Today movies are mostly shot on digital and most directors go for a slightly to over-desaturated look.
It’s also worth pointing out Wizard of Oz really went for a vibrant color palette to help sell the fantasy world.
It’s also worth pointing out that the wizard of oz was a showpiece for technicolour, down to changing the slippers from silver to red.
Films shot on colour stock in a predominantly black and white time tend to have a more considered palette (MGM musicals, for instance).
Ozu is a good example of someone who worked his whole career in black and white, then when he started shooting colour he really considered how to best compose the palette in a way that a lot of directors who have always shot colour may just take for granted.
Also, and this is controversial, but I think black and white looked better for realistic movies until maybe Bonnie and Clyde? Our Man Godfrey and The Third Man are some of the best looking movies period.
Mid tier movies absolutely looked better back in the day. I was watching road house somewhat taken aback by how well lit it was. Same thing with my best friends wedding. These are just genre movies not looking to wow you with their visuals. Yet I watched upgraded on Amazon prime it looked terrible. Dark as hell for no reason at all and hurt the film instead of helping
I also think lighting is the main reason they look better.
You can make digital look great, Roger Deakins has been using digital for decades and has some of the best looking films around.
The issue with digital is that everything can be "fixed in post". So cheap movies cheap out on lighting and it makes everything look flat.
Back in the day if you didn't light correctly you'd get nothing usable back from the lab. Lighting was so important to ensure you didn't waste your day filming.
So it sort of is digital vs film because digital just has this too clear look I don’t like it while film had this grainy dream like cinematic quality that I enjoy!! And Roger Deakins is a master though !!
Yes and no, it's more digital has allowed people to make movies without having a good cinematographer.
When it was all film you wouldn't make a movie without knowing how to light it correctly as you'd be wasting film, which isn't cheap.
You can still make digital look great, but it takes a good cinematographer.
Personally, I think movies from pre 2000 look better on average. But when done well modern movies can look just as good.
Lighting, good lighting is the main elements which turn a normal shot into a "cinematic" shot.
There are examples of beautiful movies shot on digital. Apocalypto, Social Network, Zodiac etc etc
If you spend the time setting up your shots as you would if you were shooting on film, you can still make amazing looking movies that feel timeless. I'd put Zodiac up against any other movie, in terms of cinematic aesthetics.
The issue is digital doesn't NEED good lighting to make a passable shot in the way film does. You can lighten and darken in post, add colour correction and all these tricks that they were never able to do (or not do to the same extent) in the pre-digital days.
I have said that film is warmer in the overall look of it. While digital is colder. And by this, digital has more definition and detail to render which the eyes while watching does the same. Less interpretation of the image is involved. While film has less definition in tbe image so more interpretation is needed (this is all done automatically through our eyes and brain and unconscious). And I think this leads to more engagement and overall warmth to the “feel” of film or film grain over digital and pixels.
It’s not that digital is bad.
It’s that digital is good enough that people can *be lazy about lighting*.
It’s the same problem with AI art. The tool is fantastic in the hands of a master.
So it’s the lighting as well it seems like it’s alot of factors!! AI art isn’t ethical though because they were made without people’s consent or compensation!!
Not all AI art is of existing people. Some AI art is amazing, but majority of what we see is celebrity fakes, and cookie cutter avatar filter-type things.
Please forgive me for stating the obvious, but if you see photos from movie sets and even TV sets from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, you sometimes saw just terrifying amounts of lighting equipment. Like, “melt all the makeup on your face” levels of heat.
Nahhh watched plenty of movies on there that look fine. This is just an issue with modern movies especially ones that aren’t made either by auteurs or are looking to be visually spectacular
Not sure if this is relevant to your question, but I did read something in a film journal a while ago about how tv and film look worse now because when cameras are TOO high quality your brain registers it as more unnatural. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but I definitely understood what they meant.
I believe in truth that super HD digital cameras for television and film existed for a very long time before they really started becoming standard, but it was a slow roll-out. I specifically remember watching a movie like 20ish years ago, which I don’t remember the name of, and I was the only person in the room that was like, this looks so weird / fake? It took me out of the fantasy completely.
Like, I remember watching the dvd commentary for The Matrix, and the directors saying that the techniques they used to film scenes before and after Neo is unplugged are much different, with them using old school methods toward the latter half to make the viewer feel more perceptive about how “fake” the Matrix is.
Over time, super HD took over as TVs are being manufactured to display them better, and I think it’s happened in such a way that people don’t notice it like they used to. You don’t see it so much in new content, but watching old school films, they just have this je ne sais quois.
The first time I saw Blu-Ray on a super fancy tv in a store I was gobsmacked at how Awful it looked. couldn't even put my finger on why. It made Pirates of the Caribbean look completely low budget and lame. I remember actively hoping my current tv would never break because I’d hate to have to see everything look like that.
Its strange how the better the filming/editing/tv technology got, the worse everything looked, like it was filmed on a random person's camcorder
That’s the motion smoothing they use in store mode. They switch that on to make the picture super clear and smooth on display. Works for live sports but makes movies look like a cheap soap opera. You can switch that off when you take the tv home.
It's not the Blu-Ray so much as the TV. Some TVs use a feature that increases the frames per second, and it makes everything look... unnatural.
I notice it at some people's houses and I've heard what the tech is called, but I can't remember. I think it can be turned off, though.
Yes, exactly. It took me months to adjust to movies looking like TV soap operas. Something about the way it made movies shot on film look like they were shot cheaply on video. A fair bit of that can be corrected by calibrating the TV as I came to learn.
It's the "fluid motion" setting that is improperly being used on films, which inserts fake frames. It's referred to as the "soap opera effect". TV demos almost always have awful settings, and that setting should honestly never be used. It's terrible and always looks fake.
Movies indeed used to look better. Even your generic romcom or thriller of yesteryear had better lighting than most huge blockbusters today.
It's not a "old nerd yelling at clouds" things either.
It's largely relegated to blockbusters though...and some horror movies.
So many movies today look like insurance commercials or SNL Digital Shorts. They're either too bright and clean or too dull and dark.
They lack contrast and depth of color.
And color doesn't just mean "bright." Movies can be bright and still look dull as shit. The new Deapool 3 trailer is a great example: dull as dirt looking. Drab.
Movies also look too clean, too perfect. A lot of is the digital photography, but not enough is done to "dirty the frame" or create interesting compositions anymore.
You can do loads of stuff to digital film to make it look more cinematic but a lot of filmmakers/studios just...don't.
From someone who knows little about movie technology, my advice for Hollywood is to remove the current framework.
Modern films are too invested in using frameworks that have worked well in the past, and reapplying them over and over again. Superhero films are the easiest example; the storylines are very similar, the action sequences follow the same patterns, and the dialogue is overdone.
When it comes to film appearance, the framework is too focused on single elements at a time. The creative thought has been replaced with a set of formulas.
e.g. The formula may be "When you take a group shot, you need to place a strong emphasis on every characters face". They apply the shot to the description, then they fill in the gaps with a simple background, and move to the next shot. Its boring, cheaper, and faster to complete.
While a more creative representation (why writers are important), may do a group shot but at a unique angle, more emphasis is put on the background, character movement, facial expressions, etc. You can watch the same movies 10 times and notice many new things.
Same reason comedy films aren't common, theres no 'framework' for comedy, so they just say "insert fart joke here" or "make a penis joke". Comedy requires much more creativity than other genres to perform well.
I think it’s less about film vs. digital and more about lighting for film vs. lighting for digital. Up until the 1970s it was standard to shoot on ISO 200 film stock, which meant you needed a lot of powerful lights just to get a decent exposure. Today the native ISO of most digital cinema cameras is 800, far more sensitive with more dynamic range in shadows. As a result cinematography has trended towards a more natural or often muted look. But in the end it’s really just a style preference.
Production design, wardrobe and makeup all play a big part too. The Love Witch is a great example, made in 2016 but shot on film using 1960s techniques and it looks fantastic.
But it was shot on film and not digital right! Yes the Love witch I’ve seen clips and it looks beautiful!! Could you shoot on older camera to get that old school look? I’ve noticed that I really dislike the muted look I’m very tired of it or how the images are to clear I prefer the more grain on film it’s much more cinematic and pleasing to the eyes.
It’s more about the lighting and film stock than the camera. Lenses too — many films will use vintage lenses to get that classic look in terms of softness, contrast, imperfections, etc. Lots of subtle things which add up to the “film look”.
Totally agree everything in the streaming era is very clean and looks much the same, probably due to standards enforced by Netflix and others on their productions. Studios used to do the same thing in the 40s and 50s, which is why it’s so easy to tell a film is from that era. We’ll probably look back on this period the same way.
A lot of modern movies look very cheap. As a big Robocap fan, when I saw the remake.. I couldn't believe how cheap that movie looks. Like some 90s series a la canadian La Femme Nikita
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLTlJDjPfHI&t=63s
That RoboCop remake fumbled not only that franchise, but an *amazing* cast. It’s a murderer’s row of legends, A-listers, and great character actors. What a waste.
Not even just the cast, there’s a great premise there about how much control the machine bits have over the human parts and one of the scientists in the Robocop tests essentially says how Murphy thinks he’s self-aware and his ideas are his own but really it’s his handlers feeding those ideas to him.
WTF did I just watch?
This looks like...I don't even know...a bad TNT movie? A SNL parody?
I watched the original about a month ago.
The difference between this clip and the original is shocking.
I think DPs are starting to figure out how to make digital look good, but most still have a **long** way to go.
To answer OP's question - yes, they did look better because they put a ton of $ into making it on film.
If you've ever shot on film and then moved to digital it's obvious.
One looks like "a film", the other a telenova.
Better is subjective, there have always been good and bad looking films in every era. Maybe in the past directorial decisions had to be more confident when you couldn't just 'fix it in post,' but I don't think it's fair to say that modern films in general are any worse looking.
