"HBO has made a cottage industry of dimly-lit hourlong dramas—True Detective, Boardwalk Empire. And where HBO goes, other networks have followed, from basic cable (Better Call Saul) to streaming (Jessica Jones) to even networks: No show was as inky as Hannibal. So why, exactly, has this happened?...
Over the ensuing years, as The Sopranos succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, that very specific visual callback to a thematically similar film sometimes got conflated with the relatively new idea of “prestige television” in much the same way as the show’s antihero did. “I kept hearing, you know, make it darker, make it darker, make it darker,” said cinematographer Manuel Billeter about his work on Jonathan Nolan’s Person of Interest, which premiered in 2011. (Billeter also shot the very dark Jessica Jones.) “They wanted it to look more noir, to look more stylized. I started playing a lot of scenes in silhouette, with no light at all on the actors and just light in the backgrounds.”...
But one problem with the wave of technological change that has made dark lighting easy and cheap for filmmakers is that it doesn’t translate to all television sets. Old televisions did a better job of rendering dark colors than modern ones. Detail that’s visible on an expensive television disappears on a cheap one, and suddenly Game of Thrones is indecipherable. The same is true when a television is viewed in a brightly-lit room or from an angle"
Related: TV hair all looks the same
No comments:
Post a Comment