Needed: One Clue Bat, Large
Dec. 5th, 2004 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuThe lovely and talented ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snippy and I have been watching Lost every Wednesday evening since it started. We've enjoyed the show, though we've often questioned some of the things the character have done (or more often, failed to do). But with a small dose of MST3K advice ("repeat to yourself 'it's just a show, I should really just relax!") we've enjoyed it.
But. (And you knew this was coming, didn't you?)
Somebody in charge of production for Lost needs a beating. A long and sincere beating with a great big clue bat. Every week we get a little more annoyed by the combination of shakey-cam camerawork and their habit of filming by candlelight in a coal mine at midnight. Clue: when your audience tends to be made dizzy or nauseous by the "camera in the hands of a twitchy meth addict" filming style, they get annoyed. When they can't tell what's happening even when the camera is relatively still because the scene is so damn dark, they get more annoyed.snippy asks, "Why did they go to all the trouble of inventing the steadi-cam only to have it used by shaky people?"
Verisimilitude has its place, of course. And that place would be a film purporting to be a real, amateur film of some important or interesting event captured as it happened. This is not that. This is a television show. We know it's a television show. And the cameraman is not a character, making use of a camera and 22 hours of videotape he happened to drag out of the baggage compartment after the crash, okay? The cameraman is a professional filming a professional tv show.
So act like it, you morons. Let the story jump around and provide us with thrills and chills. I just want the camera to show me what's happening without all the faux excitement that the shakey-cam supposedly adds. And a little light so we can see what the hell is happening wouldn't be bad, either.
Nor as we alone in feeling this way. I've seen a number of posts on alt.sf.tv complaining about the same thing. Catch a clue, Lost producers. Sometimes, as Steve Jackson* said, the first thing you need to do is shoot the Art Director.
I'm just sayin'.
*of Steve Jackson Games fame. He is known to be...intolerant of game books with too much emphasis on art and not enough on readability (and having suffered through my share of books that fall into this trap, I agree). If you can't read the title of the book from the other side of the game store, he says, you need to revamp the cover.
snippy and I have been watching Lost every Wednesday evening since it started. We've enjoyed the show, though we've often questioned some of the things the character have done (or more often, failed to do). But with a small dose of MST3K advice ("repeat to yourself 'it's just a show, I should really just relax!") we've enjoyed it.But. (And you knew this was coming, didn't you?)
Somebody in charge of production for Lost needs a beating. A long and sincere beating with a great big clue bat. Every week we get a little more annoyed by the combination of shakey-cam camerawork and their habit of filming by candlelight in a coal mine at midnight. Clue: when your audience tends to be made dizzy or nauseous by the "camera in the hands of a twitchy meth addict" filming style, they get annoyed. When they can't tell what's happening even when the camera is relatively still because the scene is so damn dark, they get more annoyed.
snippy asks, "Why did they go to all the trouble of inventing the steadi-cam only to have it used by shaky people?"Verisimilitude has its place, of course. And that place would be a film purporting to be a real, amateur film of some important or interesting event captured as it happened. This is not that. This is a television show. We know it's a television show. And the cameraman is not a character, making use of a camera and 22 hours of videotape he happened to drag out of the baggage compartment after the crash, okay? The cameraman is a professional filming a professional tv show.
So act like it, you morons. Let the story jump around and provide us with thrills and chills. I just want the camera to show me what's happening without all the faux excitement that the shakey-cam supposedly adds. And a little light so we can see what the hell is happening wouldn't be bad, either.
Nor as we alone in feeling this way. I've seen a number of posts on alt.sf.tv complaining about the same thing. Catch a clue, Lost producers. Sometimes, as Steve Jackson* said, the first thing you need to do is shoot the Art Director.
I'm just sayin'.
*of Steve Jackson Games fame. He is known to be...intolerant of game books with too much emphasis on art and not enough on readability (and having suffered through my share of books that fall into this trap, I agree). If you can't read the title of the book from the other side of the game store, he says, you need to revamp the cover.
