the only way out is through but fuuuuuuuuuck fuuuuucckkkk cant i like scooch past or something
wallacepolsom
i don't do bad sauce passes
Peter Solarz
Mike Driver

Kaledo Art

pixel skylines

titsay
dirt enthusiast
$LAYYYTER
RMH
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
🪼

izzy's playlists!
occasionally subtle

Kiana Khansmith
Show & Tell
Jules of Nature
trying on a metaphor

roma★
Stranger Things
seen from Poland

seen from Italy

seen from Germany

seen from Türkiye
seen from Austria
seen from Spain
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Colombia

seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States

seen from Australia
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
@miss-mii
the only way out is through but fuuuuuuuuuck fuuuuucckkkk cant i like scooch past or something
In this scene, they are in the middle of the woods under a canopy of trees. They show the sky and there is no moon.
The light has absolutely no motivation.
Motivated lighting is a philosophy where all of the light sources on screen have a logical source. The light from a smartphone on someone's face. A lamp next to the couch. Sterile overhead office lights.
Often filmmakers will still use their own custom light sources, but they will simulate these things to give the impression the light has motivation.
Compare this to when all they really had were bright spotlights and insensitive film. An indoor scene just couldn't have this warm and cozy feel. And the light was just blasted in from everywhere.
Black and white helped a lot. You could still get dramatic effect despite things needing to be overlit. Or you could play with contrast ratios and shadow.
All the stuff you need to see was very bright and exposed well onto film and all the stuff you didn't was very dark.
But there was no graduation in between. It was hard to be subtle.
And when television and movies went color, this black and white contrast advantage was lost.
You can see EVERYTHING. And look at those sharp shadows. Everyone is just being blasted in the face with lights.
This sitcom lighting persisted long past when it was necessary. It became part of the sitcom language.
I think M*A*S*H was one of the first shows to subvert the overlit sitcom aesthetic. They began to play with lighting that had more motivation.
But aesthetic standards are hard to kill. And despite the heavy influence of M*A*S*H, sitcoms persisted all the way into the Friends era.
Her lamp isn't even on. Everything is just lit by God.
I don't think you will see a living room or kitchen scene lit like this very much from here on out.
People are getting used to lighting making more logical sense.
With the advent of LED lighting that can be any size, shape, and brightness, as well as cameras that can interpret very dark images, modern shows can now use bright and dark as narrative tools.
I think Severance does this well, and still keeps everything properly motivated.
But this newfound flexibility has created new problems. If you can film dark things, how dark is too dark? And how do you make sure the audience can see all of the important visual information?
The two worst examples of unmotivated lighting are always space helmets and cars.
It's a conceit. You gotta see the faces so these things are usually forgiven.
But the biggest debate in the realm of unmotivated lighting is night scenes. People have lots of opinions on how best to use light in the dark.
This is because following a motivated lighting philosophy can be especially tricky. Particularly if your setting is a secluded area without any artificial light sources.
Many cinematographers will try to give some sense of moonlight. But moonlight is very hard to replicate, so the effect usually ends up looking pretty fake.
This scene during a blackout in Die Hard 4 looks like they took the brightest light they had, mounted it as high as possible and said, "Fuck it, that's moon-ish."
If the DP is hardcore into motivated lighting, they just make the screen really really dark, like the Long Night battle in Game of Thrones.
The really really dark option bugs a lot of people.
Froggie Tangent about Dark Scenes:
I originally thought people needed to adjust their display settings. But then I realized not everyone watches content in a darkened room like a vampire. But if you find a show or movie is too dark, turning off any room lights will help a lot. Watching it in HDR will also help. And watching it on an OLED will help even more.
Scenes this dark are mostly a fad. DPs are experimenting with the possibilities of new technology. But sometimes they forget not everyone has that technology yet. And they forget some people watch stuff on their phones in a room full of sunlight.
Eventually the fad will fade, we will all adopt better screens, and the darkness will land somehwere between "I can't see shit" and "it would never be that bright in real life."
[End of tangent]
In the olden days, since film wasn't sensitive enough to do scenes in the dark, almost everything needed to have unmotivated lighting just to make sure their film wasn't a grainy mess. And as a culture, we sort of got used to that style. They'd mess with the contrast ratios to give the feeling of night, but if you think about where the light is coming from too hard, it won't make any sense. They took a Broadway theater approach to lighting and so a lot of movies felt like they were on a soundstage.