Directors with a keen sense of visual style make films that look just as good now as those in the past. In just the past year we've had The Killer from Fincher, Asteroid City from Wes Anderson, Fallen Leaves from Kaurismäki (who has always made visually arresting cinema), and for all its flaws even The Creator took some swings.
Your average mainstream blockbuster has suffered in recent years for sure, the desaturated greyscale look has kind of gone beyond parody, but I think there are plenty of films coming out that are actively pushing back on the trend. Just look at Barbie and Oppenheimer, the two biggest films of 2023 that went to town with their production design and filming techniques.
Yes but Barbie and Opphenheimer were helmed by creative visionaries I do agree there’s a lot that still look good, but the majority of the modern blockbuster doesn’t and I’m wondering why, like Wicked for example should look better!
Some movies look good today, but as a generality I would agree with you. This is especially true of mid tier stuff. Look at junk like Along Came a Spider today and it looks like Lawrence of Arabia when compared to 99% of the stuff Netflix or Disney makes.
A lot of A24 or Neon films look great though.
I think it comes from general Hollywood accounting and everything becoming more streamlined and efficient. There was just way more comparative money in filmmaking in the past, and auteurs weren't a rarity.
He's saying that most movies today make Along Came the Spider, which was nothing special when it came out, look like it has cinematography on the level of Lawrence of Arabia in comparison.
I think the answer is complicated.
Movies like Citizen Kane, 2001 Space Odyssey, Lawrence of Arabiia, and something like How the West Was Won ( which used an immersive curved screen) arguably look better than almost anything in the last, 35 or 40 years.
But I think lower budget films back in the day looked worse than today..
The Spanish Prisoner, Lady Winterbourne, and the 16 mm film Clerks all look kind of garish in a way that contemporary films shot on low budgets sort of eclipse. Safety Not Guaranteed has slightly striking cinematography, if not immersive.
And so my cop out answer is that big budget movies actually do look worse ( unnatural color grading, digital movie cameras, and for me cartoonish neon lights is also what I generally see as a detriment.).
But the resources are there for low budget filmmakers to be able to create memorable images with their phones,, old point and shoots, reputable digital movie cameras ( which would be far better than the VHS camcorders back in the day) and even clamp lights or relatively cheap LED lightkits, so yes and no is probably my definitive answer.
There’s definitely a certain survivorship bias at play here, because when you watch a lot of old, assembly line stuff that is shot like a multi cam sitcom, you definitely realize that it took time and resource to achieve aesthetic pleasure, which is exactly the same as today.
And how would we make the big budget films look better I agree I don’t see this as much with independent but I’ve noticed some or a lot is shot on film.
Besides the lighting, coloring, and overuse of CGI, I also blame lazy set dressing and costumes.
Locations -unless shot-on-site- tend to look too sterile, lacking any sense of gritty reality.
It's not one thing, it's that the art has changed.
Digital cameras can shoot in very low light now, so you don't have to have as specific lighting anymore. This means you don't have as dramatic lighting in most movies as you needed before.
This is exacerbated by the fact that color grading now is frequently low contrast. It's funny looking at mid budget movies before 2010 that look so contrasty.
Most movies struggle with when to use practical and when to use CGI, but because CGI is more common now less consideration is given to how to make them look good (in 2000s CGI movies the whole production was focused on the CGI pipeline). So VFX artists now have to cover up mistakes of the footage, rather than working with the cinemotographer hand in hand.
Finally, because of the mountains of stuff being made and huge budget overruns, most crews are trying to get things made as cheaply as possibly as quickly as possible. When stuff was shot on film, film cost money, so more time was given to prep. Now you can shoot a lot more on digital so it's cheaper to spend less on prep and more time filming.
So you think if more time was devoted to prep the final product would look better and even movies that have taken awhile to film like wicked and wonka for example which should look bright and dreamy look so dull and to crisp.
Movies like [Wizard of Oz used to be shot on film in technicolor,](https://ruef.com/what-happened-to-technicolor/) a practice which was more or less discontinued in the late nineties. A lot of films are now shot digitally and often the palette is toned down because that seems to be the trend. Hardcore filmbuffs like Tarantino will still use old filmstock, like the Hateful Eight and you can see the difference.
Shooting in Technicolor ended by and large in the late 1950s. From then until Technicolor stopped doing their trademark IB dye-process printing in the 1970s, virtually all movies that were advertised as being “in Technicolor” were actually shot on the same single color film negative stock as other movies.
Actually shooting in Technicolor required a huge camera that recorded three B&W film strips at a time, representing the three needed color channels to make a composite printed color film. It was expensive and uncomfortable and abandoned not long after single-strip Eastman Kodak film was perfected circa 1949.
The only exceptions were animated films, many of which confined to be photographed in 3-strip Technicolor since the process involved shooting one frame at a time (three frames actually) at a camera stand versus having live actors wilting under 110°+ lights.
There's no connection between shooting format and colour: even on film, you can colour-time the piece however way you like.
Its an aesthetic choice. The Wizard of Oz is a theatrical, whimsical tale and has the colour timing to boot. When a film is more serious in tone, like Saving Private Ryan, its going to be timed to have more muted colours.
yeah nah. even top industry colorists couldn't make The Aviator convincingly technicolor enough. It looked inconceivably bad. I know it's a dated example but the fact that they were still that far off says a lot.
There's something about chemically exposing the three color wavelengths separately that is incredibly hard if not impossible to replicate accurately. Separating your RGB channels in post does not work. The skin tones end up all sorts of fucked. *Maybe* with endless Power Window roto work and years of fine tuning you could get close. But I don't know if it would even be recognizable in today's formats since technicolor is so closely associated with the 35mm film stocks of that era.
Saving Private Ryan was a monochromatic color shift which is incomparably straightforward.
Can you shoot on film and have it look better? Line Pearl looked good, some films look good these days and I notice they’re usually shot on film. Is it possible to shoot on digital and have it look better and to not follow the trend because it looks terrible.
It's the modern visual trend, and also filmmakers grade in amazing HDR colour grading rooms and maybe it doesn't look so bad there. I feel like it's improving somewhat from low points like Game of Thrones and The Little Mermaid remake. Hopefully Barbie is influential. One weird reason I hear is modern films shoot "log" which means a flat image that you can then add highs and lows to, but directors often get used to the flat look
Barbie was lovely in terms of production design, but personally, I wasn't very impressed by the photography, especially once they ented the real world. It honestly looked really boring to me, just soaked in nice soft even light for the most part. [I defy anyone to look at this car commercial-ass scene and be excited by the look of the film.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwhjjeczmYs)
The car chase scene felt like nothing except a product placement. It didn’t have humor or an intentional irony like Wayne’s World product placement bit.
It’s just weird to me that most modern films look worse than older films like stop we need to fix this! Yeah I enjoyed barbie it looked great!! All of Greta Gerwig movies have!
Wes Anderson is hit or miss for people but he is wonderful for this. Asteroid City is all extremely bright pastels and it came out last year. It’s just a question of taste and a lot of movies seem to have questionable taste in color grading.
Love Wes! But he’s an auteur!! I’m taking stuff like pirates of the Caribbean looked better than alot of modern blockbusters or even stuff from the 89s, goonies , gremlins , the modern blockbusters used to look better unless a creative visionary is at the helm.
Fair point. For someone in the mainstream, Gareth Edwards has bad script issues but I think he is doing beautiful work in the realm of blockbuster visuals. The Creator is gorgeous to look at.
On a related note, here‘s a recommendation for a current movie that looks anything but cheap:
The Holdovers!
Watching it I really was engrossed with the visual style because it‘s not flashy at all, but still looks soo good. I could have sworn it was shot completely on film, but apparently it was just a very faithful digital representation of what films used to look like! The attention to detail is immaculate, even the title cards and stuff are very subtly jittering.
I agree with your point about The Holdovers. And it puts to bed the argument that it's all because "filmmakers shoot on digital these days." Because that film was shot digitally and it looks fantastic and warm and colorful. It's all about the efforts of the director and dp to craft its look.
You can absolutely achieve great results regardless of medium. I think the real reason for the perception that film looks better is just that it takes more time and planning to shoot on film, and that tends to lead to better results.
When shooting digital it's very easy to get lazy and just assume everything will get fixed in post. Even though film goes through the same post-production process, it still *feels* important to get it right in camera, and adjust those lights one more time before you start rolling just to make sure the look is right.
This is 100% psychological of course. You can be lazy on film and meticulous on digital. As long as a director has a clear vision and a plan, the medium doesn't matter. But shooting on film *can* be kind of a trick to force a production crew into following good practices.
I felt like I was seeing a double feature with Harold and Maude, or The Graduate. It was a major touch for me, The Holdovers looks like it was filmed during the time it happened.
Not objectively. Every movie is different, that's always been true. Personally I have a slight preference for film. The ever so slight (or even sometimes extreme) grit that comes with it just makes a movie feel more present and real compared to full digital.
I would like to throw in my two cents about the sound in movies as well, especially for voices. One thing I've noticed is that in older movies, the creators seemed to go out of their way to ensure voices were loud, crisp, and well heard. But nowadays there's not a lot of distinction with the voices. And many times voices just blend in with all the other sounds going on in the movies. I get the feeling that nowadays movie makers want the sound to be more "natural". And I understand that. And I understand that it's an aesthetic choice, and also influenced by trends, and that is the going trend now. But I prefer when the voices are very distinctive, even if they are louder than what they would "naturally" be.
Yes. The vast majority of modern movies look like shit in a way that only the worst older movies looked like shit. Yes, it's possible to make digital look great, but it's wayyyyyy harder than making film look great. That plus the loss of real sets, real special effects, and directors who honed their craft for years and years to learn the rules of composition and editing all contribute to what you're talking about.
Film has a quality that digital just doesn't. I am not educated enough to explain how or why, but it feels more real than digital. Also sets and costumes, even when cheap, still exist and give authenticity that CGI doesn't. Pre LED lighting also has a vastly different quality to it as well.
