Posted by Lee Mellows on 10/22/06 23:10

Jesus! What the fuck happened?
Congratulations to the beeb on producing the worst-looking show on TV! Did
no-one see the rushes? Why are all the shots so smeary? At some point
someone made a decision to go with some new filming technology that
obviously went horribly wrong. So why didn't they stop? The preview for next
weeks show looks no better. Was the whole series shot like this? Surely
someone must have noticed that something was going very wrong with this
show.
I was really, really looking forward to this programme, but it's almost
unwatchable, the bizarre visual quality completely ruins the drama, utterly
takes you out of the situation.
I thought it looked odd on the previews, but I presumed that someone had
been mucking about with the speed to give it that effect, but no, the show
it self did actually look that bad. It makes it look as though it was shot
on 30 year old cameras under low light conditions onto 1" stock.
It's not an entirely new phenomenon either. Did anyone watch 'Blackbeard'?
That looked fine while they were on board ship, but any time they cut to one
of the Governor's mansions the picture went all smeary and the black levels
became lifted, flattening the picture. Bizarrely , the same thing happened
in the last episode of 'Extras'. When Jonathan Ross popped into Andy
Millman's Dressing room, there it went again, smeary motion, flattened
contrast etc. for three shots. The rest of the show looked fine, but that
moment was really jarring.

God I hope this doesn't become the norm.

[Back to original message]