The 1961 West Side Story is a good example.
They've got a spot light hitting them, but not the building behind them. I guess that could be an overhead street light. But street lights are meant to flood the area like an ever expanding donut of light. A spotlight is like a directly projected cone of light. It is perfectly pointed at the side of their face and not coming from above.
She has some magical purple light coming from... somewhere.
And then they are in an area under a bridge, far away from any lights, but they've got soft fill light with a bright rim coming from the right.
Speilberg's version has much more motivated light.
This one is a bit of a cheat, some very bright source off in the distance. But it feels more plausible to the brain and gives a better sense of darkness. It feels like some kind of industrial lighting. Or a security light at a junkyard.
Here he straight up shows you where the light is coming from. And his preference for anamorphic lenses.
And here he uses bright train lights to create silhouettes. This is clever because it allows everything to be very dark but everyone is still legible in the scene.
I'm torn. Because I study light. And so I am very aware of how shows and movies are lighting things. And unmotivated lighting sticks out in my brain. Like when I watch someone miming playing the guitar. Or using a camera improperly. When you know too much about something, inaccurate onscreen depictions just drive you nuts.
There are some techniques being experimented with to make night scenes more legible while maintaining lighting realism. I think the most promising is the infrared day-for-night process used in Nope.
But maybe it doesn't need to be solved. Maybe DPs should just light the night even if it doesn't always make sense. Maybe general audiences just do not care and I am a big nerd who should be ignored.
Which do you prefer?
Whatever lighting allows you to clearly see what is happening.
Realistic motivated lighting, even if it is dark and hard to see.
I didn't care about motivated lighting until you pointed it out, you dork.
Motivated lighting as much as possible, dark scenes should cheat to see detail
As long as it looks cool, whatever dude.
Some additional thoughts and clarifications...
Looking back, I think I made it seem like motivated lighting was good and unmotivated lighting was bad. That was not my intention. My issue has more to do with watching something with almost exclusively motivated light and then a scene with unmotivated light breaks that train of immersion.
Or, like with West Side Story, the unmotivated lighting breaks the intended facade. The filmmakers wanted a soundstage to look like a New York City street. But the lighting made it look like a Hollywood soundstage. People had already seen the show on a stage and I think the artistic intent was to avoid that impression. But their lighting limitations made that illusion difficult to pull off.
Some people gave the impression that motivated lighting was less artistic or less emotionally impactful because it is grounded in realism. And lighting should be thought of more like music where we don't question where the music comes from.
I like the spirit of that analogy, but I'm not sure it fits. You choose music to fit the mood and emotion of the scene. And the genre and tempo of the music needs to be motivated by what is happening.
If a movie has a scene where someone is weeping because they learned they have a month to live and Eye of the Tiger starts to play, that could really break immersion.
If your film is grounded in reality, it would make sense that the lighting matches that.
Beyond that... "grounded in reality" and making logical sense does not mean the lighting is 100% realistic. It is still very crafted. In fact, motivated lighting requires a lot more design and artistic thought.
Which is why I would argue that motivated lighting can be more artistic and impactful.
When you don't limit yourself, sometimes that can lead to poor artistic choices. If you give a kid a box with a thousand crayons, you're probably going to get a drawing with a thousand colors.
You get a Zack Snyder movie.
Limitations and constraints on art often help creativity and force you to use your problem solving skills. If you can do lighting however you want, you may be tempted to just film everything on a green screen and use magic CGI lighting in post. Or you may pick an ugly environment and use good lighting as a way to improve the aesthetics. You end up using lighting as a crutch.
But if you constrain yourself to a more motivated lighting philosophy, that can force you to seek out places with beautiful light. To find locations that already look amazing without any additional light. You may be inspired to build amazing sets with the lighting design in mind from the beginning.
Motivated lighting is harder to make look good and requires more effort. And I believe that when art requires more effort, you tend to get a better end result.
Motivated lighting isn't just DPs wanting everything to be realistic for realism's sake. It requires more thought. It makes more sense. And if you can create beautiful, motivated light, it usually looks better.
Severance is widely considered to be a beautiful show. And it uses nearly 100% motivated lighting. They built a lot of the lighting into the actual sets.