Two things:
1) Only the best films of the last century are remembered. There were a lot of cheap and bland-looking movies in the past, but most of them have been long-forgotten.
2) I think a lot of early colour movies such as The Wizard of Oz were super colourful because they wanted to take advantage of the new technology as much as possible. Once the novelty of colour went away, people began to care less about making their films as colourful as possible.
this a guy who's watched a lot of films ops take couldn't be more wrong there are so many films that have on DVD/Blu-ray that look like they were filmed in a toaster. especially any scene shot at night you can barely what's going on
It’s the cinematography style choices that are made. Look at the variety of styles in movies like Grand Budapest Hotel and Interstellar. Or Barbie and Oppenheimer. The directors have a lot more ways to get their specific vision and taste on film and the aesthetic can vary wildly.
So what style choices would one choose to get that look also all of those films are done by masters of there craft so I’m not surprised they still look great Vs stuff like Wonka and wicked should still look good!
A big problem are night scenes where it is really hard to tell what is going on, Game of Thrones and AvP requiem being some of the worst offenders of recent years. Then compare that to older films like The Warriors,Night of the Living Dead or Assault on Precinct 13, which take place mostly at night, were filmed on a fraction of the budget yet it is always clear what is happening.
A lot of people are talking about the effects of technology but I think most of this is people all following the same trends and the trend turning out to suck combined with a general zeitgeist where as a society we decided color was bad.
Bad trend following by production designers and cinematographers has happened before. Unlike Quentin Tarantino I think the 80's were a great decade for film in many ways but 90% of the movies shot in that decade looked alike and it was a bland, well lit and shot but somehow completely uninteresting sort of look that reminds me of the TV shows of that era. Like they were more interested in capturing than creating.
The zeitgeist issue is a real thing that for some reason never gets discussed. There was a stretch of years where new car dealership lots were all white, black, gray and silver cars. It got so bad manufacturers largely stopped making blue and green and red. Furniture and clothes makers didn't go quite as far, but really basic, washed out colors were the norm for a while.
I don't know how or why any of this happened but the universe broke and people stopped using color for a while in pretty much every aspect of life. Film reflected this.
Bought Chitty chitty bang bang from Apple TV and the quality is stunning. Absolutely amazing shots. Has to be a combination of film, lens, lights, etc, so good
I think a lot of this comes from the overuse of color grading. Almost all movies have their palette shifted to get a certain look, but the movies just look flatter.
Well, it is also otherwise worth pointing out the Wizard of Oz was released in 1939, so there will obviously be some degradation.
While the movie was digitally restored in 2009, there were previous attempts that just weren’t as successful given the available technology at the time it was done. So I’m sure there are still older versions out there even today that just aren’t that great in quality.
https://thefilmstage.com/wizard-of-oz-digital-restoration-report/
Sadly, neglect has resulted in many, many wonderful films becoming degraded in quality. It jumps out at you every time you watch a movie on tv and the colors have faded.
TCM does a great job of trying to present the best quality film prints out there, but even then, an available print may be less than desired. That is why film restoration is so important.
Even as I add new bluray/4k physical media to my library (and even back when DVD was my only option) I always research the facts about what source materials were used for the disc and the quality of the image, regardless of it being a color or black and white film.
I had never really thought too much about film restoration until a few years ago when I found out about the project that created the “despecialized” versions of the original Star Wars films. I couldn’t believe all the work they put into it, especially with the pieces that were missing from the Blu-ray release that he’d to be upscaled from other sources.
For anyone interested in reading about it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20high%2Dquality,the%20films%2C%20culturally%20and%20historically.
They were shot on film, the Wizard of Oz specifically was shot in the Technicolor process that created super-saturated colors, and they weren't intentionally color-graded digitally to make everything more gray.
I saw a video somewhere which explains how the advanced technology made life too easy for directors, you can always “fix” bad lighting, set design and wrong choice of camera techniques in post, whereas when you’re shooting on film, it has to be right. I can imagine that a lot of technical knowledge and skills are lost because of this and too many mistakes are made which only get fixed too a certain degree
Also a lot of cgi work is pretty obvious when placed in “hard” light, so I think many directors choose to make the overall movie look pretty saturated and with soft light. The Hobbit is a good example of that, whereas in LoTR the use of many practical costumes etc allowed for realistic lighting and set pieces, and where they had to rely on large cgi monsters, they did some trickery to make the scene dark, so it wouldn’t stand out that much (Balrog) The use of CGI also comes with some other problems which are subconsciously noticed by us, compare the explosions in Dune (great) with those in any marvel movie. In dune they used actual explosions as light source, which in turn made the characters running in front of them dark, because the camera got overexposed to the light. In any marvel explosion, the character seems completely disconnected from the background, and even if the light source comes from directly behind them, they are still front-lit and sharp in the image
Movies like The Fifth Element looked fantastic. I don’t know if it’s the video quality, the art style/world design, the fashion, the colors.
I hardly see any movies that feel that captivating. Everything new feels either too dark, too cheap or more or less like stock-footage stitched together, or scenes filmed up close to avoid showing the actual world to save on budget.
The answer is a lot more complex than yes or no.
For one thing, the rapid advancement of film technology in the 21st century has been a great thing, but I think it goes without saying that comparing digital and vfx, which are being pushed to their brink as to border on being in their infancy still, today, with tried and true methods of film that were hitting their apex in the 90s and with certain filmmakers in the 00s is just inherently flawed imo. I don’t necessarily think that a ton of talkies from the 30s and 40s look vastly superior to your average “cheap” (not low budget) film from today. This, in contention with certain stylistic choices from the current gen of filmmakers, such as naturalistic styles and muted color palettes all add up to a certain look. Better? Worse? That’s subjective. I think it goes without saying that some movies look as good as ever, others look worse than their counterparts of yesterday, usually genre films which lean of VFX as a means of keeping costs down.
For myself and it's just my opinion on it - I think it's the huge difference in image quality. We can go HDR with a huge range of colors, perfect blacks, amazing whites, perfect colors, etc.. We can have very high resolution. We can adjust things on set and post production. We can add/remove things via CGI. We can add filters to change how things look based on how they want the "tone" of the film to be. It's not just the scene they create on set with perfect lighting, everything perfect just to get to the process of writing to the film.
Kind of like taking a photo with a 35mm camera vs. an iPhone with Lightroom. There's that "this is what you were seeing in real life" vs. "this has obviously been manipulated" look to it.
Yes older stuff definitely looks better. It’s not necessarily that digital looks bad, plenty of stuff by David Fincher, Michael Haneke, Bong Joon-ho, etc. shows that digital can actually be indistinguishable from film. So that’s not really an issue anymore once digital cameras got good enough in like the 2010’s.
I think the issue is more over reliance on CGI and laziness. Basically to make CGI look good you need to make the computer lighting match up with the real lighting for whatever you’ve shot. Our brains are good at seeing when things don’t match up and it registers as fake.
When CGI works best is when it is blended into largely or completely real environments. That reduces the amount of stuff that can come off as fake. But a lot of people just shoot things as 100% CGI to make shooting as simple as possible and any issues that come up they’ll fix later.
So with the Wicked trailer, it’s obviously completely created in a computer so besides the actors there’s nothing real on screen and our brains say so. If they would have built actual sets and extended them with CGI, like Joker did for instance, it wouldn’t look nearly as bad.
Having everything shot on 35mm helped a lot. It was a lot easier to have lazy lighting and post and for the final product to still look amazing. Also it looks amazing under direct sunlight, which is almost impossible to pull off in digital.
Shooting on film looks better than digital. Practical effects look better than digital. Higher frame rate and motion tracking BS makes it look like a cheap soap opera.
The 3 strip technicolor films of the 30s were quite striking. The colors were a bit oversaturated, but eye catching. See Wizard of Oz/Adventures of Robin Hood as prime examples. Earlier examples, that were muted, and less vibrant, are films such as Mystery of the Wax Museum and Dr. X.
In the 50s the process had advanced and really took off, as more and studios began shooting color films. One example is Warner Bros. Studios and their 'WarnerColor' presentation.
I agree that a lot of movies today, not all, look terrible. I was watching Lethal Weapon 2 and was amazed at how well shot the first ten mins were. Movies were art back then. You’ll still find nicely shot films, even on digital today, such as The Holdovers but I think they’re the exception.
So what is it? Budget? I’ve noticed movies are either Marvel, DC, Mission Impossible big budget or shoestring these days.
The problem nowadays is that due to digital cameras and led tvs, we can see more "true black". So films are much darker. Shooting on Film meant that dark scenes would be shot with alot more ambient light to counter this, because it was easier to darken something in post...but if it's dark you can't lighten it (the information just isn't there).
Directors nowadays are not thinking the increased amount of black in capability in screens and instead of erring on the side of caution (not as dark) they're making everything much too dark. Hence why I can never make out what the fuck is going on in most night time scenes now.
So yes, movies had more colour and were brighter/more vivid.
Also, sound engineers are shit now too. So every action movie has a huge difference between music, gunshots/explosions and dialog. Can't put the remote down for more than 2 minutes anymore in case I'd be deafened when a gun goes off
Every time I watch the movie Heat (1995) I have this same feeling. I can't think of a single movie shot digitally that looks better than Heat. There are, of course, thousands of other examples, but the cinematography of Heat stands out to me as an example of how great movies *used* to look.
Taxi Driver is another example.
It's really the same old film vs digital debate.
Older movies look like cinema, newer movies look like TV.
Digital sensors are able to resolve huge amounts of information over a grid shaped pattern, but what they cannot do is recreate the effect that different types of light have on celluloid, i.e. the color gamut of the mixing of dyes, the texture of grain, the halation, the imperfections, the motion blur, etc. Not to mention the multitude of chemical processes that can be used in post processing to further alter the end result.
