I Saw Three Versions of Gemini Man In One Day: A 60 FPS Vlog

Alright headed into first Gemini Man screening. We're starting off with 3D high frame rate ultraAVX Dbox. I think I know why he's as good as you he is you alright I'm back at the theater for my second showing of Gemini Man the the 2d 24 frames per second version of this film so earlier today I saw the 3d 60fps version and I don't I have so much to say that I don't know what I want to say and that's wobbling again it like wobbles every time I move and that's probably gonna be look looking bad cuz 60 frames shows off all the wobble my impressions of the 60fps version are are not good this this movie to me it looked incredibly cheap the the 60 frame the the high frame rate like I've I kind of wish I could see the 120 version because I'm curious if it even looks appreciably different to the 60 like if it's if it's perceptibly different - to the 60fps I suspect not maybe who knows it looked like a made-for-tv movie and it looked like it looked like a very special episode of the sitcom of a sitcom it looked like it looked like the episode of a sitcom where they go to an amusement park or the beach or you know it the action scenes looked like they were lifted out of Baywatch the the high frame rate just takes a lot of the energy out of some already like I don't know like I get the impression I got the impression that the action would look pretty limp in in any version and so we'll see what the we'll see what the 24 but like you know a lot like a lot like glass in it like the the action is is just kind of wet noodle it's it's limp it's cold very very like blandly shot very blandly framed very blandly lit you know the the 120 FPS plus 3d requires so much light that they're heavily reliant on on just sunlight you know a lot of outdoor locations in bright daylight and very very little sculpting to the to the light very little you know shaping of shadows you kind of get the impression that it's like they had very limited access to a lot of the locations that they were shooting on and so it's it's that like okay well we can be like right over here and we can only be here for two days and so we kind of need to get everything and so we just need to we need to shoot efficiently and and that ends up showing in the finished product with the fact that it's like everything is just kind of bare-bones they didn't there's no there's no like real craft to the way that anything anything is really like shot and composed the way that actors are blocked within the frame and the way that they move relative to one another is just it's it's very utilitarian you know which again is like these are the kind of hallmarks that you end up seeing in like a made-for-tv movie or you end up seeing in the beach episode of a TV show like of a sitcom that's shooting on tape and they're like well we got all the actors Disneyland and we've only got like two days that we can be doing like outdoor outdoor shots like we've got we've got four hours in front of the castle and that's it that's our window and we need to get literally everything that we need there you know done in that time and and it just it ends up being like fundamentally very unambitious very uninteresting and there are a few like you can tell the set pieces where they did have time and they did put in like a ton of energy and that shows and those are like the most interesting parts of the movie you know like there's there's a big set piece towards the end of the movie where the characters are avoiding like mini gunfire and and that comes close to kind of showing you like what 60 FPS could do but at the same time I'm sitting there and I'm watching it and and it's like okay I already know what this looks like at 60 frames or at 120 frames or a 240 because I've seen it at that framerate before in every other action movie where they take this they shoot it at that frame rate and then they play it back at 24 and so it's it's slow-mo like we have you see a lot of high frame rate stuff in movies anyway it's just it's all slo-mo and the the current cinematic language of film encompasses that and it come in it encompasses a higher temporal resolution in the form of slow motion which is a lot more malleable there's just there's more you can do with it there's you can you can shape slow motion in a lot of ways that you you can't necessarily shape high frame rate because when you raise your floor like that it's you just you've you've got to go even higher and higher in order to like get that stuff and there's a very limited amount of slow-mo in this which means that and it's like and it's not much it's like they went so they were shooting at 120 and they were maybe going up to like 160 200 maybe like there was one shot in there where they went up to like 240 which gives you a 50% slowdown and now the thing is is a 50% slowdown isn't that much half speed is like barely slow-mo for a lot of purposes like half speed is what you would be shooting if you were just kind of shooting like product shots where where you wanted to get like that extra kind of clarity and stability out of the out of I was slowing like you know out of slowing it down like you know any any camera shake is gonna get kind of smoothed out by that and oh boy camera shake like every jitter of the camera registers as to its microscopic details like you can feel all