Hacker Cinema
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2016 · Film · 113 min
Directed by Ang Lee
19-year-old Billy Lynn is brought home for a victory tour after a harrowing Iraq battle. Through flashbacks the film shows what really happened to his squad – contrasting the realities of war with America's perceptions.
3 negative3 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
> I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps
I think Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk? Although I'm not sure if you can actually watch it at 120fps.
"Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" was shot at 120fps and displayed in cinema and at home on 120fps or 60fps.
This is a drama film. Both critics and viewers hated the look of it.
Marvel comic book films should def be shot at 60/120 though. Why haven't anyone tried this with audiences?
Not that I'm aware of. The only high FPS movie I know of is Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ang Lee, it is shot at 120fps. The Hobbit is shot at 48fps.
As a movie nerd I was interested by the bit about the broadcast being in 120hz. This is... unusual for most visual content.
Where video games strictly benefit from a higher framerate, adding more frames does weird things to movies and television. As you may know, most movies are shot at 24 frames per second, which is low considering humans can see far more fps than that.
This lower FPS means movies are actually impressionist paintings of reality. The framerate blurs what is being filmed so it looks less like a set and more like what we've been trained to think of as a movie.
Movies that experiment with high framerate like Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (120 fps) find it makes selling the fiction harder. Viewers can see the cracks in everything a lot easier. This is one reason people disliked Peter Jackson's 48 FPS version of The Hobbit. Instead of seeing a group of dwarves, high frame rates made them look like a bunch of guys in funny costumes.
All this is to say it's interesting they are making high frame rate a part of their video future when its future within movies and TV is undecided.
James Cameron ("Avatar", "Titanic", etc.) used to argue that high frame rate was more important than higher resolution. If you're not in the first few rows of the theater, he once pointed out, you can't tell if it's 4K anyway. Everyone in the theater benefits from high frame rate. This may be less of an issue now that more people are watching on high-resolution screens at short range.
Cameron likes long pans over beautifully detailed backgrounds. Those will produce annoying strobing at 24FPS if the pan rate is faster than about 7 seconds for a frame width. Staying down to that rate makes a scene drag.
Now, Cameron wants to go to 4K resolution and 120FPS.[1] Cameron can probably handle that well; he's produced most of the 3D films that don't suck. He's going to give us a really nice visual tour of the Avatar world. For other films, that may not help. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" was recorded in 3D, 4K resolution and 120FPS. Reviews were terrible, because it's 1) far too much resolution for close-ups, and 2) too much realism for war scenes. Close-ups are a problem - do you really want to see people's faces at a level of detail useful only to a dermatologist? It also means prop and costume quality has to improve.
The other issue with all this resolution is that it's incompatible with the trend towards shorter shot lengths. There are action films with an average shot length below 1 second. For music videos, that's considered slow; many of those are around 600ms per shot.[2] They're just trying to leave an impression, not show details.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2016/10/31/13479322/james-cameron-avatar-3d-4k-hdr [2] http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php?sort=asl
60fps is not yet good. The Hobbit at 48fps did not look as good as 24fps and Billy Lynn's long Halftime Walk at 120fps 3D was one of the worst looking films I've ever seen.
I do believe someone will crack this nut (as Cameron did with 3D). But it's going to take the right project and very creative filmmaking techniques. Personally, I think the first one that works will be a sci-fi in a sterile setting, so the HFR will work with the narrative, not be a distraction.
HFR and 8k require rewriting the rules of set design, makeup, lighting and post-production for non-documentary work as they expose the artificiality of fictional narrative. Rather than feeling like you're in the movie, you feel like you're on the set, seeing all the fake backdrops, cables, and acne. HD (and 4k) had similar issues, but not to the extent that HFR and 8k does. Although both HFR and high resolutions do work extremely well for sports and nature documentaries where suspension of disbelief is unnecessary, at the moment both are worse for narrative filmmaking using current techniques.
The Hobbit (shot 48fps 5k 3D)had mixed results using HFR. The scenes shot on location with less CGI looked awful (like low budget early 80s BBC mid day dramas) while the green-screen, heavy CG scenes felt like being in a video game (in mostly a good way). Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (shot at 120fps 4k 3D) looked absolutely horrible, like early HDCam home movies. It was impossible to get swept up into the movie and made an ok script and good acting feel much worse than it actually was.
I do believe someone will crack the code on HFR, but it will first require the right source material (The Hobbit and Billy Lynn's Long Walk Home were not it). I suggest utopian sci-fi or something set in a sterile environment. But even beyond that they have to figure out the lighting, makeup and set-design (and the extra burden HFR and 8k puts on post-production, especially for CGI/VFX).
One element that actually helps make a film feel cinematic is a slight softness to the image. The best looking digital cinema uses on camera filters and/or post-process to help achieve this look that comes naturally from film shot at 24fps.
Younger audiences who've grown up on HD and HFR video games are less bothered by the differences, but audiences usually don't really know what they want until they see it (one reason that early audience feedback is poison to the process).
background note: 20years experience working in production and post-production