5ive Days to Midnight

[CrypticMirror]

http://sfdebris.com/videos/tv/fivedaystomidnight.php

Or is it Five Dayf to Midnight?

And I apologise to Chuck and Kevin too.

(And all I can think is: I can't wait for Chuck to do "Flipside of Dominic Hyde/Another Flip for Dominic". It is an 80s BBC show only available on an R2 DVD where all the information on it is in the liner notes and that is mostly about how the producers thought they had a great scheme to score a free case of gin.)

I'd have had the password to the brief case be 12345.

Keyring is an infinity symbol? I thought it was just an 8.

You can never have too much security for your Ranma porn though. Trust me.

[Jonathan101]

Kind of want Chuck to review Se7en now just to hear him spend 5 minutes complaining about the title.

[Hiccups]

I've only ever seen that low framerate style of slow motion in animation, for example, the earlier seasons of The Simpsons would use it a lot because animating proper slow motion would have been too time consuming. I don't think there's a technical term for doing it in live action, but my best guess would be "Couldn't afford a high speed camera".

[ProfessorDetective]

I've only ever seen that low framerate style of slow motion in animation, for example, the earlier seasons of The Simpsons would use it a lot because animating proper slow motion would have been too time consuming. I don't think there's a technical term for doing it in live action, but my best guess would be "Couldn't afford a high speed camera".

I have seen it one other place: whenever CSI or its derivatives do a flashback to or a mental reconstruction of the crime.

[Nessus]

Yeah, it's not a shutter speed thing. It's what happens when someone wants a slow-motion shot, but either they couldn't get the right kind of camera, or they decided they wanted slow motion after the shots were already filmed and can't/won't reshoot. So the only thing they can do is slow down the playback by doubling frames. It's not what happens when you do undercranking wrong, it's what happens when you don't undercrank, then try to fake it in post.

And yeah: it always looks like crap, aggressively like crap, and if it's the only form of slow motion you can swing, then you're better off not doing slow motion. If you see that in a finished work, it's a smoking gun that someone on the production wasn't up to their job either technically or creatively.

Regardless of crank speed, getting the shutter speed wrong won't create a "dropped frames" effect. If the speed is too low, you mostly get overexposure. If the speed is too high, you get strobing movement because there's not enough motion blur to tie the movement together from one frame to the next. The latter was the bane of stop motion/claymation effects, as it was basically unavoidable (the characters/creatures being photographed aren't moving when the frames are taken, so motion blur can't happen regardless of shutter speed), but was also famously popularized by the films Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator as a deliberate way of stylizing action to represent the way perception goes chaotic when adrenalized and/or panicked.

The interesting thing in this show's case is they clearly did have the means to do actual in-camera undercranking, as there are a few shots that are in proper slow-motion, like the bit at 8:13 in the review where the main character falls to the ground after being shot. The shot of hiss hand letting go of the railing is faux-undercranking, but the very next two shots of him falling backward then hitting the ground are real undercranking.

The impression I get is that the people actually filming the show knew what they were doing, but at some point during editing some dumbass producer came in and started demanding more and more cowbell.

The most cynical part of me wonders if this was done to stretch the runtime. Like maybe this was filmed as a TV movie, but then after it was all done someone decided to sell it as a miniseries for purely business reasons, and at that point the only way to make the runtime longer was with last minute editing bay doctoring.

[Fianna]

"The episodes were running up to eight minutes under; the only way to stretch them out was with slow motion. And we tried to keep the slow motion away from the dialogue as much as possible. But anything without dialogue was considered for slow motion."

- Dean Learner, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

[ProfessorDetective]

"The episodes were running up to eight minutes under; the only way to stretch them out was with slow motion. And we tried to keep the slow motion away from the dialogue as much as possible. But anything without dialogue was considered for slow motion."

- Dean Learner, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

Freaking Darkplace.

[Rocketboy1313]

Honestly, and I know that so far the review has been "Thin material to work with and ultimately really 'meh'" but I will say this, I am 100x's more likely to seek this show out than I was prior to today, as I hadn't heard of it before.

I have "The Lost Room" DVD on my shelf, this will not join it there, but if I see this thing on Netflix... Shrug...

[Nessus]

"The episodes were running up to eight minutes under; the only way to stretch them out was with slow motion. And we tried to keep the slow motion away from the dialogue as much as possible. But anything without dialogue was considered for slow motion."

- Dean Learner, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

Ha! Exactly. I legit wonder what runtime for the show you'd find if you subtracted 1/2 of the combined total runtime of all the assorted faux-undercranked shots. If they were spreading that stuff around as liberally as it appears from the review, it could actually be a significant difference.

[tvindy]

I've only ever seen that low framerate style of slow motion in animation.

The movie "Carrie" (the original) uses something similar for the opening scene.