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steve_egg
Reviews
The Terminal List (2022)
HDR? Really? Dark, flat, desaturated image with poor and lazy lighting
I am halfway through the season and, wow, this is incredibly difficult to watch as the lighting is atrocious. I have been hoping/waiting for that 'Wizard of Oz' moment (where it goes from Black and White to Color), but, no, this is a dark, dim, rear lit, desaturated mess 99% of the time.
For example: pretty much every indoor scene is back lit by practical table lamps - even office environments. No key lighting is used except for maybe some bouncing, so the faces of the actors are largely in the dark. I get it with HDR that the desire is to make highlights 'pop' by having bright lights in the background, but, for goodness sake, you need to light the talent!
My eyes were straining to see what the characters were supposedly looking at on set - why on earth would you depict characters reading documents or studying plans in dimly lit rooms? What is the point of that? There are scenes of meetings held in offices where the characters are reading paper documents yet there is no, or very restricted, overhead lighting.
Outdoor scenes were also almost entirely back lit and, to make matters worse, the color was desaturated to the point that everything was just a flat, grey mess. There was no richness to the outdoor scenes; the sky would generally be a grey tone; and there was little clarity... Why? I mean, WTF, why???
The only 'positive' that one can say about the lighting is that it was in the most part consistent - just a shame that it was consistently bad.
HDR is supposed to increase contrast and provide brighter highlights, but the production of The Terminal List seems to indicate that 'HDR' is being used as a marketing gimmick only. This is not HDR, it is very poor SDR marketed as HDR.
TLDR; crap lighting as a result of an extremely lazy/cheap production.
Breaking Infinity (2023)
Junk movie with equally junk overly positive reviews
Firstly, do not believe the 10/10 or 9/10 reviews for this movie: it is a low-budget, poorly-acted, and directed, movie with low-quality props that were supposed to give the illusion of a new and radical method to travel through time.
There is no chemistry between the two main characters (Liam and Emma): they come across as unsuited to each other and one questions why Zoe Cunningham was cast in the female protagonist lead role to begin with - oh, wait, she was one of the producers, that must explain it...
Apart from the laughably poor 'acting' by Zoe Cunningham, it was the prop used to represent the control panel for the incredible 'time machine': what looked like a Betamax A/B offline editor with only the power chord plugged into it despite it being easily discernable that the 'control panel' had numerous inputs and outputs that were simply going unused. How did the control panel actually control anything? Maybe this was one of the 'sci-fi' elements the director and producers wished to get across - machinery that operates entirely wirelessly even though the Garret character had to refer to his analogue wristwatch to time events... laughable at best.
And the Garret character themselves: every sentence ended with 'mate'. Every sentence! Now, I am Australian and we do use the word 'mate' a lot, but even we do not finish every utterance with 'mate'.
The movie is a joke and not worth your valuable time. The only grace was that Jonny Phillips who played 'Carter' looked like he knew what he was doing even if that character was pretty stereotypical.