Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Production gimics

Way back when Television started it was felt that commercials should be separated by 'optical wipes' and somebody had organised hundreds of these things, little short wipes which were spliced in between commercials.   At the same time there was a French magazine programme called Image de France which used to insert proper optical where one picture wiped into the next ... but we ...TVNZ .. had to edit in these pure white and jet black strips of film ...I never heard from the technicians what effect it had on transmissions.  Cutting to a shot with a large amount of clear white sky would upset the electonics I'd been told when I used to shoot the odd newclip when our cameraman was already out on a job.   One time the Journo slung off at me for being 'artie' ...I orgaanised the branches of a tree across the sky above a building.
I did it to avoid bounce on transmission, he though I was trying to be clever :-).

So from all that you can guess I have an aversion to all the fancy wipes people insert in the videos and projected still programmes becuase it is what TV does so it must be good ... yuck!

So when I saw the British RPS show last year I was disgusted at the short 'shot length' which didn't give you a chance to appreciate the excellent photography ... I gave up after awhile and closed my eyes.   This year we had a programme from the same source and each shot was shown for more than enough time to appreciate it but also the duration of largely facile comments by some organiser guy ... trying to be humourous in many cases and falling flat IMO.

However the programme had been produced by some guy with two lots of letters after his name on his credit, the acceptances were only given one lot in the commentary, but sadly this two lettered guy inserted opticals between every shot ... some were very apt but most simply a interuption between images, themselves very competantly done [ if you like that sort of thing].  See my other post on that :-)

When I saw his production company[?] credit my thoughts were well I won't reccomend him for sure, he may know how to win letters with his photos BUT....

A recent occasion when I also closed my eyes was with a programme with fabulous shots of trees in various settings and lighting treatments .... it should have been highly enjoyable BUT ... the main picture occupied the centre of the screen, which was too small to give jusstice to the shots, and a derivative of that photo was used as a drop-edge background.   It was great to start with but very quickly I simply didn't know where to look for movement in the background attraction my eyes ... it was a horrible presentation of really top quality imagery.   The double picture effect used sparingly would have been good, but throughout the whole programme ... URRGH !

Well that is my beef for today :-)



No comments: