KMartin

On 7/2/2017 at 3:38 PM, Andrew Reid said:

It really did look terrible on a technical level.

But so does Dogme 95 stuff in general.

I think Dod Mantle did it on purpose.

I find it quite an interesting piece and was moved enough to write an article about it so I guess that's job done from the DP.

It would be boring if all interviews and documentaries were polished turds, with glossy shot after glossy shot... What's the point?

I understand the point you want to make here but there's "different" and then there's just f'ing ugly... personally, after the 1st 15 minutes I don't really care what they shot it on. Ugly video may not be boring but I found watching it was so distracting that it was counter-productive to the content. 4 hours is a lot of content that may have been easier to digest as a Podcast. Just my opinion of course but I doubt I'm the only one who took that away from watching this series.

I've watched the series and it's impossible to know the real world problems the crew encountered during production, but IMHO it contains some of the ugliest modern interview footage I can remember seeing on Showtime in recent memory. Plenty of possible culprits to point at; shooting on Putin's home turf, the extra harsh added lighting, mostly clipped exposures on skin as well as highlights, really soft as well a way too sharp images + odd mismatched color/skin tones within the same scene like the cameras weren't prepped.... if it's color graded it obviously didn't help, etc.. Considering the depth of experience and expertise behind this production, I think we can safely rule out incompetency or lack of budget. Either way I was left wondering why all that high end talent would intentionally create that look, much less why they used the C-300MI or 5DMII in FHD and whether they are a problem or not. I waded through all 4 episodes just to hear the content but was constantly distracted with how really shitty it looked.