of the jitters and not in a good way it's it's not interesting it's not fun it's not engaging that this really this movie is not a good demonstration of the strengths of 60fps and makes me wonder if 60fps has or I shouldn't keep saying 60fps of high frame rate that it makes me wonder if high frame rate has any narrative strengths at all and I want it to because I think it's an interesting tool I think I think there is potential for high frame rate it just takes the right people to figure it out and at the moment having seen the high frame rate version of Gemini man this is not that you know if if like Michael Bay we're doing high frame rate or Zack Snyder we're doing high frame rate I think this would be a very different story at the very least it would be lit better it would not look like it would not look like made-for-tv and this is it was some of the worst 3d I've seen in quite a while the grade the the color the color grade is just bad and I don't just mean like just really limp it's lame there was a whole bunch of scenes super overexposed and they were like they had these really wide latitudes and they had a lot of like really like wide dynamic range shots you know it's like oh we're indoors but you can resolve the stuff that's outside the window and we didn't put you know we didn't put gels on the window like look you can actually like hold all that and say okay like that's kind of neat you like that's technically interesting but it's it's not shaped and it's not really used well it's like whatever but then there's a bunch of shots where it's just like it's on the border of being blown out but then they've like brought it back down but they didn't and I'm wondering if this had to do with like the 3d version that I was seeing like is this just an artifact of like the 2k 3d 60fps I will I see this same problem in the 2d version I don't know we're gonna see going into it but like they so they're up at clipping and then they just kind of took it and like lowered it but so the clipping point you know you're pure white things that are approaching that don't get dimmer the white just goes down and it ends up so instead of having instead of everything going up to pure white it just goes up to slightly below pure white and so pure white is just dimmer and that might have been an artifact of the of the 3d like they might have been clipping out and then like you take that and add the dimming of the glasses and it ends up looking muddy you know I don't know yet we'll see when I've got something to to compare it to so a thing that I'm wondering is like is it going to look as cheap at 24 frames 2d like without the glasses without the high frame rate is it going to look as cheap is is the is it going to look as boring is the lighting going to be as uninteresting is the framing going to be as uninteresting is the blocking going to be as uninteresting and and maybe I'll actually be able to talk about the movie as a story which I don't know like it completely bounced off me and it seemed to bounce off like the the entire audience that I was with earlier today we it wasn't a full theatre but it wasn't an empty theatre okay was a mostly empty theatre I saw it in a mostly empty theater earlier today but there were other people there and I don't remember if there was a single like comedy relief moment or like tense moment or just like wow moment that got any kind of audible reaction from the audience I don't remember any comic relief moment I don't I don't even know if there was comedy in this movie and howdy oh wait no there were some jokes at the end and they felt like a sitcom which was really bizarre because the end of this movie up until like the closing scene is pretty grim and like and you're if you're using high frame rate you're doing so to try to create reality or hyper reality but this is not doing anything with hyper reality it's neither realistic enough to to exploit the reality element of that you know make you feel like you're you're watching something that like maybe actually happened like 60 FPS is maybe going to be like best suited for you know found footage or something like that like a horror film you know I think I think there's a lot of room in that like if you're trying to exploit the fact that things look real and if you're trying to exploit the fact that like so one of the quirks of high frame rate is that the higher your frame rate goes the closer things look to reality the problem is with with narrative film than is that reality is not necessarily your constructed reality or the reality you're attempting to construct the reality is a bunch of actors standing around acting at each other and you know you see this a lot in in Billy Lenz long halftime walk if you watch the high frame rate version of that where there's like all of the extras in these these crowd shots you become keenly aware of the fact that they're extras who are miming crowd actions like and like you know they're moving their hands a lot and they're just trying to look busy and they're pointing at things in ways that like nobody does in real life and it's like okay it looks fake you look like actors you have exposed the reality of the fact that your movie is a bunch of actors pretending to do stuff and you know that's that's a thing that you need to like incorporate or accept or or overcome and and Billy Lin does not manage