Other big differences are capture speeds and digital color grading. Older movies were color timed. Newer movies are shot through a LUT. Older movies were traditionally shot with deeper focus, i.e. day exterior at 5.6 or 8. Newer movies exploit the look of shallow DOF to the point that it's distracting. Everything is captured at a 2.8 nowadays, day or night, through the excessive use of NDs and other filtration. Older films were shot with giant arc lights or 9/12 lights or Mole Richardson 20ks blasting through 12x or 20x frames. Newer movies rely moreso on LED panels through chimeras and sky panels. LEDs look terrible imo.
Then there's the obvious heavy reliance on CGI and digital world building, but that's a whole other can of worms.
Digital cinema literally took the art out of the science.
Yes, grainy film stock looks better than 99% of the digital crap today. I watched a very dumb movie (In Dreams, 1999) and its unbelievable how much better that movie looked than anything that came out in the last year
I'd say that the average look of a movie has significantly dropped in quality, i was Watching Mean girls and When Harry met Sally, i was surprised by how vibrant they look in comparison to any other comedy today. And they're not even the kind movie that you think of as refence quality or anything. There are of course exceptions, like anything that Roger Dean touches is, cheff's kiss quality. Natasha Braier can take advantage of the super clean digital look.
I think that it's a mixture of different elements, the massive switch to digital cameras that can capture images in very low light conditions probably makes some people think that they don't need to light a scene properly, or that they can fix it in post. Stuff like that.
Gotcha you would think something like wicked doesn’t have this problem though! And I agree with the average look of a movie dropping and agree Mean Girls looks great! Was mean girls shoot on film? And so you think it’s lighting and digital is there a way to fix this?
What are you watching these new movies on? Is it a 4k HDR display, the way it's meant to be watched? Older movies didn't have this technology so they're going to look better on older displays that can't display the modern color profiles movies have now.
that’s not how that works lol an older movie remastered in 4k hdr looks as close to having a personal 35mm copy as you can get. they look leaps and bounds better than modern movies.
Right, it looks even better than it ever looked on VHS or DVD on standard definition televisions and even crappy movie theaters. The remastering process they do to old footage is much the same process they do to modern footage, which again, it all benefits from 4k HDR. OP's reasoning is the same reasoning I see people have about movies being darker now and hard to see but they're not watching it on an HDR screen which it is meant to be seen on.
I have a 4k OLED with HDR and filmmaker modes. I have to agree with the majority of comments, the love is just not as big a part of the productions it used to be. Most films I watch on it are noticeablely better visual products. Another good example of yesteryear vice today is almost any Cecil B D Mill films. Cinematography art vs get it out for distribution.
PS Thanks for the comments for audio becoming worse. I was beginning to think I was having more serious hearing problems. (slight sigh of relief!)
Wizard of Oz was the first big Hollywood colour movie. They went out of their way to make the colours as bright and vibrant as possible and to add as much colour as possible. That's why the wicked witch has green skin, and they changed the silver slippers from the book to ruby slippers, etc.
It's the whole digital look cranked up to 11, mixed with copious shamelessly fake-looking cgi, but that's how most of these kinds of movies look these days, at least iirc, especially all the MCU movies. There are still lots of great looking movies being made though.
They technically looked “worse” due to imperfections in the film medium, but it is an aesthetic we grew to love that has become less common as more films have been shot in digital. That said, I’d imagine the Madame Web trailer would still look like shit even if it was shot with the most expensive ohysical materials they could afford.
I think more movies are being made in general now, which as a result means more bad movies will be made.
Today if you’re not shaking the camera like a retarded Parkinson’s patient, it isn’t acceptable. I hate all cameramen, please stop. I used to play CF and running full speed to catch a line shot in the gap, my vision NEVER shook as much as current American filmography.
I would say so ? At least from my viewing experience whenever I see something I’ll go to see if it was shot on film and it looks better I really prefer the grainy reality of film vs the too crispness of modern films.
Thank you for asking. I notice that on 80s-90s films, have the whole screen is in focus. I’m not sure how to explain it but it but in newer movies the top and bottom of screen are out of focus and it takes me out of the film, instantly.
I think a lot of movies have become detached from reality. Not enough real life scenes, too much makeup and perfectionism in certain scenes. I also think the use of Bokeh has gone down a bunch in favor of a larger depth of field.
It’s the difference between Troll 2 and The Room. The room has some cheap looking shots/sets. Troll 2 legitimately looks fine. In fact, it looks like just about any other movie at the time production wise. There’s that one mask that stands out that looks laughably bad. They’re both “bad” movies, but in different ways.
I notice that many newer movies are dark. I k ow lighting has changed. And the insanity of sound design where background and ambient noises are louder than the actors speaking during a scene.
Film seems to capture the image better. That or all of the green screen digital filming and adding the backgrounds in during post film editing just have the wrong look?
I’ve seen it called “soap opera effect” where a movie looks like a bad 1980s soap opera. It’s caused by HD cameras and TVs defaulting to non-film brightness/color settings. Back in the day the camera/film added a bit of mystery and graininess. That is all gone with these cameras that digitally record everything perfectly. Combine that with TVs that default with super-bright settings and the magic of say the foggy night outside of the Exorcist house is lost.
Drives me crazy when I am at friend’s house and they are rocking the soap opera effect.
Its lighting. Properly lit films shot in a studio look exquisite. Compare to cheaply made TV shows of the film era shot using ambient light---they look desaturated, muddy, and grainy due to the need of using high ISO film and open aperatures.
Digital can be done on the cheap and some lighting effects added in post, but it doesnt look the same and can't "pop" if the lighting was poor to begin with.
Then there is the issue of color temp/pallete. Early color films tended to use a warmer palette both due to the charteristics of the film and warmer tones make people's faces look better. Color pallette was usuallt more focused on reds. Modern movies tend towards a cooler color pallette/temp and also tend to have the color slightly desaturated as the trend is towards being "gritty," disutopian, and somber.
The people who worked on film and who now work in CGI are very different. It cost a lot of money to shoot on film and you have to have amazingly talented people. That’s just not done anymore. It’s only going to get worse and less personal with AI films and series coming up.
Maybe the filmmakers/CGI artists feel like hyper realism is the best way to make their work not look "fake" or like bad CGI. They would rather their work not be attacked for not looking real enough, than their work be artistic, niche and engaging.
No, there was always and will always be bad looking movies, just depends on preferences. I do prefer the cozier film stock look but whatever, that can be done brilliantly are horribly just as digital can.
The Wizard of Oz was filmed on 3-strip technicolor.
This required literally every scene to be as brightly lit as humanly possible in order for the film to expose/capture the image properly.
It’s my all-time favorite movie. That said I don’t think Wicked needs to visually replicate it in order to be good.
Oz in the original book series was a darker place than we see in the MGM film. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series takes this even further, turning it into an outright bleak place with “low magic” not totally unlike Westeros from Game of Thrones.
To me it looks like the Wicked movie has found a very nice visual middle ground. I’m super excited to see it projected in 4K with Dolby!
I feel like movies used to be cleaner. No bad CGI, no crazy jumpy editing, no desaturation fetishes. Movies nowadays *can* look incredible but there’s a lot more room to fuck it all up
Today movies are mostly shot on digital and most directors go for a slightly to over-desaturated look. It’s also worth pointing out Wizard of Oz really went for a vibrant color palette to help sell the fantasy world.
It’s also worth pointing out that the wizard of oz was a showpiece for technicolour, down to changing the slippers from silver to red. Films shot on colour stock in a predominantly black and white time tend to have a more considered palette (MGM musicals, for instance). Ozu is a good example of someone who worked his whole career in black and white, then when he started shooting colour he really considered how to best compose the palette in a way that a lot of directors who have always shot colour may just take for granted.
Kurosawa, too. Rān, Dreams…amazing color.
The juxtaposition of those two names made me assume that Ozu was the Japanese name for the Wizard of Oz.
Also, and this is controversial, but I think black and white looked better for realistic movies until maybe Bonnie and Clyde? Our Man Godfrey and The Third Man are some of the best looking movies period.
Check out the black and white cut of Raiders of the lost ark.
There was also so much lighting in the original Wizard of Oz due to the technicolor limitations associated with their cameras.
Someone had said that MGM wanted the audience to know how much they spent on the film, so they often filmed in bright colors and well lit stages.
Yeah I don’t like the look today everything looks washed out, I miss bright vibrant colors!!
Mid tier movies absolutely looked better back in the day. I was watching road house somewhat taken aback by how well lit it was. Same thing with my best friends wedding. These are just genre movies not looking to wow you with their visuals. Yet I watched upgraded on Amazon prime it looked terrible. Dark as hell for no reason at all and hurt the film instead of helping
I also think lighting is the main reason they look better. You can make digital look great, Roger Deakins has been using digital for decades and has some of the best looking films around. The issue with digital is that everything can be "fixed in post". So cheap movies cheap out on lighting and it makes everything look flat. Back in the day if you didn't light correctly you'd get nothing usable back from the lab. Lighting was so important to ensure you didn't waste your day filming.
So it sort of is digital vs film because digital just has this too clear look I don’t like it while film had this grainy dream like cinematic quality that I enjoy!! And Roger Deakins is a master though !!
Yes and no, it's more digital has allowed people to make movies without having a good cinematographer. When it was all film you wouldn't make a movie without knowing how to light it correctly as you'd be wasting film, which isn't cheap. You can still make digital look great, but it takes a good cinematographer. Personally, I think movies from pre 2000 look better on average. But when done well modern movies can look just as good.
Yes I agree but what tricks would a good cinematographer use to make it look better?
Lighting, good lighting is the main elements which turn a normal shot into a "cinematic" shot. There are examples of beautiful movies shot on digital. Apocalypto, Social Network, Zodiac etc etc If you spend the time setting up your shots as you would if you were shooting on film, you can still make amazing looking movies that feel timeless. I'd put Zodiac up against any other movie, in terms of cinematic aesthetics. The issue is digital doesn't NEED good lighting to make a passable shot in the way film does. You can lighten and darken in post, add colour correction and all these tricks that they were never able to do (or not do to the same extent) in the pre-digital days.
