Recent comments in /f/television

Interesting-Turn9046 t1_j9a5d70 wrote

Reply to comment by draxenato in Which people in the TV world (real or fictional) would you classify as a genius? by unitedfan6191

>I myself was an audience member pulled up on stage during one of his tours. I've seen him at work literally inches away from me.

I never said his stage shows were staged, they are all legit 'magic'. I said his TV shows were staged. The ones where he makes someone believe they are in a zombie apocalypse, like, come on... I've also spoken to people involved in making those shows who corroborated that the people on it were aspiring actors. They never actually said it was staged, but they sent links to the actors pages online.

Derren Brown is basically just a normal illusionist / magician who made an incredibly powerful brand / patter. He will do a normal force to get you to pick a card but then convinces the audience that the reason you picked the card is that he set up a street food vendor outside your apartment building 3 months ago called 'the 3 of clubs' or something and has actually personally served you 12 times hypnotising you each time without you knowing. It is all nonsense, he is just using slight of hand, forces, props etc. like every stage magician for the past 100 years. He has just managed to convince the layman that he is doing it all through things like 'the power of suggestion' etc. which to his credit is a fucking great brand to build and has made him a lot of money. But it is all nonsense, the whole 'power of suggestion' shtick only works if you are manipulating people for months or years, it doesn't work over an afternoon.

Let's put it this way, there is a 0% chance that Derren will ever get a stage trick wrong. That is because it is all traditional magic, he knows he can't get it wrong because he is using props and or slight of hand to make sure he always gets it right. The man would never risk a trick going wrong because the person in the audience sneezed when they walked past the giraffe statue in the lobby and didn't see it ruining his psychological re programming. If that happens a handful of times, his career is over and having read up on the psychology he attributes to his tricks, there is no way he is actually doing it that way, it is FAR to risky for him

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anasui1 t1_j9a053y wrote

Reply to is sopranos still popular?? by Water8ucket

well, there exist many people, even foreign, outside of the ones we talk with. Some of them probably watch it and use IMDB, wild guess I know

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draxenato t1_j99xzk2 wrote

Reply to comment by Interesting-Turn9046 in Which people in the TV world (real or fictional) would you classify as a genius? by unitedfan6191

That's the thing, they're *not* staged. I worked in broadcast television in the UK a while back, and I know people who've worked on his shows, they're not staged.

I myself was an audience member pulled up on stage during one of his tours. I've seen him at work literally inches away from me.

Many years ago I found a video "while sailing the salty seas of the internet". It was a semi-private video (ie not intended for retail) made by the Magic Circle. It was a 3 hour lecture by Derren Brown to the Magic Circle where he demonstrated all his then current material, looked to have been filmed in the early 2000s. He explained everything to a room full of his peers and experts, who were just a few feet away from him, there was no chance of deception and that was the point of the lecture. He used to give similar explanations to his audience in his earlier stage shows, he's open about what he does and how he does it.

He's just very very smart with an incredibly disciplined memory.

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apescaper t1_j99tgfw wrote

Reply to Why is it that a lot of TV shows these days have really poor sound mixing by StarChild413

https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/

some quotes:

""There are a number of root causes," says Mark Mangini, the Academy Award-winning sound designer behind films like "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "Blade Runner 2049." "It's really a gumbo, an accumulation of problems that have been exacerbated over the last 10 years ... that's kind of this time span where all of us in the filmmaking community are noticing that dialogue is harder and harder to understand."

"Mangini says that in the old days, "you could count on an actor's theatricality to deliver a line to the back seats." But acting styles have changed so dramatically over the years that it has become much more difficult to capture great sound on the set. When actors adopt that more naturalistic style, "it's even harder for the production sound mixer to capture really quality sound. Now we get those compromised microphone positions here in post-production, reaching for a dialogue line that is barely intelligible or maybe even mumbled because it's an acting style, and already, we're behind the 8-ball in trying to figure out a way to make all of those words intelligible."

"What we see from our brothers and sisters in production is a never-ending [complaint] that they don't get the respect they need to get the microphone where it needs to be to capture the sound clearly," Mangini says. "That's because as movies have matured in the last 15 years, movies have become more visually exciting. And because of that, it is less likely that you're going to be allowed to put that boom mic right where the actor is, because it's probably going to drop a shadow because it's in front of a light that the camera team insists has to exist to get the perfect look of the shot. So [the visuals have] taken precedence over what we hear."

https://www.slashfilm.com/577777/christopher-nolan-sound-mixing/

Specifically speaking about the sound design of Interstellar, Nolan said, "We got a lot of complaints. I actually got calls from other filmmakers who would say, 'I just saw your film, and the dialogue is inaudible.' Some people thought maybe the music's too loud, but the truth was it was kind of the whole enchilada of how we had chosen to mix it."

Nolan has spoken about this topic in the past, but here he is once again confirming that he is well-aware how his movies sound, and yes, he's making them sound that way on purpose.

"It was a very, very radical mix," he went on. "I was a little shocked to realize how conservative people are when it comes to sound. Because you can make a film that looks like anything, you can shoot on your iPhone, no one's going to complain. But if you mix the sound a certain way, or if you use certain sub-frequencies, people get up in arms."

Its not a singular issue, it affects both tv and movies.

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