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Mudface

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Posts posted by Mudface

    US band Tournament - 1st Round - Nine Inch Nails vs The Crickets

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    7 minutes ago, Pidge said:

    I mean Reznor's a genius as well, but outgunned on this one, for me.

    True, but I'd rather listen to NIN than the Crickets. They're obviously very important, even vital to what came after them, but to me it's similar to wanting to play The Witcher 3 over Pacman or watch The Big Short over Citizen Kane (just plucking random examples out of the air there). 

     

    Now, the Crickets vs Motley Crue? No contest there...

    US Band Tournament - 1st Round - REM vs Pixies

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    17 minutes ago, mgw100 said:

    Spot on. I fucking love Come on Pilgrim. It's small and perfectly formed

     

     

    Great way to start the day. Holiday Song, Nimrod's Son and particularly Levitate Me are superb on that too.

     

    The dross that's gone through instead of them, it's like Liverpool drawing Notts Forest in the first round of the '79 European Cup while Grasshopper and Bohemians go through.

    • Upvote 1

    US Band Tournament - 1st Round - REM vs Pixies

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    8 hours ago, Nummer Neunzehn said:

    Genuinely never heard of the( cunts)m. What are their best songs?

     

    7 hours ago, mgw100 said:

    There's quite a few youtube clips on this thread. If you were to listen to either Surfer Rosa or Doolittle albums, you would get a pretty good idea of whether you like them. 

     

    6 hours ago, General Dryness said:

    Doolittle is the best album, but yeah like mgw said Surfer Rosa is also essential listening.

     

    The musical complexion of today would be very different without their influence IMHO.

     

    I prefer Surfer Rosa these days, but they're both fantastic. If you do fancy listening to them, then probably go with Doolittle first as it's more accessible. Of their other albums, Come On Pilgrim is good, but more of a 'sighter' (it's an EP really). Bossanova was a bit of a disappointment, but only in comparison to Doolittle, it's still got some great songs on it. Tromple le Monde was patchy and was a sign of them burning out- they'd released 4 albums in barely 3 1/2 years by then and toured constantly, particularly in Europe.

    • Upvote 1

    Rate the last film you watched...

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    Not sure if this belongs in here, the 'rant' thread or the little things that annoy the shit of you... The last series of True Detective was terrible for muddy dialogue as were several BBC series recently- Scrooge in particular was impossible to make out for large parts of the first episode.

     

    Watching films at home you can occasionally understand that they couldn't possibly test on all possible sound systems, but it's inexcusable not to be able to hear dialogue for TV series and in the cinema. Nolan has past form for this with Interstellar- where he apparently actually said he wanted parts of the film to be unintelligible, which is ridiculously arrogant. Bane in the Dark Knight Rises was also a real chore at times, but then Tom Hardy speaks like he has a mouth full of marshmallow at the best of times. In the comments, quite a few people point out that they thought they had hearing problems, but then have no difficulty with older films which often have crystal clear sound in comparison.

     

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-christopher-nolan-sound-technology

     

    Quote

     


    Hard to pardon: why Tenet's muffled dialogue is a very modern problem
    Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster is already infamous for its barely-audible exchanges. As sound technology advances, why are films getting harder to hear?


    You what? … Robert Pattinson and John David Washington mumble away in Tenet.

    There is a wonderful exchange in Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Tenet, between Robert Pattinson and John David Washington. “Hngmmhmmh,” says Pattinson. “Mmghh nmmhhmmmm nghhh,” replies Washington. Marvellous.

    This is how much of Tenet sounded to viewers in cinemas. The film’s dialogue has been criticised by reviewers and audience members for often being impossible to make out. Given how hard Nolan’s blockbuster would be to understand even if all the dialogue was crystal-clear, it is curious that the director has made it doubly difficult to hear the story of a screenplay he supposedly spent five years writing.

    But it isn’t just Nolan’s films. It’s a much-repeated claim that movie dialogue is becoming harder and harder to hear. What is going on?

    Mathew Price is a production sound mixer who has worked on The Sopranos and The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. “When they take the sound we record on set and kind of undermix it, it feels like, ‘What did we try so hard for?’” he says. Price believes the problem is partly that modern directors have so many more tracks to play with, causing “track overload”, the result being that “the dialogue gets short shrift a lot of the time”. When he watches films or TV shows at home, he turns on the subtitles in case of clarity issues – he is far from the only one – and will limit the TV’s dynamic range. (On home TVs the dynamic range is more extreme than in a cinema: this is why you often have to turn up the volume for dialogue, then down again for action.)

    Is it actually a modern phenomenon? Sound engineer Ron Bochar, who was nominated for an Oscar for his mixing on Moneyball, thinks so. “Think about it: the first few Star Wars [films], we heard them all. We heard all the lines. Listen to Apocalypse Now – you hear everything.” Price agrees: “If you watch old movies, you might hear some sound effects here and there but now they go nuts: somebody’s walking across the room in a leather jacket, you hear the zippers clink and the creak of the leather and every footstep is right in your face.”