to do that and Gemini man does a better job but doesn't do a good job and you know on the other end would be like you're using it to construct hyper reality and this is where I think like this is kind of why I say like I want to see like a Michael Bay or a Zack Snyder do something with it where you're going you're going all in on just absurdity you're you're escalating to just this this comical degree and you're constructing a world that is so divorced from reality that that it becomes its own substance and I think if you're going that far then like who knows like what'll what happens if you then take that and raise it to you know raise the frame rate on it and I think that would be maybe where you would you would see something interesting coming out of that where you're constructing like you're you're not just like presenting hyper reality you are constructing a a reality worthy of being hyper real because otherwise you're just you're you're calling attention to all the stuff and Billy Lynn had a lot of this fakeness like tons of problems with this fakeness and a lot of also problems with the fact that it's it's it's limited by its budget you know these are these are both expensive movies but that expense seems to be very unevenly distributed it's all in post-production it's all in camera Department and post-production and like none of it isn't lighting none of it isn't sets none of it is in you know getting that key thing that you need you know you watch Billy Lin and it's very obvious that you know like Beyonce is there and it's super obvious that it's not Beyonce because they're always showing the back of her head in this really obvious way which when combined with the fact that the movie already looks and feels like a sitcom just becomes even more comical because now you're looking at something that already looks like a sitcom and is now using a sitcom trope of like oh here's this the gang meets a famous person but we can't actually afford the famous person to like show up and shoot our you know 22 minute sitcom so it's just it's always the back of their head you know the the gang meets Elton John but it's just it's it's just some actor kind of dressed like Elton John with a wig on and they walk into frame you always see them from behind and you know it's it's using that trick and it uses it multiple times very obviously and it's like okay this plays in a sitcom because a sitcom is this cheap thing and it's principally about like banter and character interactions and a little bit of slapstick doesn't really play for your war movie about PTSD doesn't really play for your action film about I don't know what this movies about I don't know what Gemini man is about its Will Smith want a fast government assassin wants to retire and his asshole ex boss sends his clone to kill him that's it you know there's there's not really there's not really a message so anyway I'm gonna go get some snacks and let's go see Gemini man for a second time hello and welcome to my latest tutorial how to grade like Gemini man so we've got this footage from New York it's pretty wide in terms of its dynamic range but you can see over here on the scopes that whoever shot it did a good job at protecting the highlights so we've we've got a lot to work with here now as always the first thing we're gonna do is slap a LUT on it so just just find just find your favorite LUT and slap it in there there we go now since this is the Gemini man look we're going for we will naturally be exhibiting in 3d which means we need colors to really pop pop pop to make up for the 3d glasses so add a node and just grab that saturation and crank it right on up and you know what let's do it again just add another node and just keep on turning it up just crank it just crank it right on up a good rule of thumb here is that if the audience can look at a color without experiencing physical discomfort then you've got some room to turn it up okay so now that that is painful to look at we check our waveform and uh-oh we're definitely clipping out and are no longer DCI compliant for exhibition so how about we just add another note and let's just let's let's just you know clamp that off and yeah that's you know what that's all all you really need to do to recreate the deeply uncomfortable experience of watching a substantial chunk of professionally made film Gemini man all right I'm out of the movie I am I made it about halfway through the the 4dx version with the giant like the giant motion sim seats and the the scent wafting throughout the theater which never failed to smell like anything more than the generic idea of scent it didn't it was a you would just okay so 40 X ok okay so 40 X is is a new thing it's part of the whole like value added cinema experience along with things like 3d and and high frame rate and dynamic seed movements roll heave and pitch with the on-screen action water effects spray through the theater wind effects recreate a turbulent storm or the sensation of speed lightning flashes just inches away scent adds a new dimension of realism fog adds drama to the seen bubbles bring a buoyant atmosphere to life a tickler adds vibration to your legs for a full body experience and floating snow adds a dreamlike effect with over 20 different effects for DX is the movie experience you just have to see and feel to believe see your next movie in 