Video Essays on film and gaming

[Strangelove]

tbh after doing some film editing myself, i completely understand wanting to take bits and pieces from one take and compositing them with another. if i had the technology/skill/time, i would have done that

 

[Geostigma]

Lucas took it to some pretty absurd levels for the prequel trilogy though for sure.
Mcgregor once said about the trilogy when watching it there were entire scenes with lines he never said (splicing sound bytes from other scenes into a new cut with cgi over the mouth to make it "seamless").

If you watch the trilogy again and pay attention you can see some really ridiculous shenanigans with CGI and scene splicing. The scene between Palpatine and Anakin at the opera is a decent offender of this.

 

[Strangelove]

i am tempted to watch them again just for this. i think i just overlooked some slightly odd scenes because i assumed it was a result of a lot of cgi in the backgrounds and stuff

maybe watch with some kind of list so i don't have to pay that much attention to minor details

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Also, I really love that Haywire was mentioned, because just about a week ago I was talking about that movie specifically because of the shots and the camerawork in the film. I remember that my buddy and I had a HUGE discussion on it after we saw it in theaters, specifically because a lot of the shots are really old-school in addition to the action being really tight. It also made me mention Gareth Edwards specifically because in Godzilla[/i], I learned that he only ever uses virtual cameras in ways that you COULD use a physical camera (i.e. helicopter, building etc.) because it makes the scenes seem more real.





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[X-SOLDIER]

Also, the latest xXx film suffers from this SO FUCKING HARD. Having talented people like Tony Jaa and Donny Yen makes it SO obvious, because it makes their action look friggin' terrible.




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[Lulcielid]

The Dark Knight: "Identity Secrets" - Analysis and Explanation

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Ultra pleased about this. Happy to be contributing to this positive trend with my dollars.





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[Hisako]

Want to give a shout-out to Noah Caldwell-Gervais, who does hour-long videogame analyses in a very smooth, sedate manner. He's now doing this crazy awesome thing where he's living out of his Kombi, which is putting him in a mood for adventure with parallels to adventure in videogames.

He does some work with some real effort, it's worth watching if you have a couple hours to spare.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

A write-up on VFX: http://www.fresnobee.com/entertainment/movies-news-reviews/article128729769.html





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[X-SOLDIER]

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[Cthulhu]

Watched that one a short while ago, it gave me a newfound appreciation of the movie, even if it did both arouse and traumatise me as a child

 

[Lulcielid]

Avatar is an Anime. F*** You. Fight Me.

Spoiler

The video is actually largely focused on discussing the definition of anime than anything else .

 

[ForceStealer]

^Agreed with all that. I have similar issues with the arbitrarily strict definitions people have of "JRPG." I don't know if the fact that both of those things involve Japan is a coincidence or not.

 

[Lulcielid]

Video response to Marvel´s music

Spoiler

Relevant to my interests. Although I can actually hum pretty much all the MCU themes but I probably listen to them more often than most people. Considering how much the composers are swapped out along with the themes, the MCU barely gives any theme time to stick around for it to become memorable to the average moviegoer.

Spoiler

Another one on the Marvel music:

Spoiler

While the video itself is a response torwards the first video, I think it´s still applicable to the other two in some capacity.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

This isn't a video, but a comment about what does and doesn't qualify as a plot hole in narrative structure in Rogue One when looking at why Leia was at the battle of Scarif that I think WAY too many Internet People don't understand when criticizing story, and I wanted to C&P somewhere I could find it again in the future.

Because narratives always have gaps; they are less detailed, necessarily, than the experiences that people have in life that the stories try to invoke. Narrative art is only an impression of the texture of life. If it tried to do more, it would be very tedious; movies would be days long, books tens of thousands of pages.

So, it’s the job of the person consuming the narrative to fill in the gaps for themselves. A plot hole occurs when there is no logical way to fill in one of those gaps because any reasonable possibility is contradicted by some explicit information in the narrative. Outside of plot holes, it is the reader’s/viewer’s job to fill in the gaps with their imagination.

Some folks have gotten a bit lazy about this, and complain whenever they perceive a gap. Or, they complain because it is usually possible to differ significantly from one reader/viewer to another on what exactly is in the gap; there are multiple plausible options. Casual debates and BS sessions can be had between folk on which gap fillers are better or more fun to entertain, but often if a question comes up often enough, the author/production team will give some idea of what they though the gap was naturally filled by, what assumptions they used to guide what you are presented with explicitly by the narrative. But if it’s not in the actual text, it’s just a suggestion, and nobody is under any sort of obligation to substitute the official explanation for their own head canon.