That is not to say unmotivated, stylized lighting cannot look cool.
Wes Anderson overlights his films to great effect. He relies on vivid color palettes and strong symmetric composition to inform his aesthetic. He wants you to see all of the details in the frame as clearly as possible.
Sin City uses strong contrast for its aesthetic design.
The lighting is more photographic than filmic, with strong edge lighting. A very common style when photographing athletes with muscles.
And then you have John Wick, which uses a heavy mixture of motivated and unmotivated lighting.
I think this lighting style is called "make it look fucking cool."
I guess my big clarification is that I wasn't advocating for one type of lighting over the other. I love unmotivated lighting. Almost all of my photography is unmotivated lighting. But I wouldn't use studio lighting to do street photography. And Spielberg wouldn't light Saving Private Ryan like John Wick.
It's just a genre of lighting to choose from.
My post was about what to do when motivated lighting interferes with the legibility of the action on screen. I was curious how much this bothers people. And what approach they preferred to solve the problem.
Is it best to abandon the philosophy and lose your stylistic consistency?
Should we explore new solutions like the day-for-night scenes in Nope?
From the poll it seems people are split between "stay in-genre as much as possible and cheat when you have to" and "I just want to see everything."
Personally, I think cheating when you have to is probably where I land. Space helmets bother me, but I do like to see the actor's face.
But I would like to see more cinematographers experiment with new ways to represent darkness on screen like they did with Nope.
And once most people have OLED-style screens with HDR, I think this problem will be easier to manage.
First, thank you to everyone who is nerding out with me about motivated lighting. I love that I can have these conversations on a large scale like this, so I thought I'd post on my main blog too.
I'd like to add something to my conversation and I'm hoping it won't be too controversial.
I think we also need to talk about making demands of artists.
Looking at the comments, I did notice a new concern. Some folks expressed they would like their preferred viewing experience be catered to. They didn't want to make their environment more suitable to watch content with darker scenes.
Not to be confused with accessibility issues. I agree that there are accessibility concerns that are underserved. I tried to address those in another post. (I will reblog it on my main after this.) I think those are best solved with tools that alter the image after the fact. And there are a lot of tools for people with low vision (high contrast modes, zoom features), but not very many options for people who are light sensitive. So if you want to learn more about that issue, check out that post.
This discussion is about wanting filmmakers to make their content more friendly for less-than-ideal viewing environments.
Viewing experience is very wrapped up in artistic intent. The people who make cinematic movies are hoping people will experience them in an actual cinema. That is their artistic priority.
And I think that is where I have a problem with people wanting movies and shows to be completely legible even if they are in a bright or sunny room.
If someone told me to make my photography brighter so they could see it better in their bright kitchen… I would not be okay with that.
I think we sometimes forget that movies are giant artistic collaborations. I know they have been commodified and can sometimes feel like a product more than art. So some people feel like they are getting defective product when they can't see everything clearly. But films are made by hundreds of artists and they are still very much works of art.
And while I do think it is reasonable to make some concessions for accessibility and legibility, I also think people need to respect artistic vision.
If I am Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve and I make an epic cinematic masterpiece using IMAX cameras and all of the most advanced filmmaking techniques to perfectly craft an amazing visual spectacle… and you say you need Dune or Intersteller to look good on your phone as you watch in your backyard at noon… well… no.
If you want to watch something cinematic, I think some effort on your part to find a suitable viewing environment is warranted.
There are definitely shows and movies that got way too caught up in this darkness fad.
The night battle in Game of Thrones was absolutely too dark.
I am in full agreement.
They mastered it on a $20,000 display under ideal conditions and crafted the visuals so they could only be legible in that same environment on a screen that no regular person owns.
I don't think it should be necessary to watch in a pitch black room on a magic TV with perfect calibration.
But if you are watching movies like John Wick or Avatar or Star Wars, I think you owe it to yourself to find a darker space and watch it on your best display.
You will have a better experience and you will be more respectul of the artistic intent.