40 x only at Cineplex ok battery died so 40 X is part of the whole like it's part of the value added cinema experience along with 3d high frame rate all of this other stuff basically things gimmicks that they're trying to that can't be really easily or affordably replicated at home and are thus something that you kind of have to go to the theater to experience a tickler at sly bration to your legs.i I don't know I ranted about this whole bunch before I realize the battery was dead and they're just they're just neither like it's not it's not awful like you know that motion sim experience but like it really did not suit this movie and wasn't particularly interesting and like okay so like the the 40x you're you're in a bench of like four seats that all move together and that's that's kind of interesting you know in kind of what it can do and the range of motion as a result is is a little more extreme you know it's also more precise like the motions are less less jittery they're more fluid but they're also just more extreme as a baseline where where the D box seats like you have of individual control on like how intense you want your seat to be in so like you can actually like shut it off and if it's just you know too obnoxious you could just you could just turn it off the real problem with the forty X so the the seat motion got tiring the sense never smelt like anything in at all like they just smelled like the idea of scent the real problem was that they have a strobe or I guess what is supposed to be several strobes or or you know at least two different strokes up at the top that that go off for things like lightning strikes gunfire stuff like that you know basically anything that would be in screen flashed the strobe flashes and enhances the experience but like I don't I don't know if the system just sucks or or if there was something broken about this this theater because only the strobe on my right-hand side so the right-hand side of the theater only that strobe was going off and so it was just constantly like only ever coming in like one side and one strobes are annoying as hell at the best of times and then having a strobe only like strobe one side of your vision is is immeasurably worse and so after I made it about halfway through the movie and it was just like no more and went out and talked to guest services and switched into the IMAX 4k screening that started a little bit after the one that I was the the the 40 X one that I was in so I have seen all or part of three different formats now going it and there's problems with all of them so going into the 4k version was actually kind of really really interesting one it was just it took me a while just to adjust of being stationary again and just be like enjoying watching a movie in just a reclining seat and and the motion cadence is at least ordinary and and things look I don't want to say normal because they didn't but you know you're not being overwhelmed but but the higher resolution so jumping up from 2k to 4k all of a sudden the movie now has a high enough resolution that you can see like the edges on power windows in the grade there's like fringing around characters faces against the sky juniors look like just the the a lot more flaws are are obvious in 4k that we're actually pretty well hidden in in 2k like you you start to really notice that like the his nose isn't right like the upper lip like just kind of this whole area like the upper lip and the nose like it doesn't it doesn't behave properly and that's really obvious actually at the the end of the movie when a second jr. is like dying and the soundtrack has this really like labored breathing but but his nose like the the nostril flare there's no nostril flare and so like even though there's this like really heavy breathing nose breathing like you're not getting that labored kind of tension in the face and like the so the face just looks overly static and you know yeah I mean but like creating a CG person like photo-realistic human is like really hard and you know credit for coming as far as they have but it's just ironic that this movie that is fetishizing technology to such a degree looks worse at its higher-end versions that the higher you go the more flaws appear because you know if if they had focused on on finishing this for a 2k delivery like if that had been their primary delivery with the tech pipeline that they have in in you know like that juniors rendering like it would look amazing like it I mean it does look pretty good but you know it would it would blow everything away if they had been able to focus on like okay we're going to like maximize all of the things that are going to be visible in a 2k delivery and use the fact that we're delivering at a lower temperature just actual you know geometric resolution pixel resolution use that to to hide imperfection and allow imagination to take over allow the audience's brain to to take over and do a lot more heavy lifting with with guessing and filling things in and and whatnot and it would work so much better but but nothing nothing is going to make up for the fact that like it's just a boring movie and is is just really underwhelming and limp and ineffective confusing not particularly interesting at the end of the day the critical flaw here is the film itself it's it's none of the technology you know the the technology at