Oh, god. I'd love to do more animated movies. But if we did a Menken/Ashman Disney flick, we all know how insufferable I'd be.

Aaaaaaand "Out There" is a worse title. Thoughts?

I think you'd definitely notice that.

Well, I just saw The Hobbit in 3D HFR. I have some thoughts, and I haven't seen the particular thoughts I have anywhere else so far, so perhaps they're even interesting.

No, I didn't hate it. Yes, I got a headache. More on those things in a minute.

Here's something that intrgued me: very early on, I noticed that (framerate shock aside) I was doing alright with it, but every now and then, a shot would happen where NOPE NOPE NOPE. A few minutes later, I thought I had noticed a trend. I had a theory. A half an hour later, I had confirmed it, and it held true for the rest of the movie.

It's not that HFR "doesn't work," for me. It's not even that HFR "doesn't work in action scenes." It's a very specific distinction. HFR doesn't work when panning. The grand Z-axis shots, or the calmer dolly shots, were fine. A little jarring for "never seen that before" reasons, but not fundamentally offensive to my brain. But panning, especially quick panning, is dizzying and awful.

And I think I even know why.

HFR does do one thing, and there doesn't seem to be much argument about it: it does make everything feel more grounded in reality. Most people hate it and reject it out of hand as being uncinematic, some people are into it, but at least we can all agree that it is much closer to the experience of being there. (Being there, in this case, means being on a set. Many have complained.)

And here's the thing: your brain does not pan. Your brain can walk forward in the world (by, uh, walking) and your brain can crane up (climbing stairs), but your brain has never in your life "panned." When sweeping your eyes across a vista, you don't - you can't - move your eyes at a constant rate across it and take in details as you smoothly wipe past. Your eyes dart across the panorama, microsaccading in little jolts, separating it from what would be a pan by condensing it into what your brain registers as still frames along the way.

This isn't such a problem at 24, because it's a bit... well, strobe-y. It may make you feel a touch queasy, but it's nothing we're not all used to by now. But in HFR, it's like spinning in a chair. (With your eyes glued perfectly forward.) It's a fundamentally wrong thing that your brain can't deal with. And it's kind of revolting.

And boy oh boy, does this effect ever worsen when the lenses get longer. The more zoomed in, the flatter the shot, ugh. You're just compounding it. Now you're spinning on a chair and looking through a toilet paper roll.

Many folks hate all of it, I don't. I actually rather liked large swaths of this framerate. Which should carry some weight here: I'm officially an intrigued apologist. I'm not dismissing anything, much less dismissing it out of hand, so take my full meaning: panning does not fucking work. Some folks might hate all of it, some folks might be okay with it, but regardless... no. No on the panning, guys.

When not panning, and not being too frenetic*, I actually kinda liked it. Eventually even stopped noticing it for minutes on end. (Especially in the giant rock monster fight. Possibly because of the artificial slow-mo feeling evoked by them being so huge.) I didn't have problems with the "lighting," as some have, or feeling like I was on the set. I felt like I was in the world, and a couple of times a setting was a bit too shabby for the format, but mostly it felt... like a play. Sort of. Didn't bug me.

However. And here's our asterisk.

* PETER YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A FUCKING DICK ABOUT IT AND FILL THE FIRST TEN MINUTES WITH NOTHING BUT BRAIN-MELTING ZOOMED-IN SWEEPING CAMERA MOVES.

Good god. Keep it on a tripod for a while, shit. It's an oft-repeated claim that the "ugh" feeling wears off a bit after the first ten minutes - I'm rather convinced it's not that you get used to it in ten minutes, I think it's just that about ten minutes in, the prologue ends, and everything fucking calms down for a second. Seriously. It's almost obnoxious the way the first ten minutes go. I guess it's subjective, and most of the world just subjectively disagrees with Pete, because a choice like that might otherwise be called "unflinching" or "confident" on his part. In this case, it's borderline... like I said. Obnoxious. Give us a second, bro.

And that leads me to my final point. It takes a Cameron to use the Hollywood machine as his personal RnD department and figure out stereo filmmaking, and it takes a Peter Jackson to flex nuts and make a thousand theaters release in an almost unprecedented format...

...but...

...as much as Peter Jackson was the nigh-perfect choice for LOTR (and even The Hobbit!), and as much as he is personally interested in high framerate filmmaking, Peter Jackson is not the right filmmaker to introduce it to the world. He's too prone to weirdo giant camera moves and high-speed rakethroughs of giant setpieces. He's too loud, in terms of blocking. Half of LOTR, and half of The Hobbit, are shots like that bit in The Matrix Reloaded where the camera soars through the cave in Zion over the rave. It's pretty much the same thing, in fact... with the notable (and un-ignorable) exception that while that camera move is happening, he'll whip pan left or some shit.

You're killing us, Pete.

So no. I don't hate HFR. I could see it working especially well for non-narrative formats (Cirque du Soleil, documentaries, concerts, etc.) and potentially even catching on for tripod movies. (Any tripod movie. Any movie where they use a goddamned tripod.) But for the above reasons, it may be quite a while before people natively accept it for any form of media wherein the camera is zoomed in and on a helicopter.

...

Oh, and I liked the movie. Sure it felt fluffy, but no more fluffy than the extended editions. The thing that was the most distracting was the fat dwarf, to be honest, and the spectrum of nose-sizes on display.

One last bit, and spoilers to follow.

The complaint that the fridge is nuked by all these elaborate terror-escape scenes wherein nobody dies interests me. I agree - but I think the fact that it's a problem rests entirely upon the choice to make the novel into three movies. It works both ways: on one hand, we're now a third of the way through the book - presumably before any characters who WILL eventually die have died - and, additionally, needing to stretch out the movie over such a thin slice of book requires lengthening battle scenes, thereby making them seem all the more unlikely to be survivable. Weird.

Anyway, I enjoyed the flick.

What an amazing video. Cool post!

I'm starting to think Paul is a superhero.

I've always thought Zarban is a supervillain.

Hee hee. I've had that complaint from two people so far (also, "qi.") The reasoning is that the above words aren't actually in the list of accepted Scrabble words in the American dictionary.

There's several UK/Commonwealth words that don't appear in the American one. Hence, thingy.

Wow. Thanks, man.

Seriously, Paul killed this. I wanna do a duet cover when I get back to LA.

Well, drag your ass to London. I thought all of England was like five miles square.

EDIT Google. Three hours and forty minutes. Sigh. Travel.

That Chevy's right by Ikea has at least one bartender who knows how to make a proper margarita. (Go traditional, not one of the specialty cocktails.)

I don't remember, but I like imagining that somehow the whole internet agreed to pretend like we did to see if we'd call them on it. Shh.

Well everything about that is just great.