. He cannot consider that anyone else sees things differently, the potential he is wrong is unthinkable to him. He is right and all who disagree are the Enemy, as he's mentioned so often. Of course, then he'll try to speak Truth about, say, lesbians, and the actual truth is revealed.

Hmm. Truth, an ever-present Enemy, and a hated Other. What does that remind me of?

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Is the lesbian bit a reference to something he actually posted?

Lord Krangdar posted:

Allowed by who?

Harime Nui posted:

Maybe if the movie had a plot, characters or events worth giving a drat about it could have made up the difference. Even the movie's defenders though always tell me "you're not supposed to care about the characters, just enjoy the robots hitting the monsters!" well okay, if that's the only criteria to go by the movie sucks.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Basic colour theory: 'blue' and 'orange' are complementary colors.

'Dark blue' and 'black' are not complementary colors

White text on yellow is hard to read, because there is very little contrast. Dark blue shapes on a black background are hard to read, because there is very little contrast.

Contrasts make things easier to read.

Contrast means that something is different from another thing, rather than similar. There is a game on Sesame Street called 'one of these things is not like the others'. We can play this game as well. Dark blue and black are very similar colors, and orange is very different. One of these colours is not like the others. Orange is not like dark blue or black.

Visual clarity refers to the legibility of the image. I am writing about cinematography, the way the image is composed
to convey visual information. A cinematographer is a man who 'writes' images for you to 'read'. He uses things like basic color theory to make images easier to read. An image may only be onscreen for a second or two, so it needs to be easy to read. An image that is less clear is more difficult to read.

'Difficult' means that something is hard, but not impossible. It is 'possible' to read yellow text on a white background, but it is 'difficult' to do so. It is 'easier' to read text that is black. This is why books typically use black ink instead of yellow ink.