Trends in Hollywood Filmmaking

By Christina Kotlar (doddleNEWS)

Trends come and go. Trendsetters start or follow (early on) fads or technology trends before most other people, starting cultural trends, developing any form of behavior among a large population, lasting longer then ten years. Trends in films and filmmaking have come and gone, thank goodness, but there are some that have become increasingly disturbing and in many cases downright annoying.

One of the most prevalent that I find happening more often than not, is the poor audio quality as well as the mediocrity in music production. There doesn?t seem to be a conscious effort in getting a good music composer for the film. Along with the current trends in only hearing the downbeat in music, the compression of MP3 downloads has diminished an audience?s ability to differentiate between good and poor quality music, because all it is doing is blasting with the volume set on high. Very annoying.

Checking out a listing on cracked.com, I agree with their 5 annoying trends that make movies look the same over and over, again ? #5 Movies are color-coded by genre. I thought about it and found, not to my surprise, how easy it had been for me to peg films I saw at screenings into their respective genres through the colorization processes. The patterns were remarkably on the nose: horror movies should be blue; apocalyptic movies are drab gray; movies set in the desert are so yellow, I get hot and jaundiced just watching them; skewed reality are a green tinge (think The Matrix and all the copycat movies since then).

This is where directors use color as a low budget way to create atmosphere without having to write a good script or hiring competent actors. Just as traditional artists used color to depict various emotions and ideas, a clever way for evoking emotion from their viewers, film directors look for color correction as a short cut. This leads to #4 Everything else is teal and orange. Check out a color wheel and compare to the recent promotional movie posters. There?s no mistake. Color correction is left up to the directors and editors who have little time to spend properly on their film projects. As the deadline looms, so does the two-color decision.

#3 Ramping or everything slows down and then speeds up. Speeding up and using slo-mo effects, that?s so overused and watching the bad guy get killed at agonizing lengths of time ? I can go to the bathroom and back before its over ? and anything with the shaky cam thing always gives me a headache. (Again, copied since The Matrix; shaky cam: Saving Private Ryan.)

#2 Faking the documentary look, even when it?s not a documentary, such as being so up close and personal when there?s no way in hell that?s possible. Things that land on the camera lens, water drops, blood and guts, which obscure the view from the lens, and is not exciting in the least. I?m amazed at the number of lens flares showing up in more films (thanks, JJ Abrams) when a lens flare was always something taught to avoid as the light hits the lens and hides part of the shot. While the idea behind this is too make things look accidental as if a little reality creeps in, all it really says to me is sloppiness

Finally, #1 3D that somehow makes a movie look worse. It?s happening in many more instances and the audience is paying top dollar to watch a crappy production. Some movies should not be promoted as 3D, because they were not shot in 3D, but later converted to 3D. When all is said and done, that conversion to 3D does not give the illusion of depth, but, actually degrades the entire image, darkening it. Wearing the 3D glasses is annoying enough as it is, but watching a dark, murky film for almost two hours gives me another headache especially after spending an extra 50% markup on the ticket.

Trends, a science fiction short story, written by Isaac Asimov in 1939, on behalf of an academic writing, is about social resistance to technological change. There is a moral to the story citing that technological trends will be blasted by a society that resists new trends. It doesn?t seem to be happening here as Hollywood is raking it in at the box office with mediocrity and just plain bad, lazy short cuts in studio film productions. It?s time for movie goers to just say no.

(Hat tip:?cracked.com)

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