I really love this, because I can't overstate how often I've seen cries of, "that's a plot hole" when it definitely fucking isn't. It might not be explicitly explained to the audience, or it might be a little bit of a stretch of a believable explanation, but a majority of the time it's not a goddamn plot hole.




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[Cthulhu]

LotR is so good and this explains why. The Hobbit movies didn't really have anything like this, even going as far as ending the second movie on a cliffhanger, whilst the LotR ones had an epic climax in the second - and setting the bar even higher for the next movie. I literally cannot even. I don't believe there's ever going to be a better trilogy of movies.

Unless they remake LotR, only better, which will be very hard. The scale of the castle sets in LotR are off, which kinda bugs me.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

This isn't a video, but a comment about what does and doesn't qualify as a plot hole in narrative structure in Rogue One when looking at why Leia was at the battle of Scarif that I think WAY too many Internet People don't understand when criticizing story, and I wanted to C&P somewhere I could find it again in the future.

Because narratives always have gaps; they are less detailed, necessarily, than the experiences that people have in life that the stories try to invoke. Narrative art is only an impression of the texture of life. If it tried to do more, it would be very tedious; movies would be days long, books tens of thousands of pages.

So, it’s the job of the person consuming the narrative to fill in the gaps for themselves. A plot hole occurs when there is no logical way to fill in one of those gaps because any reasonable possibility is contradicted by some explicit information in the narrative. Outside of plot holes, it is the reader’s/viewer’s job to fill in the gaps with their imagination.

Some folks have gotten a bit lazy about this, and complain whenever they perceive a gap. Or, they complain because it is usually possible to differ significantly from one reader/viewer to another on what exactly is in the gap; there are multiple plausible options. Casual debates and BS sessions can be had between folk on which gap fillers are better or more fun to entertain, but often if a question comes up often enough, the author/production team will give some idea of what they though the gap was naturally filled by, what assumptions they used to guide what you are presented with explicitly by the narrative. But if it’s not in the actual text, it’s just a suggestion, and nobody is under any sort of obligation to substitute the official explanation for their own head canon.

I really love this, because I can't overstate how often I've seen cries of, "that's a plot hole" when it definitely fucking isn't. It might not be explicitly explained to the audience, or it might be a little bit of a stretch of a believable explanation, but a majority of the time it's not a goddamn plot hole.

In my mind they're describing what I would call a "continuity error" rather than a plot hole. To me, any gap in the narrative is, by definition, a plot hole. That's not inherently a negative thing, though.

Storytelling is better for having them (for the sake of pacing, mostly, as the person you quoted alluded to in that first paragraph), and they're everywhere in everything (usually in the form of scene transitions) where there's no continuous narrative window from one instance to the next. They're usually not even worth commenting on because they're so minor and ubiquitous -- e.g. in "The Fellowship of the Ring" film, the Hobbits make it across the Brandywine River, and when next we see them, they're arriving at Bree. This is technically a plot hole, but nothing important because it's nothing that we can't instantly fill in, even as we're watching the scene unfold for the first time. "They walked here, and it wasn't so far that walking here is implausible." Done.

This is why phrasing like "plot holes you could drive a truck through" is worth using when waxing negative about a composition's plot holes. Though the fact that one is calling attention to them in the first place is probably indicative of them being (at least perceived as) significant and A Bad Thing.

To be clear, in the case of the example from "Rogue One," it is a plot hole, but it's hardly significant, and certainly not a continuity error.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

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[X-SOLDIER]

This isn't a video, but a comment about what does and doesn't qualify as a plot hole in narrative structure in Rogue One when looking at why Leia was at the battle of Scarif that I think WAY too many Internet People don't understand when criticizing story, and I wanted to C&P somewhere I could find it again in the future.

Because narratives always have gaps; they are less detailed, necessarily, than the experiences that people have in life that the stories try to invoke. Narrative art is only an impression of the texture of life. If it tried to do more, it would be very tedious; movies would be days long, books tens of thousands of pages.