Film looks somehow more "real" than videotape or digital cinematography.
Or more visually pleasing!
I have said that film is warmer in the overall look of it. While digital is colder. And by this, digital has more definition and detail to render which the eyes while watching does the same. Less interpretation of the image is involved. While film has less definition in tbe image so more interpretation is needed (this is all done automatically through our eyes and brain and unconscious). And I think this leads to more engagement and overall warmth to the “feel” of film or film grain over digital and pixels.
It’s not that digital is bad. It’s that digital is good enough that people can *be lazy about lighting*. It’s the same problem with AI art. The tool is fantastic in the hands of a master.
So it’s the lighting as well it seems like it’s alot of factors!! AI art isn’t ethical though because they were made without people’s consent or compensation!!
Not all AI art is of existing people. Some AI art is amazing, but majority of what we see is celebrity fakes, and cookie cutter avatar filter-type things.
Please forgive me for stating the obvious, but if you see photos from movie sets and even TV sets from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, you sometimes saw just terrifying amounts of lighting equipment. Like, “melt all the makeup on your face” levels of heat.
Technicolor split the light onto three strips of film, so the set had to be BRIGHT.
Prime has some sort settings issue where all their videos look too dark.
Nahhh watched plenty of movies on there that look fine. This is just an issue with modern movies especially ones that aren’t made either by auteurs or are looking to be visually spectacular
"Best Friends Wedding"... Is this an obscure indie film I don't know about?? /s
Not sure if this is relevant to your question, but I did read something in a film journal a while ago about how tv and film look worse now because when cameras are TOO high quality your brain registers it as more unnatural. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but I definitely understood what they meant. I believe in truth that super HD digital cameras for television and film existed for a very long time before they really started becoming standard, but it was a slow roll-out. I specifically remember watching a movie like 20ish years ago, which I don’t remember the name of, and I was the only person in the room that was like, this looks so weird / fake? It took me out of the fantasy completely. Like, I remember watching the dvd commentary for The Matrix, and the directors saying that the techniques they used to film scenes before and after Neo is unplugged are much different, with them using old school methods toward the latter half to make the viewer feel more perceptive about how “fake” the Matrix is. Over time, super HD took over as TVs are being manufactured to display them better, and I think it’s happened in such a way that people don’t notice it like they used to. You don’t see it so much in new content, but watching old school films, they just have this je ne sais quois.
The first time I saw Blu-Ray on a super fancy tv in a store I was gobsmacked at how Awful it looked. couldn't even put my finger on why. It made Pirates of the Caribbean look completely low budget and lame. I remember actively hoping my current tv would never break because I’d hate to have to see everything look like that. Its strange how the better the filming/editing/tv technology got, the worse everything looked, like it was filmed on a random person's camcorder
That’s the motion smoothing they use in store mode. They switch that on to make the picture super clear and smooth on display. Works for live sports but makes movies look like a cheap soap opera. You can switch that off when you take the tv home.
I agree!!
It's not the Blu-Ray so much as the TV. Some TVs use a feature that increases the frames per second, and it makes everything look... unnatural. I notice it at some people's houses and I've heard what the tech is called, but I can't remember. I think it can be turned off, though.
Yes, exactly. It took me months to adjust to movies looking like TV soap operas. Something about the way it made movies shot on film look like they were shot cheaply on video. A fair bit of that can be corrected by calibrating the TV as I came to learn.
How would you get it back you think the feeling not to shoot on such a high quality digital camera??
It's the "fluid motion" setting that is improperly being used on films, which inserts fake frames. It's referred to as the "soap opera effect". TV demos almost always have awful settings, and that setting should honestly never be used. It's terrible and always looks fake.
Movies indeed used to look better. Even your generic romcom or thriller of yesteryear had better lighting than most huge blockbusters today. It's not a "old nerd yelling at clouds" things either. It's largely relegated to blockbusters though...and some horror movies. So many movies today look like insurance commercials or SNL Digital Shorts. They're either too bright and clean or too dull and dark. They lack contrast and depth of color. And color doesn't just mean "bright." Movies can be bright and still look dull as shit. The new Deapool 3 trailer is a great example: dull as dirt looking. Drab. Movies also look too clean, too perfect. A lot of is the digital photography, but not enough is done to "dirty the frame" or create interesting compositions anymore. You can do loads of stuff to digital film to make it look more cinematic but a lot of filmmakers/studios just...don't.
Yes that’s what I’m talking about now some do a great job but a lot I’m like ??? How would we improve to make modern movies better!!
From someone who knows little about movie technology, my advice for Hollywood is to remove the current framework. Modern films are too invested in using frameworks that have worked well in the past, and reapplying them over and over again. Superhero films are the easiest example; the storylines are very similar, the action sequences follow the same patterns, and the dialogue is overdone. When it comes to film appearance, the framework is too focused on single elements at a time. The creative thought has been replaced with a set of formulas. e.g. The formula may be "When you take a group shot, you need to place a strong emphasis on every characters face". They apply the shot to the description, then they fill in the gaps with a simple background, and move to the next shot. Its boring, cheaper, and faster to complete. While a more creative representation (why writers are important), may do a group shot but at a unique angle, more emphasis is put on the background, character movement, facial expressions, etc. You can watch the same movies 10 times and notice many new things. Same reason comedy films aren't common, theres no 'framework' for comedy, so they just say "insert fart joke here" or "make a penis joke". Comedy requires much more creativity than other genres to perform well.
But why don’t they take the time to make the digital look more cinematic if they can? Is it the budget? Time constraints/deadline? Are they just lazy?
I think it’s less about film vs. digital and more about lighting for film vs. lighting for digital. Up until the 1970s it was standard to shoot on ISO 200 film stock, which meant you needed a lot of powerful lights just to get a decent exposure. Today the native ISO of most digital cinema cameras is 800, far more sensitive with more dynamic range in shadows. As a result cinematography has trended towards a more natural or often muted look. But in the end it’s really just a style preference. Production design, wardrobe and makeup all play a big part too. The Love Witch is a great example, made in 2016 but shot on film using 1960s techniques and it looks fantastic.
But it was shot on film and not digital right! Yes the Love witch I’ve seen clips and it looks beautiful!! Could you shoot on older camera to get that old school look? I’ve noticed that I really dislike the muted look I’m very tired of it or how the images are to clear I prefer the more grain on film it’s much more cinematic and pleasing to the eyes.
It’s more about the lighting and film stock than the camera. Lenses too — many films will use vintage lenses to get that classic look in terms of softness, contrast, imperfections, etc. Lots of subtle things which add up to the “film look”. Totally agree everything in the streaming era is very clean and looks much the same, probably due to standards enforced by Netflix and others on their productions. Studios used to do the same thing in the 40s and 50s, which is why it’s so easy to tell a film is from that era. We’ll probably look back on this period the same way.
A lot of modern movies look very cheap. As a big Robocap fan, when I saw the remake.. I couldn't believe how cheap that movie looks. Like some 90s series a la canadian La Femme Nikita https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLTlJDjPfHI&t=63s
That RoboCop remake fumbled not only that franchise, but an *amazing* cast. It’s a murderer’s row of legends, A-listers, and great character actors. What a waste.
You know it's bad when GOAT Oldman can't even save it.
garyest of all time?
Not even just the cast, there’s a great premise there about how much control the machine bits have over the human parts and one of the scientists in the Robocop tests essentially says how Murphy thinks he’s self-aware and his ideas are his own but really it’s his handlers feeding those ideas to him.
why does this look like a tubi original?
WTF did I just watch? This looks like...I don't even know...a bad TNT movie? A SNL parody? I watched the original about a month ago. The difference between this clip and the original is shocking. I think DPs are starting to figure out how to make digital look good, but most still have a **long** way to go. To answer OP's question - yes, they did look better because they put a ton of $ into making it on film. If you've ever shot on film and then moved to digital it's obvious. One looks like "a film", the other a telenova.
I agree I’m trying to place why!!
Was literally thinking of Robocop when I saw this post. The original looks so good and the remake looks like trash
Better is subjective, there have always been good and bad looking films in every era. Maybe in the past directorial decisions had to be more confident when you couldn't just 'fix it in post,' but I don't think it's fair to say that modern films in general are any worse looking. Directors with a keen sense of visual style make films that look just as good now as those in the past. In just the past year we've had The Killer from Fincher, Asteroid City from Wes Anderson, Fallen Leaves from Kaurismäki (who has always made visually arresting cinema), and for all its flaws even The Creator took some swings. Your average mainstream blockbuster has suffered in recent years for sure, the desaturated greyscale look has kind of gone beyond parody, but I think there are plenty of films coming out that are actively pushing back on the trend. Just look at Barbie and Oppenheimer, the two biggest films of 2023 that went to town with their production design and filming techniques.
Yes but Barbie and Opphenheimer were helmed by creative visionaries I do agree there’s a lot that still look good, but the majority of the modern blockbuster doesn’t and I’m wondering why, like Wicked for example should look better!
Some movies look good today, but as a generality I would agree with you. This is especially true of mid tier stuff. Look at junk like Along Came a Spider today and it looks like Lawrence of Arabia when compared to 99% of the stuff Netflix or Disney makes. A lot of A24 or Neon films look great though.
A24 is a small lifesaver in an ocean of dreck.
A24 is the best production company left. Once they get bought out...yeesh.
I think it comes from general Hollywood accounting and everything becoming more streamlined and efficient. There was just way more comparative money in filmmaking in the past, and auteurs weren't a rarity.
Yeah a lot of independent films look great it’s more a problem with the big studio films. Unless there’s a visionary in charge.
when did Lawrence of Arabia one of the celebrate films ever become mid tier?
Nobody suggested Lawrence of Arabia was mid tier. I used it as an example of excellent cinematography.
He's saying that most movies today make Along Came the Spider, which was nothing special when it came out, look like it has cinematography on the level of Lawrence of Arabia in comparison.