    When television became commonplace in the mid-20th century and challenged cinema’s dominion, cinema needed to distinguish itself; it needed to prove that it could justify people leaving the comfort of their homes. It did so partly by becoming bigger and louder. In an era – and a pandemic – in which home streaming dominates, cinema may be forced to pull out the stops once more. “I think we’re bombarded,” Paul Markey, a projectionist at the Irish Film Institute, says of modern films. “The more expensive movies have got, the more of a bombardment they become on your senses.”
    For Bochar, the priority is dialogue. Working with other editors, his job is to layer a film with multiple levels of sound. As he adds layers he has to make sure he can still hear the words. “The first thing I do is create a solid dialogue track, and then everything else has to come up to it and not exceed it,” he says. “Somebody wrote the words and actors are saying those lines, so there’s got to be some priority.” He doesn’t know any re-recording artist who would deliberately obscure a story point.

    Sound effects and music tracks exist on faders that can slide up and down. This means that even “a crazy, batshit scene” with numerous layers of sound is easy for a mixer to control. “It really isn’t a mystery. We know how to do it.” This means that Nolan’s use of noisier Imax cameras in Tenet would not explain the problem, as some have suggested.

    To complicate matters, there is a disparity between the environment in which the director hears the final mix of a film and the one in which it is screened. Markey says Warren Beatty watched a screening of Bonnie and Clyde when it came out and couldn’t understand why the sound of the bullets was so quiet. The projectionist was turning the volume down. Beatty realised that projectionists, not directors, have final say on a film. Markey says that they could, for example, raise the volume of the dialogue specifically, but they never do – it would mean having to readjust it for every film.

    As with most problems, every department assumes that another department is to blame. Although many viewers claim that films are getting louder, Bochar says that the opposite is the problem: “All of us in the industry will tell you point-blank that generally every single cinema is playing it lower than it should be.” A studio’s reference level tends to be around 85 decibels, or 7 on the Dolby scale, he says. But cinemas will often play the film at 4 (around 75 decibels). The Irish Film Institute has been playing Tenet at 4, Markey says, because the recommended level will not always correspond to the cinema in which the film is showing.

    In Nolan’s case, Price and Bochar are confident that the director does it intentionally. In a 2019 Reddit AMA, sound designer Richard King – who has worked with Nolan on seven films, including Tenet – said: “He wants to grab the audience by the lapels and pull them toward the screen, and not allow the watching of his films to be a passive experience.”

    It’s hard to imagine that Nolan is unaware of the criticism. Price suspects the director wants to make the audience work harder to understand the dialogue; he thinks Nolan believes this will make the film a more immersive, engaging experience. But, Price says, “I think he is the only one in the world who believes that.”

     

    • Upvote 3

    Working in an office

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    19 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

    I don’t even know what’s real and what’s satire anymore. 
     

     

    7B998F39-D144-4477-9876-77BF919D5546.jpeg

    Jesus. That and the office one are everything I used to hate about commuting, it's like a warning rather than an enticement. 

     

    It kind of reminds me of those dickheads who rebranded their consultancy firm as 'Monday', along with the slogan- "Sharpen your pencil, iron your crispy white shirts, set the alarm clock, relish the challenge, listen, be fulfilled, make an impact, take a risk." As expected, it just reminded everyone of the usual hell of having to go to work after a weekend, so they scrapped it within months after spending over a hundred million - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2035803.stm and https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/31/ibm_kills_monday/

    • Upvote 2

    Salma Hayek vs Sofia Vergara

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    3 minutes ago, Mook said:

    Jennifer Aniston's coupon has looked absolutely mental for about 10 years.

     

    She was unbeatable in the 90s as well, better to grow old gracefully.

    I always preferred Cox to be honest. In one of the early Friends episodes some showbiz agent says that Cox's face with Aniston's chest would be unbeatable. Have to agree.

     

    Edit: I see what you mean. It looks like everything's been scraped backwards- https://www.who.com.au/jennifer-aniston-plastic-surgery

    Rate the last game you've played...

    in TNF - Techy Nerd Forum

    Posted

    1 minute ago, Elite said:

    My problem with Ubisoft is that they churn out pretty much the same game every year with a different setting. If the developers had a bit more license to create they could make some truly stunning games with the budgets Ubisoft have but they are more interested in bland yearly 'adaptations'.

     

    Yeah, the big companies- Ubi, Activision-Blizzard and EA- are terrified of spending big on new franchises in case they bomb. There's just too much money involved these days, so they play it safe and churn out the same stuff year after year, stuffing in microtransactions and lootboxes so they can keep the price the same.

     

    That's why I like playing on PC, there are plenty of 'mid' size games that smaller companies can do without facing an existential threat if they don't sell.

    Rate the last game you've played...

    in TNF - Techy Nerd Forum

    Posted

    10 hours ago, Elite said:

    I played Valiant Hearts years ago, great little game that

     

    Thirded- really enjoyed it. This was one of the best deals I ever had on Steam- 

     

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    Child of Light is worth a play if you haven't done before, although the rhyming couplets get a bit annoying after a bit. It's a shame those UbiArt games dried up, they were much more interesting than yet another Ass Creed game.

    • Upvote 1

    Coronavirus

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    13 minutes ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

    I see Twat Hancock has announced  £500m of funding to find a 20 minute Covid test and research looking into the benefits of repeated testing.

     

    Be interesting to see where the money ends up.

    You'd think it would be overseen by the NHS and local authorities. In reality, it'll be Serco and Capita 'running' it. Some no mark company just set up by a friend of Cummings will supply the kits- it'll cost twice the price as they won't go to an EU supplier and 75% of the kits will be duds.

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