davextreme

I’m sharing this video not because it’s adorable (and Sweet Christmas is it adorable), but to complain about the tilt shift focus change in the second shot. I’ve seen it a few other places recently—Steven Moffat’s Sherlock uses it and Top Chef uses it for its food photography—and I very much dislike it. It looks nice in a still photograph because you can quickly and easily figure out where your eye is supposed to focus. But when the focus is moving in a film, your eye has to move along with the camera. 3D movies make this even worse. Think of the one of the first shots in Avatar. We’re floating through the ship that’s bringing Jake to Pandora. The camera focuses on him, leaving the background blurry. If it were real life, I’d be able to choose whether I wanted my eye to focus on Jake or the background. In the movie, I can’t change the focus, but I can still look at the background. My eye, thinking it’s looking at a real 3D environment, tries to refocus to make the background clear, which would take Jake out of focus, but it can’t, because only the cinematographer has control over the depth of field. In the second shot of this deer video, there’s nothing our eyes can do except watch a blurry image until the camera gets around to focusing.

This Saturday Night Live sketch from this weekend wasn’t particularly great, but I think there was a kernel of a good idea there. The premise is of a play being put on in 2112 that’s set a hundred years before then, in 2012, and they’re making fun of all the things about our present that are quaint by then (what our electronics were like, our non-futuristic clothing, etc.)

This is actually something I think about a lot. What sort of things are common practice now that will seem crazy to our grandchildren? Hell, when you become a parent you see how even things your parents did are now pretty unheard of (lead paint, kids riding in the front seat). If I can make one guess, I think using hormones on livestock will get eliminated. We’ll think it was outrageous all the stuff that we were putting into our bodies. (Or genetic engineering could get crazy and we’ll think it was silly we worried about eating organic at all.)

With SOPA and Protect-IP looming on the horizon, I also wonder if they or later, similar bills were to pass, if we’ll look back at the 90s/00s as the wild west of the internet, when it was okay to post anything at all and children had free access to anything they wanted. Will it seem crazy that the internet had been wide open like it is now, like how the phone company used to distribute books to everyone in your town that listed your home address and phone number, and people didn’t lock their doors?