Do you like commercials from the 50's, 60's or from today?
Submitted by Mets82 on Mon, 12/31/2007 - 04:31.
The subject says it all. What do you think? I think I could like commercials from the past as well as today. I think I would like the nostaglia of the past but I like today's commercials too.
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Do I have to choose?
Personally I only like commercials from '76 to '84 when I was producing them...
Just kidding. I appreciate every era. And as a former producer, one of the things I find interesting is the way people approached similar problems and goals with the technology and equipment available at the time.
Right, such as the late nineties trend of doing DV handheld storytelling as the technology suddenly was good enough for that. Colorists hated it though and everything looked oversaturated or blue on TV for a while. In Holland at least. Filmed commercials were such a blissful break at the time.
Exactly. Fortunately for me, by the time DV came along I was working with films that would never have been shot in any video format no matter how advanced. And I've actually never done anything in DV. I did have a "making of" piece shot in HDV though, and I've been considering HD for a Television project but I'm worried that my late father will start rolling over in his grave.
DV is not the right solution for everything, obviously. I had an ad scripted that would use a nice long slow zoom-out to tell the story, but the budget called for DV (AAARGH!) so in the end we shot the scene from all sorts of close-up angles and edited that together before the full scene (which revealed the funny/punchline.) Didn't work out too bad really, I was just keen on a zoom-out. Too keen, perhaps.
I have these discussions with people all the time. I have a hard time convincing tech-heads that 35mm film or better yet 65mm film still has no rival. But the proof is in the pudding. I'm just not at the point where I see the beauty in Hi Def.
In the end it depends on the story you want to tell which is the best tool to use.
I guess maybe I half agree with that. The old school filmmaker in me wants to say that unless you're making something like Blair Witch, motion picture film is always better. It just looks better. I'm not saying that digital technology won't eventually pull even. And it gets closer all the time. But there's still a huge leap from HD to Film, and the only people I know who don't really believe that either work for SONY or Panasonic, or they were born after 1980. Anyone else who makes that claim is making it for budgetary reasons.
I agree. I can't imagine anyone saying "please let me shoot this in DV," or any video format. And although I suppose there might be some instance where it would lend itself to the creative style established for the ad, like the ad is shot through the lens of a family on their summer vacation, I can't imagine telling the client that it's just better if we shoot this on video.
There is a professional photographer who was taking digital photos of Canadian Forces infantry combat gear for something - I don't recall for what exactly. Anyway, the gear always appeared burry in the digital shots, and he couldn't figure out why. As it turned out, he could only get good clear photos of the combat gear using film.
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