[kridsdale1]

In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously.

Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800.

Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.

This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos.

Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.

[phony-account]

> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible… > Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.

Let me introduce you to some film history:

https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...

[floren]

Any discussion about film should probably include a disclaimer like "what we say here doesn't necessarily apply to Kubrick because he was Kubrick"

[jauntywundrkind]

-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.

A focal plane mere inches thick!

Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!

But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.