Thank you for sharing this - it reminds of the film adaption of "The Peasants" novel which uses a painted animation technique made up of thousands and thousands of paintings. Quite literally, nearly "Every Frame [is] a Painting".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peasants_(2023_film)#Produ...

Such a great channel. I think it's fully retired now (again?).

https://youtube.com/@everyframeapainting

I really appreciate the still images at the end of the Mandalorian episodes. I'm not sure if they were used for set design or created afterward, but they are really stunning and gives you more time to appreciate the world building, costumes, and creativity that goes into production.

Also a huge fan of that channel. I think he came back recently to do some more episodes. There's a new channel I found that offers similar reflections upon cinema - willbryanfilms - definitely worth checking out!

> I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics.

I think an art director would describe them as "readable". When there's a lot of detail and quick motion, it's important that the audience can very quickly recognize what they're looking at and what's happen. Otherwise, it just turns into a big jumble of chaos that the viewer can't follow, like in Michael Bay's Transformer movies.

A big part of the art of movie making is telegraphic a sense of rich realism and complexity while still having everything clearly visually parsable. Doing that when cuts and action are fast is quite difficult.

Doing it well affects every level of the production: the colors assigned to characters so they are separated from the background, wardrobe choices to also keep characters distinct, lighting, set design, texture, animation, focus, the way the camera moves. It all works together to produce one coherent readable scene.

Like the best special effects ever - if it's done right the audience doesn't even really realize it happened.

We are "just fine" with blurry details, on some level... but a lot of processing a movie holistically comes from that level of detail being present. Even if few people walking out of the theater could put their finger on why the world felt vibrant, it'll come down to the fact those details were there.

So much of movie making is like that. No normal person comes out of a theater saying "wow, the color grading on that movie really helped the drive the main themes along, I particularly appreciated the way it was used to amplify the alienation the main character felt at being betrayed by his life-long friend, and the lighting in that scene really sent that point home". That's all film nerd stuff. But it's the lighting, the color grading, the camera shots, all this subtle stuff that the casual consumer will never cite as their reason for liking or disliking the movie that results in the feelings that were experienced.

They aren't necessary. People still connect with the original Snow White, and while it may have been an absolute technical breakthrough masterstroke for the time, by modern standards it is simple. But used well the details we can muster for a modern production can still go into the general tone of the film; compare the two next to each other while looking for this effect and you may be able to "feel" what I'm talking about.

We were fine watching movies on VHS tapes and small CRT TVs, but watching a high-quality encoding on a 4k TV is much better.