So, it’s the job of the person consuming the narrative to fill in the gaps for themselves. A plot hole occurs when there is no logical way to fill in one of those gaps because any reasonable possibility is contradicted by some explicit information in the narrative. Outside of plot holes, it is the reader’s/viewer’s job to fill in the gaps with their imagination.

Some folks have gotten a bit lazy about this, and complain whenever they perceive a gap. Or, they complain because it is usually possible to differ significantly from one reader/viewer to another on what exactly is in the gap; there are multiple plausible options. Casual debates and BS sessions can be had between folk on which gap fillers are better or more fun to entertain, but often if a question comes up often enough, the author/production team will give some idea of what they though the gap was naturally filled by, what assumptions they used to guide what you are presented with explicitly by the narrative. But if it’s not in the actual text, it’s just a suggestion, and nobody is under any sort of obligation to substitute the official explanation for their own head canon.

I really love this, because I can't overstate how often I've seen cries of, "that's a plot hole" when it definitely fucking isn't. It might not be explicitly explained to the audience, or it might be a little bit of a stretch of a believable explanation, but a majority of the time it's not a goddamn plot hole.

In my mind they're describing what I would call a "continuity error" rather than a plot hole. To me, any gap in the narrative is, by definition, a plot hole. That's not inherently a negative thing, though.

Storytelling is better for having them (for the sake of pacing, mostly, as the person you quoted alluded to in that first paragraph), and they're everywhere in everything (usually in the form of scene transitions) where there's no continuous narrative window from one instance to the next. They're usually not even worth commenting on because they're so minor and ubiquitous -- e.g. in "The Fellowship of the Ring" film, the Hobbits make it across the Brandywine River, and when next we see them, they're arriving at Bree. This is technically a plot hole, but nothing important because it's nothing that we can't instantly fill in, even as we're watching the scene unfold for the first time. "They walked here, and it wasn't so far that walking here is implausible." Done.

This is why phrasing like "plot holes you could drive a truck through" is worth using when waxing negative about a composition's plot holes. Though the fact that one is calling attention to them in the first place is probably indicative of them being (at least perceived as) significant and A Bad Thing.

To be clear, in the case of the example from "Rogue One," it is a plot hole, but it's hardly significant, and certainly not a continuity error.

(Meant to reply to this earlier, but posted that video and totally forgot about it)

I think that there's a distinct different between a narrative gap and a plot hole in that a narrative gap is typically something that doesn't ever feel that it necessitates explanation despite skipping forward in time since it's a storytelling mechanism and there's a reasonable expectation that whatever happens during that time can be assumed without specificity, whereas a plot hole is a narrative gap with an unreasonable or otherwise impossible explanation required to bridge that gap.

My prime examples of both of those would be:

• Unreasonable: In Star Trek Into Darkness – why does Kahn go to Qo'noS (Kronos)? The more you look at his exceptional calculation capabilities showcased in the rest of the film, the more it makes no sense that he'd go there if his goal is to get his people safe, because everything that the Federation would do via protocol or with any dependable expectation involve shooting the missiles from the Neutral Zone – but only a last second unplanned decision convinces even the completely unreliable Kirk to go against protocol is what results in them landing on the planet to set every other part of Kahn's plans in motion.
• Impossible: In The Lost World: Jurassic Park the boat arrives with the whole crew slaughtered to bits, but the Rex still contained in the cargo hold, such that there's no really reasonable explanation for how that was supposed to've transpired with only such a single massive dinosaur on board and still contained.

In both cases, the plot holes take place within those narrative gaps, but there's a clear distinction between what constitutes a plot hole and a narrative gap.

Insofar as continuity errors – those already hold a bit of a different role specific to film as they're pretty much ALWAYS used to apply to the film's visual narrative coherence, rather than that of its plot. The list on this site is a pretty good way to loosely reference how that term and other things like factual errors, etc. are used: http://www.moviemistakes.com/imdb250/pageall




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[Geostigma]

I thought this was really cool and the channel has a few other recaps of different speedrun scenes. Not really a video essay but I think worth bringing up here. Wish I could like xpost this to the speedruns thrad without having to actually go and repost it... cause lazy xD

 

[Lulcielid]

Some bits of spoilers for Kill La Kill.

 

[Lulcielid]

The Auteur Myth - Lone Visionaries... and Their Teams

 

[Shademp]

 

[Interslicery]

 

[Lulcielid]

Why Resident Evil 6 is Awesome

Also why RE6 is the best game in the series (for me)