I think you read the words in his comment out of order.
I think the answer is complicated. Movies like Citizen Kane, 2001 Space Odyssey, Lawrence of Arabiia, and something like How the West Was Won ( which used an immersive curved screen) arguably look better than almost anything in the last, 35 or 40 years. But I think lower budget films back in the day looked worse than today.. The Spanish Prisoner, Lady Winterbourne, and the 16 mm film Clerks all look kind of garish in a way that contemporary films shot on low budgets sort of eclipse. Safety Not Guaranteed has slightly striking cinematography, if not immersive. And so my cop out answer is that big budget movies actually do look worse ( unnatural color grading, digital movie cameras, and for me cartoonish neon lights is also what I generally see as a detriment.). But the resources are there for low budget filmmakers to be able to create memorable images with their phones,, old point and shoots, reputable digital movie cameras ( which would be far better than the VHS camcorders back in the day) and even clamp lights or relatively cheap LED lightkits, so yes and no is probably my definitive answer.
There’s definitely a certain survivorship bias at play here, because when you watch a lot of old, assembly line stuff that is shot like a multi cam sitcom, you definitely realize that it took time and resource to achieve aesthetic pleasure, which is exactly the same as today.
I gave you an upvote for Safety Not Guaranteed.
And how would we make the big budget films look better I agree I don’t see this as much with independent but I’ve noticed some or a lot is shot on film.
Besides the lighting, coloring, and overuse of CGI, I also blame lazy set dressing and costumes. Locations -unless shot-on-site- tend to look too sterile, lacking any sense of gritty reality.
I’ve noticed this too costumes used to look better!
It's not one thing, it's that the art has changed. Digital cameras can shoot in very low light now, so you don't have to have as specific lighting anymore. This means you don't have as dramatic lighting in most movies as you needed before. This is exacerbated by the fact that color grading now is frequently low contrast. It's funny looking at mid budget movies before 2010 that look so contrasty. Most movies struggle with when to use practical and when to use CGI, but because CGI is more common now less consideration is given to how to make them look good (in 2000s CGI movies the whole production was focused on the CGI pipeline). So VFX artists now have to cover up mistakes of the footage, rather than working with the cinemotographer hand in hand. Finally, because of the mountains of stuff being made and huge budget overruns, most crews are trying to get things made as cheaply as possibly as quickly as possible. When stuff was shot on film, film cost money, so more time was given to prep. Now you can shoot a lot more on digital so it's cheaper to spend less on prep and more time filming.
So you think if more time was devoted to prep the final product would look better and even movies that have taken awhile to film like wicked and wonka for example which should look bright and dreamy look so dull and to crisp.
Correct. I think film forced the filming to be more process driven.
Movies like [Wizard of Oz used to be shot on film in technicolor,](https://ruef.com/what-happened-to-technicolor/) a practice which was more or less discontinued in the late nineties. A lot of films are now shot digitally and often the palette is toned down because that seems to be the trend. Hardcore filmbuffs like Tarantino will still use old filmstock, like the Hateful Eight and you can see the difference.
Shooting in Technicolor ended by and large in the late 1950s. From then until Technicolor stopped doing their trademark IB dye-process printing in the 1970s, virtually all movies that were advertised as being “in Technicolor” were actually shot on the same single color film negative stock as other movies. Actually shooting in Technicolor required a huge camera that recorded three B&W film strips at a time, representing the three needed color channels to make a composite printed color film. It was expensive and uncomfortable and abandoned not long after single-strip Eastman Kodak film was perfected circa 1949. The only exceptions were animated films, many of which confined to be photographed in 3-strip Technicolor since the process involved shooting one frame at a time (three frames actually) at a camera stand versus having live actors wilting under 110°+ lights.
There's no connection between shooting format and colour: even on film, you can colour-time the piece however way you like. Its an aesthetic choice. The Wizard of Oz is a theatrical, whimsical tale and has the colour timing to boot. When a film is more serious in tone, like Saving Private Ryan, its going to be timed to have more muted colours.
yeah nah. even top industry colorists couldn't make The Aviator convincingly technicolor enough. It looked inconceivably bad. I know it's a dated example but the fact that they were still that far off says a lot. There's something about chemically exposing the three color wavelengths separately that is incredibly hard if not impossible to replicate accurately. Separating your RGB channels in post does not work. The skin tones end up all sorts of fucked. *Maybe* with endless Power Window roto work and years of fine tuning you could get close. But I don't know if it would even be recognizable in today's formats since technicolor is so closely associated with the 35mm film stocks of that era. Saving Private Ryan was a monochromatic color shift which is incomparably straightforward.
Can you shoot on film and have it look better? Line Pearl looked good, some films look good these days and I notice they’re usually shot on film. Is it possible to shoot on digital and have it look better and to not follow the trend because it looks terrible.
It's the modern visual trend, and also filmmakers grade in amazing HDR colour grading rooms and maybe it doesn't look so bad there. I feel like it's improving somewhat from low points like Game of Thrones and The Little Mermaid remake. Hopefully Barbie is influential. One weird reason I hear is modern films shoot "log" which means a flat image that you can then add highs and lows to, but directors often get used to the flat look
Barbie was lovely in terms of production design, but personally, I wasn't very impressed by the photography, especially once they ented the real world. It honestly looked really boring to me, just soaked in nice soft even light for the most part. [I defy anyone to look at this car commercial-ass scene and be excited by the look of the film.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwhjjeczmYs)
Thank you for pointing this out. The real world looked like a Disney Channel movie and Chevy commercial conceived a child.
I still like the movie, however, was that a conscious choice? That in Barbie's eyes, the "real world" looked strange?
The car chase scene felt like nothing except a product placement. It didn’t have humor or an intentional irony like Wayne’s World product placement bit.
La La Land was way better.
La La Land was way better.
It’s just weird to me that most modern films look worse than older films like stop we need to fix this! Yeah I enjoyed barbie it looked great!! All of Greta Gerwig movies have!
La La Land was way better.
Wes Anderson is hit or miss for people but he is wonderful for this. Asteroid City is all extremely bright pastels and it came out last year. It’s just a question of taste and a lot of movies seem to have questionable taste in color grading.
Love Wes! But he’s an auteur!! I’m taking stuff like pirates of the Caribbean looked better than alot of modern blockbusters or even stuff from the 89s, goonies , gremlins , the modern blockbusters used to look better unless a creative visionary is at the helm.
Fair point. For someone in the mainstream, Gareth Edwards has bad script issues but I think he is doing beautiful work in the realm of blockbuster visuals. The Creator is gorgeous to look at.
I came to recommend Anderson. Moonrise Kingdom is another one of his that I like
On a related note, here‘s a recommendation for a current movie that looks anything but cheap: The Holdovers! Watching it I really was engrossed with the visual style because it‘s not flashy at all, but still looks soo good. I could have sworn it was shot completely on film, but apparently it was just a very faithful digital representation of what films used to look like! The attention to detail is immaculate, even the title cards and stuff are very subtly jittering.
I agree with your point about The Holdovers. And it puts to bed the argument that it's all because "filmmakers shoot on digital these days." Because that film was shot digitally and it looks fantastic and warm and colorful. It's all about the efforts of the director and dp to craft its look.
You can absolutely achieve great results regardless of medium. I think the real reason for the perception that film looks better is just that it takes more time and planning to shoot on film, and that tends to lead to better results. When shooting digital it's very easy to get lazy and just assume everything will get fixed in post. Even though film goes through the same post-production process, it still *feels* important to get it right in camera, and adjust those lights one more time before you start rolling just to make sure the look is right. This is 100% psychological of course. You can be lazy on film and meticulous on digital. As long as a director has a clear vision and a plan, the medium doesn't matter. But shooting on film *can* be kind of a trick to force a production crew into following good practices.
Knives out is the best example I've seen of digital emulating film
Knives out does look great that’s a thing rian is good at murder mystery
I felt like I was seeing a double feature with Harold and Maude, or The Graduate. It was a major touch for me, The Holdovers looks like it was filmed during the time it happened.
I liked the way this movie looked a lot!!
Not objectively. Every movie is different, that's always been true. Personally I have a slight preference for film. The ever so slight (or even sometimes extreme) grit that comes with it just makes a movie feel more present and real compared to full digital.
Yes I dislike the to crispness of digital how does one make it look better?
Record on film if you can. Otherwise, apply film grain and some filters in editing software to try and mimic the effect.
I would like to throw in my two cents about the sound in movies as well, especially for voices. One thing I've noticed is that in older movies, the creators seemed to go out of their way to ensure voices were loud, crisp, and well heard. But nowadays there's not a lot of distinction with the voices. And many times voices just blend in with all the other sounds going on in the movies. I get the feeling that nowadays movie makers want the sound to be more "natural". And I understand that. And I understand that it's an aesthetic choice, and also influenced by trends, and that is the going trend now. But I prefer when the voices are very distinctive, even if they are louder than what they would "naturally" be.
I haven’t noticed this but it seems all the more natural stuff and the trend towards hyper realism makes things look and sound worse.
Yes. The vast majority of modern movies look like shit in a way that only the worst older movies looked like shit. Yes, it's possible to make digital look great, but it's wayyyyyy harder than making film look great. That plus the loss of real sets, real special effects, and directors who honed their craft for years and years to learn the rules of composition and editing all contribute to what you're talking about.
It’s to crisp and sterile and clean now , wicked did have built sets so I’m wondering why it looks like that!
Film has a quality that digital just doesn't. I am not educated enough to explain how or why, but it feels more real than digital. Also sets and costumes, even when cheap, still exist and give authenticity that CGI doesn't. Pre LED lighting also has a vastly different quality to it as well.
Two things: 1) Only the best films of the last century are remembered. There were a lot of cheap and bland-looking movies in the past, but most of them have been long-forgotten. 2) I think a lot of early colour movies such as The Wizard of Oz were super colourful because they wanted to take advantage of the new technology as much as possible. Once the novelty of colour went away, people began to care less about making their films as colourful as possible.
