> The surprising thing is not that in the silent era Japanese audiences opted to watch films with live human mediation. What is strange is that no other countries — apart from Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, all then under Japanese influence — adopted such an excellent and fun idea.
Since these performances are noted as including ad-lib commentary and anachronistic (to the film) references, seems like MST3K is pretty close, though they comment over talkies.
I've found BigScreen (https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software) to be a fairly compelling killer app case for VR. Besides being able to trick your eyes into thinking they're in a movie theater, the social elements are great. On a weekly cadence I jump into a shared room with 6+ of my friends and we pick a bad movie to watch together as we MST3k it. There's something about positional audio when talking with someone that makes it easier to replicate the experience of hanging out in person versus a video meet.
We've been doing this since the pandemic started and it's the #1 way I stay in touch with a bunch of friends now. It's also ruined real life movie theaters for me since I'm used to being able to talk with friends while watching. We'll actively wait for a movie to hit streaming before "seeing it in the theaters" with each other.
All of this was already possible with the Quest 2, but I'm interested to see how the quest 3 can further make those hangouts feel even closer to the real thing. Dunno if it will be a big enough leap for everyone to jump from the 2 to the 3, but if the visuals comes through sharper, or the sound is better, or the controller is easier to hold for 2 hours - any of those things would be a win.
Fake, refined, optimized, or over-produced.. it's all the same thing really.
With television, there are[were] a limited number of channels. Airtime was a scarce resource, and making a TV show cost money so the companies funding it wanted to make sure they got the best bang for their buck. So they had lots of experts tweaking every show to make sure it was juuust right. Little if anything was truly off-the-cusp. Seemingly impromptu conversations on talk shows are scripted and rehearsed. Too much money on the line for anything more casual. When less money is on the line, fewer people are involved and everything can be a lot more casual. Public access television is cruder but feels more authentic. Low budget art films can experiment more than big budget movies. The production of MST3K was casual and crude when it was on public access, but became serious business when they moved to Comedy Central.
A similar dynamic is in play on youtube. When a channel is just some rando uploading videos with little investment and little expectation of financial return, the content is generally cruder and quirkier. When a channel is run by a major corporation with lots of money on the line, lots of people involved in it, and high expectations for the reception, then everything is taken more seriously. Professional cameras, professional lighting, professional editing. It feels more like television because it is more like television.
This same overproduced aesthetic doesn't only come from corporations though; I think the dynamic is in play whenever the content producer has high expectations or aspirations. An individual creator working alone who has aspirations of becoming an "influencer" will put more effort into their content than somebody who has no expectations or aspirations for their content. Their content will become overproduced as a consequence of their lofty aspirations. Maybe tiktok inspires or nurtures these lofty aspirations more than youtube did in the early years.
Hacker Cinema
3 comments on Hacker News
> The surprising thing is not that in the silent era Japanese audiences opted to watch films with live human mediation. What is strange is that no other countries — apart from Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, all then under Japanese influence — adopted such an excellent and fun idea.
Since these performances are noted as including ad-lib commentary and anachronistic (to the film) references, seems like MST3K is pretty close, though they comment over talkies.
I've found BigScreen (https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software) to be a fairly compelling killer app case for VR. Besides being able to trick your eyes into thinking they're in a movie theater, the social elements are great. On a weekly cadence I jump into a shared room with 6+ of my friends and we pick a bad movie to watch together as we MST3k it. There's something about positional audio when talking with someone that makes it easier to replicate the experience of hanging out in person versus a video meet.
We've been doing this since the pandemic started and it's the #1 way I stay in touch with a bunch of friends now. It's also ruined real life movie theaters for me since I'm used to being able to talk with friends while watching. We'll actively wait for a movie to hit streaming before "seeing it in the theaters" with each other.
All of this was already possible with the Quest 2, but I'm interested to see how the quest 3 can further make those hangouts feel even closer to the real thing. Dunno if it will be a big enough leap for everyone to jump from the 2 to the 3, but if the visuals comes through sharper, or the sound is better, or the controller is easier to hold for 2 hours - any of those things would be a win.
Fake, refined, optimized, or over-produced.. it's all the same thing really.
With television, there are[were] a limited number of channels. Airtime was a scarce resource, and making a TV show cost money so the companies funding it wanted to make sure they got the best bang for their buck. So they had lots of experts tweaking every show to make sure it was juuust right. Little if anything was truly off-the-cusp. Seemingly impromptu conversations on talk shows are scripted and rehearsed. Too much money on the line for anything more casual. When less money is on the line, fewer people are involved and everything can be a lot more casual. Public access television is cruder but feels more authentic. Low budget art films can experiment more than big budget movies. The production of MST3K was casual and crude when it was on public access, but became serious business when they moved to Comedy Central.
A similar dynamic is in play on youtube. When a channel is just some rando uploading videos with little investment and little expectation of financial return, the content is generally cruder and quirkier. When a channel is run by a major corporation with lots of money on the line, lots of people involved in it, and high expectations for the reception, then everything is taken more seriously. Professional cameras, professional lighting, professional editing. It feels more like television because it is more like television.
This same overproduced aesthetic doesn't only come from corporations though; I think the dynamic is in play whenever the content producer has high expectations or aspirations. An individual creator working alone who has aspirations of becoming an "influencer" will put more effort into their content than somebody who has no expectations or aspirations for their content. Their content will become overproduced as a consequence of their lofty aspirations. Maybe tiktok inspires or nurtures these lofty aspirations more than youtube did in the early years.