I create my photography on a highly calibrated 30 inch display in a modertately dark environment. And if I could invite all of you into my room to view my photos, I would. I can't tell you how difficult it is to know people are going to view my highly detailed work on phones. Many are going to have poorly calibrated screens with the wrong colors. Some people might be in the waiting room of a doctor's office with green fluorescent light contaminating their screen.
I love making art for people and I just want them to experience it as I crafted it. But I know that is logistically impossible and most people will view my images under less than ideal circumstances.
And while I'd never demand people change those circumstances just to see one of my photos, I do think it is worth the effort for some content.
I mean, if you are watching Andor on your smartphone next to a giant window, I feel like you are cheating yourself out of a truly unique and beautiful cinematic experience.
So... if you can manage it... meet these artists half way.
Wait until night or turn off a few lights and watch on your biggest screen.
Watch the Mormon wives and Mr. Beast next to the sunny window. They don't care.
But maybe save the cinematic shit for when you can watch it properly.
The thing about old people is that sometimes when they have no idea what to do, they need someone there to tell them what to do so they can ignore that and do something else instead. It's downright impressive how smoothly they go from a panicky "oh fuck what do I do what do I do I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to do now" to the world's most confident "hmm, no, I'm not going to do that."
i stepped on the scale today and it said “bat”
it took me a few seconds to realize it meant the battery was out, but before i realized that i just said “i am not a bat” out loud
First my sister, now relentless Tumblr ads. Stop telling me to find Jesus! Im Jewish! I don't care that you lost him again, that's your problem!
To this day,
"if she's your girl then why is her leitmotif part of my theme" "to highlight the tragedy of how she'll never love you back"
is one of the most brutal pieces of play banter that I've read on this website. One of those shitposts that keep coming back to you. Damn.
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
Normalize leaving unhinged comments on ao3 fics you like. I'm tired of being the only one brave enough to write "I am chewing on this fic" in the comment section. Be weird. Authors will love you for it
If I didn't want readers to chew on it, I wouldn't have spent all that time on the mouthfeel
As you know, you can make writers lives easier by doing unnecessary exposition scenes in real life, thereby making them realistic.
Thank you for making this post on the hip social media site that we frequent at this point in our lives. I'm reblogging it both because it's funny and because I consider us friends
Yes, in the early 21st century we often consider people we only interact with over social media as friends, even if we have never met them in real life. And that's why I have not only reblogged this post, but also liked it (by clicking a button with my mouse).
*taking notes* everyone in the 21st century keeps a pet mouse in the pocket of their button up
jessies girl is obviously about sublimated homosexual desire but stacys mom is sincere in its heterosexuality
The computer used to do something very basic & helpful and now it doesn't. I'm gonna complain
The computer used to do something very basic & helpful and now it doesn't. I'm gonna complain.
The computer used to do something very basic & helpful and now it doesn't. I'm gonna complain.
The computer used to do something very basic & helpful and now it doesn't. I'm gonna complain.
most common thought: damn haha im going to have to deal with that sooner or later
do you guys think jesus was hung
no i think he was crucified
"Your love language is what you were deprived of as a child" actually no you're allowed to want, prefer and like things without everything tracing back to some dormant unprocessed trauma. You can just say you want to bounce on it without having to explain how as a child you always wanted - but never got - a trampoline.
Neo-Tijuana series (2021) by Robbo Darko
I was exactly the right age at exactly the right transitional period in history to have been an unsupervised preteen on dial-up BBSes, Usenet, IRC, and first-generation web forums, more or less in that order, so all things considered I think I'm doing pretty well.
I had an email address before they had @ symbols in them.
What the hell does an email address without @ look like??
Depends on the platform, but the most common pre-@ variant used exclamation points rather than @ symbols, and also had the host and the recipient the other way 'round – for example, instead of "person@host", it would go "host!person". Since there was no universal Internet routing system back then, you'd often need to specify the full route to the recipient manually, resulting in addresses like "host1!host2!host3!person". Email addressing of this type was known as a "bang path", after the typesetters' slang of "bang" for an exclamation point.
(Fun trivia: since email addresses of this type were often used in university settings, the part before the exclamation point would most commonly be the name of a department, which often looked a bit like an adjective. This quirk of bang path routing has been fossilised in fandom culture in the practice of using "adjective!character" shorthand to describe AU versions of a particular character.)