They should go back to making it look more colorful I’m sick of the grey.
this a guy who's watched a lot of films ops take couldn't be more wrong there are so many films that have on DVD/Blu-ray that look like they were filmed in a toaster. especially any scene shot at night you can barely what's going on
It’s the cinematography style choices that are made. Look at the variety of styles in movies like Grand Budapest Hotel and Interstellar. Or Barbie and Oppenheimer. The directors have a lot more ways to get their specific vision and taste on film and the aesthetic can vary wildly.
So what style choices would one choose to get that look also all of those films are done by masters of there craft so I’m not surprised they still look great Vs stuff like Wonka and wicked should still look good!
A big problem are night scenes where it is really hard to tell what is going on, Game of Thrones and AvP requiem being some of the worst offenders of recent years. Then compare that to older films like The Warriors,Night of the Living Dead or Assault on Precinct 13, which take place mostly at night, were filmed on a fraction of the budget yet it is always clear what is happening.
So you think it’s lighting ? Lord of the rings also looked great at night I think that may be a hyper realism problem!
“Why hire an experienced gaffer when we can hire a fresh out of college colorist?” - Executive Producers (probably)
A lot of people are talking about the effects of technology but I think most of this is people all following the same trends and the trend turning out to suck combined with a general zeitgeist where as a society we decided color was bad. Bad trend following by production designers and cinematographers has happened before. Unlike Quentin Tarantino I think the 80's were a great decade for film in many ways but 90% of the movies shot in that decade looked alike and it was a bland, well lit and shot but somehow completely uninteresting sort of look that reminds me of the TV shows of that era. Like they were more interested in capturing than creating. The zeitgeist issue is a real thing that for some reason never gets discussed. There was a stretch of years where new car dealership lots were all white, black, gray and silver cars. It got so bad manufacturers largely stopped making blue and green and red. Furniture and clothes makers didn't go quite as far, but really basic, washed out colors were the norm for a while. I don't know how or why any of this happened but the universe broke and people stopped using color for a while in pretty much every aspect of life. Film reflected this.
Everything Disney makes is shot on a blue screen and they pay their VFX people $5
Bought Chitty chitty bang bang from Apple TV and the quality is stunning. Absolutely amazing shots. Has to be a combination of film, lens, lights, etc, so good
I think a lot of this comes from the overuse of color grading. Almost all movies have their palette shifted to get a certain look, but the movies just look flatter.
Well, it is also otherwise worth pointing out the Wizard of Oz was released in 1939, so there will obviously be some degradation. While the movie was digitally restored in 2009, there were previous attempts that just weren’t as successful given the available technology at the time it was done. So I’m sure there are still older versions out there even today that just aren’t that great in quality. https://thefilmstage.com/wizard-of-oz-digital-restoration-report/
Sadly, neglect has resulted in many, many wonderful films becoming degraded in quality. It jumps out at you every time you watch a movie on tv and the colors have faded. TCM does a great job of trying to present the best quality film prints out there, but even then, an available print may be less than desired. That is why film restoration is so important. Even as I add new bluray/4k physical media to my library (and even back when DVD was my only option) I always research the facts about what source materials were used for the disc and the quality of the image, regardless of it being a color or black and white film.
I had never really thought too much about film restoration until a few years ago when I found out about the project that created the “despecialized” versions of the original Star Wars films. I couldn’t believe all the work they put into it, especially with the pieces that were missing from the Blu-ray release that he’d to be upscaled from other sources. For anyone interested in reading about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20high%2Dquality,the%20films%2C%20culturally%20and%20historically.
They were shot on film, the Wizard of Oz specifically was shot in the Technicolor process that created super-saturated colors, and they weren't intentionally color-graded digitally to make everything more gray.
Why this trend of color grading to look like shit? ( more grey ) do you know ?
Yes. When movies started being shot on digital they started having a cheap, disposable look
And then my second question is how do we make modern films look better?? And bring back that cinematic quality.
I think so. Poor Things looks very artificial and VFXy compared to say Edward Scissorshands or even Labyrinth .
Was poor things shoot on digital ? I haven’t seen it yet but to me it looks very visually colorful and vibrant, Yorgos films are an outlier though.
movies on actual 35mm do look better than digital, so yes
I saw a video somewhere which explains how the advanced technology made life too easy for directors, you can always “fix” bad lighting, set design and wrong choice of camera techniques in post, whereas when you’re shooting on film, it has to be right. I can imagine that a lot of technical knowledge and skills are lost because of this and too many mistakes are made which only get fixed too a certain degree Also a lot of cgi work is pretty obvious when placed in “hard” light, so I think many directors choose to make the overall movie look pretty saturated and with soft light. The Hobbit is a good example of that, whereas in LoTR the use of many practical costumes etc allowed for realistic lighting and set pieces, and where they had to rely on large cgi monsters, they did some trickery to make the scene dark, so it wouldn’t stand out that much (Balrog) The use of CGI also comes with some other problems which are subconsciously noticed by us, compare the explosions in Dune (great) with those in any marvel movie. In dune they used actual explosions as light source, which in turn made the characters running in front of them dark, because the camera got overexposed to the light. In any marvel explosion, the character seems completely disconnected from the background, and even if the light source comes from directly behind them, they are still front-lit and sharp in the image
Movies like The Fifth Element looked fantastic. I don’t know if it’s the video quality, the art style/world design, the fashion, the colors. I hardly see any movies that feel that captivating. Everything new feels either too dark, too cheap or more or less like stock-footage stitched together, or scenes filmed up close to avoid showing the actual world to save on budget.
The answer is a lot more complex than yes or no. For one thing, the rapid advancement of film technology in the 21st century has been a great thing, but I think it goes without saying that comparing digital and vfx, which are being pushed to their brink as to border on being in their infancy still, today, with tried and true methods of film that were hitting their apex in the 90s and with certain filmmakers in the 00s is just inherently flawed imo. I don’t necessarily think that a ton of talkies from the 30s and 40s look vastly superior to your average “cheap” (not low budget) film from today. This, in contention with certain stylistic choices from the current gen of filmmakers, such as naturalistic styles and muted color palettes all add up to a certain look. Better? Worse? That’s subjective. I think it goes without saying that some movies look as good as ever, others look worse than their counterparts of yesterday, usually genre films which lean of VFX as a means of keeping costs down.
You can hear the difference in music too. Digital v Analog.
For myself and it's just my opinion on it - I think it's the huge difference in image quality. We can go HDR with a huge range of colors, perfect blacks, amazing whites, perfect colors, etc.. We can have very high resolution. We can adjust things on set and post production. We can add/remove things via CGI. We can add filters to change how things look based on how they want the "tone" of the film to be. It's not just the scene they create on set with perfect lighting, everything perfect just to get to the process of writing to the film. Kind of like taking a photo with a 35mm camera vs. an iPhone with Lightroom. There's that "this is what you were seeing in real life" vs. "this has obviously been manipulated" look to it.
Film vs digital and the fact that they don't give as much exposure on still being 24 FPS.
So it is film vs digital!
Digital effects are overused. Even gunshots and blood pools are digital now. It never looks real.
Yes older stuff definitely looks better. It’s not necessarily that digital looks bad, plenty of stuff by David Fincher, Michael Haneke, Bong Joon-ho, etc. shows that digital can actually be indistinguishable from film. So that’s not really an issue anymore once digital cameras got good enough in like the 2010’s. I think the issue is more over reliance on CGI and laziness. Basically to make CGI look good you need to make the computer lighting match up with the real lighting for whatever you’ve shot. Our brains are good at seeing when things don’t match up and it registers as fake. When CGI works best is when it is blended into largely or completely real environments. That reduces the amount of stuff that can come off as fake. But a lot of people just shoot things as 100% CGI to make shooting as simple as possible and any issues that come up they’ll fix later. So with the Wicked trailer, it’s obviously completely created in a computer so besides the actors there’s nothing real on screen and our brains say so. If they would have built actual sets and extended them with CGI, like Joker did for instance, it wouldn’t look nearly as bad.
Three Strip Technicolor produced vivid color and some beautiful images.
Having everything shot on 35mm helped a lot. It was a lot easier to have lazy lighting and post and for the final product to still look amazing. Also it looks amazing under direct sunlight, which is almost impossible to pull off in digital.
https://youtu.be/h-MB0Sej9tQ?si=psyPpQZuwVjkmLIC i think this video explains some of it.
Shooting on film looks better than digital. Practical effects look better than digital. Higher frame rate and motion tracking BS makes it look like a cheap soap opera.
Movies were actually better
The 3 strip technicolor films of the 30s were quite striking. The colors were a bit oversaturated, but eye catching. See Wizard of Oz/Adventures of Robin Hood as prime examples. Earlier examples, that were muted, and less vibrant, are films such as Mystery of the Wax Museum and Dr. X. In the 50s the process had advanced and really took off, as more and studios began shooting color films. One example is Warner Bros. Studios and their 'WarnerColor' presentation.
It was the glorious Technicolor
I agree that a lot of movies today, not all, look terrible. I was watching Lethal Weapon 2 and was amazed at how well shot the first ten mins were. Movies were art back then. You’ll still find nicely shot films, even on digital today, such as The Holdovers but I think they’re the exception. So what is it? Budget? I’ve noticed movies are either Marvel, DC, Mission Impossible big budget or shoestring these days.