best like distracts from it maybe but it is is ultimately just a really underwhelming film so going to the going to the 24 FPS version a lot of the problems that I identified in the high frame rate version still exist in terms of like the the blocking the framing camera movement acting blind delivery the script itself it it no longer looks it still looks like TV it's it's just that it looks like an episode of 24 or homeland instead of looking like an episode of full house the grade it's it's less muddy less muddy than it was in 3d but it was pretty much what I was guessing which was that it is it's really over compressed in the highlights really oversaturated in a lot of ways and that like that has been like brought down and then you add the 3d glasses on top of it and that gave it this muddy look but even seeing it in without the 3d glasses like it's still like the highlights are just really squashed in a lot of places and the the saturation is cranked so high like probably to compensate for 3d glasses like that you're watching if you watch the 2d version you were probably not like I was probably not watching a version that had been properly prepared for 2d presentation and it's just been kind of tweaked you know like they hadn't gone through and given it like a careful grade they had just bends like a we start with the 3d version and compensate for the glasses and then pull it back by five percent and ship it for the 2d version and and it looks bad I mean it already looked bad with 3d glasses on it does not look good in either version it's so compressed in the highlights it's so just like it ends up being flat and washed out and and in a lot of places so if you if you raise colors way too high like if you raise the saturation way too high so that they come up like either clipping or right under clipping and then you kind of lower everything you create this odd optical effect where something is simultaneously dull looking but way too bright because it's kind of both same time like so it looks overexposed but the literal luminance value is below the point that you would expect it to be and and so it messes with the brain it just it looks weird yeah the all the outdoor stuff and there is a lot of outdoor stuff because it relies on it just does not look good and there's a lot of there's a lot of really just like bland day for night shooting because again their shoot like they need just so much light for these these cameras that they're using and shooting at 120fps that you know they they can't actually shoot in the dark they can't actually shoot at night and like lighting convincingly at night they do it a couple times in like City locations where they're able to like actually shoot at night and just use you know lamps and stuff like that to to get the light level that they need but then there's just a ton of stuff like out on the boats that's all it's all day for night with a sky replacement and looks cheap doesn't doesn't look great doesn't look like the kind of thing that you know is up to the the conceptual level of what you would expect from a movie where they're like our gonna shoot it just this absurd frame rate and we're gonna do it in 3d as well and we're going we're gonna go all out on these two things and and cut everything else in order to accommodate that and that's that was Billie Lynn that's Gemini man there's a whole thing with there's just some bad editing like just really sloppy coverage of conversations this was in Billy Lynn as well and it happened again in Gemini man where you'll have like three or four characters talking to each other and and like I lines and stuff will just go wherever the the angles of the characters are being covered from will just flip around the the axis of action is wherever they want it to be for any given shot you'll get you'll get a number of shots we're like characters like stare directly into the lens oh my light went out so you get a whole bunch of moments where characters are either like looking directly into the lens or even worse they have an eye line that is that is like right right beside the lens and so they're they're not they're they're not looking into the camera but they're not really looking away from the camera either and and and when it's on this when it's when that image is on this giant screen that difference is is really noticeable and really unsettling and what else haven't I talked about yet I mean the story itself IRA dimension was is limp and bland and amazingly oh it amazingly manages to suck any sort of like philosophical tension out of the idea of like cloning that Will Smith confronts his own clone but they treated they treat it so realistically in the sense that like his clone is like 23 so his clone was like made 23 years ago and is growing up you know in in real time like a normal human being and isn't you know sci-fi accelerated growth super soldier or anything like that so if you want clones a deck you know 20 years from now you got to start growing him now and the the side effect of that is the the reality kind of sets in of like oh well a clone really isn't that different from a child like from from just having a kid and and that even if Will Smith's clone is genetically identical to him the relationship really is pretty damn close to just being father-son like age difference was between them and you know there's there's