I don't expect a lot from a film like the Expendables 2 - minimal story to hang the action scenes on, passable acting to get from one set piece to another, etc - as long as the action is creative and exciting.
What I do expect from it - and from just about any mainstream, high-budget theatrical release - is solid production and post work. There's no reason any movie with that budget shouldn't look as good as is technically possible. Expendables 2 fell unbelievably short of that mark... it was like they hired someone to shoot it who'd never worked with a digital camera before, and/or the post guys just didn't care what they were doing to the image.
There'd be a shot that was incredibly sharp and clean, with no noise visible in the frame. Then they'd cut to a shot where the noise was crawling all over the screen. Then they'd have a shot where there was noise, but it was very fine-grained and 'film-like', followed by a shot where it looked like they'd run a bad noise-reduction filter and the noise was large and clumpy. Then they'd have a shot where there was noise in the background and shadows, but the actor looked super-clean, almost plasticky, as if they'd only run the noise reduction on their face.
There were quite a few shots that clearly used a 360 degree shutter, so the motion suddenly looked like video for a shot or two. There were also shots that were obviously zoomed digitally in post as they were softer overall than other shots - puzzling because the composition on these shots was often pretty bad so it certainly wasn't cropped to improve the composition. There were even shots where I could clearly see compression artifacts in parts of the frame, or an overall sense of 'blockiness' to the image, as if they were working with DCT-based compression like jpeg/mpeg. I suppose some of that could be a result of the compression for the distribution file, but I wouldn't expect it to be visible only on certain shots like that, I haven't noticed it on other films I've seen projected digitally, and it isn't characteristic of wavlet-based codecs like the JPEG2000 compression used for DCDMs.
All of that stuff could have been simply bad technical decisions, but there was one scene that didn't have that excuse. It's just a dialogue scene between Stallone and Liam Hemsworth. It just cuts back and forth between medium shots of the two of them - Hemsworth is in sharp focus, Stallone is out of focus, throughout the entire scene. At first I thought it was more bad post work - that they'd tried to smooth out the wrinkles on Stallone's face and overdone it - but then at the end of the scene Stallone stood up and stepped into focus for about half a second. They'd missed the focus mark by a foot or so on a long dialogue scene with a static camera and actor.
I just don't get it... I'd personally be embarrassed to release a film that visually sloppy on any budget, but I don't see how it happens on a $100 million budget. How many people along the way must have signed off on this stuff without either noticing or caring how bad it looked?
What I do expect from it - and from just about any mainstream, high-budget theatrical release - is solid production and post work. There's no reason any movie with that budget shouldn't look as good as is technically possible. Expendables 2 fell unbelievably short of that mark... it was like they hired someone to shoot it who'd never worked with a digital camera before, and/or the post guys just didn't care what they were doing to the image.
There'd be a shot that was incredibly sharp and clean, with no noise visible in the frame. Then they'd cut to a shot where the noise was crawling all over the screen. Then they'd have a shot where there was noise, but it was very fine-grained and 'film-like', followed by a shot where it looked like they'd run a bad noise-reduction filter and the noise was large and clumpy. Then they'd have a shot where there was noise in the background and shadows, but the actor looked super-clean, almost plasticky, as if they'd only run the noise reduction on their face.
There were quite a few shots that clearly used a 360 degree shutter, so the motion suddenly looked like video for a shot or two. There were also shots that were obviously zoomed digitally in post as they were softer overall than other shots - puzzling because the composition on these shots was often pretty bad so it certainly wasn't cropped to improve the composition. There were even shots where I could clearly see compression artifacts in parts of the frame, or an overall sense of 'blockiness' to the image, as if they were working with DCT-based compression like jpeg/mpeg. I suppose some of that could be a result of the compression for the distribution file, but I wouldn't expect it to be visible only on certain shots like that, I haven't noticed it on other films I've seen projected digitally, and it isn't characteristic of wavlet-based codecs like the JPEG2000 compression used for DCDMs.
All of that stuff could have been simply bad technical decisions, but there was one scene that didn't have that excuse. It's just a dialogue scene between Stallone and Liam Hemsworth. It just cuts back and forth between medium shots of the two of them - Hemsworth is in sharp focus, Stallone is out of focus, throughout the entire scene. At first I thought it was more bad post work - that they'd tried to smooth out the wrinkles on Stallone's face and overdone it - but then at the end of the scene Stallone stood up and stepped into focus for about half a second. They'd missed the focus mark by a foot or so on a long dialogue scene with a static camera and actor.
I just don't get it... I'd personally be embarrassed to release a film that visually sloppy on any budget, but I don't see how it happens on a $100 million budget. How many people along the way must have signed off on this stuff without either noticing or caring how bad it looked?