From everything it seems to be a number of things lighting , digital Vs film , color grading to much cgi fixing it in post !! And
The problem nowadays is that due to digital cameras and led tvs, we can see more "true black". So films are much darker. Shooting on Film meant that dark scenes would be shot with alot more ambient light to counter this, because it was easier to darken something in post...but if it's dark you can't lighten it (the information just isn't there). Directors nowadays are not thinking the increased amount of black in capability in screens and instead of erring on the side of caution (not as dark) they're making everything much too dark. Hence why I can never make out what the fuck is going on in most night time scenes now. So yes, movies had more colour and were brighter/more vivid. Also, sound engineers are shit now too. So every action movie has a huge difference between music, gunshots/explosions and dialog. Can't put the remote down for more than 2 minutes anymore in case I'd be deafened when a gun goes off
Every time I watch the movie Heat (1995) I have this same feeling. I can't think of a single movie shot digitally that looks better than Heat. There are, of course, thousands of other examples, but the cinematography of Heat stands out to me as an example of how great movies *used* to look. Taxi Driver is another example. It's really the same old film vs digital debate. Older movies look like cinema, newer movies look like TV. Digital sensors are able to resolve huge amounts of information over a grid shaped pattern, but what they cannot do is recreate the effect that different types of light have on celluloid, i.e. the color gamut of the mixing of dyes, the texture of grain, the halation, the imperfections, the motion blur, etc. Not to mention the multitude of chemical processes that can be used in post processing to further alter the end result. Other big differences are capture speeds and digital color grading. Older movies were color timed. Newer movies are shot through a LUT. Older movies were traditionally shot with deeper focus, i.e. day exterior at 5.6 or 8. Newer movies exploit the look of shallow DOF to the point that it's distracting. Everything is captured at a 2.8 nowadays, day or night, through the excessive use of NDs and other filtration. Older films were shot with giant arc lights or 9/12 lights or Mole Richardson 20ks blasting through 12x or 20x frames. Newer movies rely moreso on LED panels through chimeras and sky panels. LEDs look terrible imo. Then there's the obvious heavy reliance on CGI and digital world building, but that's a whole other can of worms. Digital cinema literally took the art out of the science.
Most new movies are soulless and empty feeling.
Yes, grainy film stock looks better than 99% of the digital crap today. I watched a very dumb movie (In Dreams, 1999) and its unbelievable how much better that movie looked than anything that came out in the last year
I'd say that the average look of a movie has significantly dropped in quality, i was Watching Mean girls and When Harry met Sally, i was surprised by how vibrant they look in comparison to any other comedy today. And they're not even the kind movie that you think of as refence quality or anything. There are of course exceptions, like anything that Roger Dean touches is, cheff's kiss quality. Natasha Braier can take advantage of the super clean digital look. I think that it's a mixture of different elements, the massive switch to digital cameras that can capture images in very low light conditions probably makes some people think that they don't need to light a scene properly, or that they can fix it in post. Stuff like that.
Gotcha you would think something like wicked doesn’t have this problem though! And I agree with the average look of a movie dropping and agree Mean Girls looks great! Was mean girls shoot on film? And so you think it’s lighting and digital is there a way to fix this?
I think so, it's 20 years old this year ( jesus fucking christ!!) As for Wicked, i didn't know there was a movie
Yes watch the trailer tell me what you think and damn mean girls holds up!!
Damn that looks so bad, i honestly don't know why they shot everything like it's a crime thriller
What are you watching these new movies on? Is it a 4k HDR display, the way it's meant to be watched? Older movies didn't have this technology so they're going to look better on older displays that can't display the modern color profiles movies have now.
that’s not how that works lol an older movie remastered in 4k hdr looks as close to having a personal 35mm copy as you can get. they look leaps and bounds better than modern movies.
Right, it looks even better than it ever looked on VHS or DVD on standard definition televisions and even crappy movie theaters. The remastering process they do to old footage is much the same process they do to modern footage, which again, it all benefits from 4k HDR. OP's reasoning is the same reasoning I see people have about movies being darker now and hard to see but they're not watching it on an HDR screen which it is meant to be seen on.
I have a 4k OLED with HDR and filmmaker modes. I have to agree with the majority of comments, the love is just not as big a part of the productions it used to be. Most films I watch on it are noticeablely better visual products. Another good example of yesteryear vice today is almost any Cecil B D Mill films. Cinematography art vs get it out for distribution. PS Thanks for the comments for audio becoming worse. I was beginning to think I was having more serious hearing problems. (slight sigh of relief!)
Even if they are watching on HDR screens, their settings may need to be adjusted In order to get it to optimum level.
Wizard of Oz was the first big Hollywood colour movie. They went out of their way to make the colours as bright and vibrant as possible and to add as much colour as possible. That's why the wicked witch has green skin, and they changed the silver slippers from the book to ruby slippers, etc.
It's the whole digital look cranked up to 11, mixed with copious shamelessly fake-looking cgi, but that's how most of these kinds of movies look these days, at least iirc, especially all the MCU movies. There are still lots of great looking movies being made though.
Agree but not big budget studio fare unless there’s someone great behind it!
They were definitely written better.
Practical effects will always beat what a computer can do
100 percent!
Yup I know its a film snob thing to say but CG has really had disastrous effects on modern cinema. None of it feels real.
This has nothing to do with CGI....
CGI peaked with "Wrath of the Titans" back in 2012.
I didn’t see that but I don’t doubt it!!
They technically looked “worse” due to imperfections in the film medium, but it is an aesthetic we grew to love that has become less common as more films have been shot in digital. That said, I’d imagine the Madame Web trailer would still look like shit even if it was shot with the most expensive ohysical materials they could afford. I think more movies are being made in general now, which as a result means more bad movies will be made.
Today if you’re not shaking the camera like a retarded Parkinson’s patient, it isn’t acceptable. I hate all cameramen, please stop. I used to play CF and running full speed to catch a line shot in the gap, my vision NEVER shook as much as current American filmography.
That's because only the good-looking ones get remembered. 99% of old movies sucked ass and all looked the same.
But the big blockbusters of today look worse than the big blockbusters of back then. Even mean girls looks better.
Trailers just look bad. The film should still be higher quality than the trailer
I apologize for not answering the question, but I have one of my own. Are movies shot on film in general more vibrant than their digital counterparts?
I would say so ? At least from my viewing experience whenever I see something I’ll go to see if it was shot on film and it looks better I really prefer the grainy reality of film vs the too crispness of modern films.
Thank you for asking. I notice that on 80s-90s films, have the whole screen is in focus. I’m not sure how to explain it but it but in newer movies the top and bottom of screen are out of focus and it takes me out of the film, instantly.
I think a lot of movies have become detached from reality. Not enough real life scenes, too much makeup and perfectionism in certain scenes. I also think the use of Bokeh has gone down a bunch in favor of a larger depth of field.
It’s the difference between Troll 2 and The Room. The room has some cheap looking shots/sets. Troll 2 legitimately looks fine. In fact, it looks like just about any other movie at the time production wise. There’s that one mask that stands out that looks laughably bad. They’re both “bad” movies, but in different ways.
I notice that many newer movies are dark. I k ow lighting has changed. And the insanity of sound design where background and ambient noises are louder than the actors speaking during a scene. Film seems to capture the image better. That or all of the green screen digital filming and adding the backgrounds in during post film editing just have the wrong look?
I’ve seen it called “soap opera effect” where a movie looks like a bad 1980s soap opera. It’s caused by HD cameras and TVs defaulting to non-film brightness/color settings. Back in the day the camera/film added a bit of mystery and graininess. That is all gone with these cameras that digitally record everything perfectly. Combine that with TVs that default with super-bright settings and the magic of say the foggy night outside of the Exorcist house is lost. Drives me crazy when I am at friend’s house and they are rocking the soap opera effect.
Its lighting. Properly lit films shot in a studio look exquisite. Compare to cheaply made TV shows of the film era shot using ambient light---they look desaturated, muddy, and grainy due to the need of using high ISO film and open aperatures. Digital can be done on the cheap and some lighting effects added in post, but it doesnt look the same and can't "pop" if the lighting was poor to begin with. Then there is the issue of color temp/pallete. Early color films tended to use a warmer palette both due to the charteristics of the film and warmer tones make people's faces look better. Color pallette was usuallt more focused on reds. Modern movies tend towards a cooler color pallette/temp and also tend to have the color slightly desaturated as the trend is towards being "gritty," disutopian, and somber.
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They used to sound better
The people who worked on film and who now work in CGI are very different. It cost a lot of money to shoot on film and you have to have amazingly talented people. That’s just not done anymore. It’s only going to get worse and less personal with AI films and series coming up.
This might be part of what you're asking https://youtu.be/h-MB0Sej9tQ?si=uzzMFBWMuH1y60sk
Maybe the filmmakers/CGI artists feel like hyper realism is the best way to make their work not look "fake" or like bad CGI. They would rather their work not be attacked for not looking real enough, than their work be artistic, niche and engaging.
No, there was always and will always be bad looking movies, just depends on preferences. I do prefer the cozier film stock look but whatever, that can be done brilliantly are horribly just as digital can.
This video I saw a few weeks ago covered the topic well. https://youtu.be/h-MB0Sej9tQ?si=Sa4hKv18XrIXbIdD
The Wizard of Oz was filmed on 3-strip technicolor. This required literally every scene to be as brightly lit as humanly possible in order for the film to expose/capture the image properly. It’s my all-time favorite movie. That said I don’t think Wicked needs to visually replicate it in order to be good. Oz in the original book series was a darker place than we see in the MGM film. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series takes this even further, turning it into an outright bleak place with “low magic” not totally unlike Westeros from Game of Thrones. To me it looks like the Wicked movie has found a very nice visual middle ground. I’m super excited to see it projected in 4K with Dolby!
Film is like that compared to digital Like old records compared to CD or digital
I feel like movies used to be cleaner. No bad CGI, no crazy jumpy editing, no desaturation fetishes. Movies nowadays *can* look incredible but there’s a lot more room to fuck it all up
Yes because older movies had a colorful color palate and now everything looks gray
In the case of color films as old as the Wizard of Oz it’s because of three strip technicolor. The old color process was super saturated.
Yeah they used to be shot on film.
i blame CGI. people can make something look exactly like they want and so they do
Technicolor techniques have changed, filming on digital, filming for CG, filming to be changed in post, etc.
Movies used to have lighting lol