this really funny line that shows up in the trailer where junior says you made a person out of another person and it's like yeah man that's genetics that's how babies work like that's just that's what a baby is and it is it being really funny and also just like I guess this is the thing I'll go out on the the the trailer presents a far more interesting story than the movie itself actually is because the trailer is principally told from juniors point of view so if you watch the trailer you're given the impression that you're watching a movie about a kid who's who's like this rate born and raised assassin who's being sent out on this hit and then he realizes that his job is is to kill the person that he's being cloned from and that's the the opposite of the of the story as its told in in the actual movie because it's the opposite because you're you're not really you you don't really in the film get a point where jr. really grapples with like the fact that he's a clone and when they try to do it in the scene or it's like you made a person of another person it's there's not really an existential crisis to that the the the bigger existential crisis the bigger the bigger crisis in that conflict is really just the fact that he was lied to about his parentage because they've made being a clone so bland that it's it's no different than if the the antagonist was like oh yeah we just stole you from a maternity ward and then told you that your parents died in a car crash and I will you lied to me like I have parents out there you know it's basically the same as that he's more hung up on the fact that he was told he's an orphan than any sort of identity crisis of being a clone because again in the world that they've constructed there really isn't an identity crisis to be had about being a clone cuz it's not that different than just being someone's child and also like it's worth noting that they they raised the fact that a clone would require a surrogate mother and nary a word of that is ever mentioned again she's never brought up she's never identified no one cares about her or who she is or what her role in all of this was or what happened to her what happened to the woman who was involved in this illegal human cloning super-soldier program what happened to the rest of the women involved in the illegal secret super soldier cloning program because there's there's jr. number two who has been genetically edited to not feel pain or fear or whatever and and none of that and the other interesting thing about the about the trailer which I have now finally seen after after seeing three versions of this film I finally went and watched the trailer and the grade and the trailer is better the trailer actually makes use of a lot of slow-mo that doesn't exist in the movie itself which makes sense that if you're cutting a trailer and somebody has basically has handed you you know a box full of 120fps footage it's all footage that if you're if you're cutting a 24 FPS trailer you can do whatever you want with it and like any any subtle or extreme amount of slow-mo you want to create is all just gonna look buttery smooth and so there's a bunch of shots in the trailer that are slowed down a conventional amount there's a conventional amount of time warping going on with them in order to like you know amplify the intensity of the of the moment and you know it's it's not extreme but it's there and the trailer also does include the few V like three shots in the actual movie that do have slow-mo those are included in the trailer as well at basically the amount of slow-mo that you would see if you go see it in theaters but then there's a bunch of other shots that have the slow-mo added to them because they could and it's it's really interesting to see the trailer make better use of the tools for cinematic storytelling than the movie that it is pulling from I know that's not unusual for a trailer to be better than a movie but it's just it's it's interesting for those technical tools to be better utilized and for for that hundred and twenty FPS footage that they grabbed to be better utilized and also it's really fascinating to me that all of the high frame rate films to this point I think Billy Lin is the only one that has released a high frame rate trailer there might be a high frame rate trailer for Gemini man out there I didn't find it on a cursory search but I mean searching for movie trailers get re-uploaded so many times in so many different places that finding a specific version can be challenging so there might be one out there but I did not find it and it is certainly not the one that is surfaced when you do an initial search it's it's not the first thing to come up so they have not done if if high frame rate is an element of the movie that they're trying to emphasize they've done a bad job of emphasizing that by not making it easy for audiences to find and engage with and this is all just this is a bigger problem with high frame rate as a whole in in a cinematic scope and I'll get more into that later but I feel like that's at least 80% of what I want to say about Gemini man so to close this out here's that bit with the tickler again a tickler ATS vibration to your legs for a full body experience he've with the on-screen action

Channel: Folding Ideas

Views: 419,003

Keywords: Criticism, gemini man, 60fps, hfr

Id: qlGdHd-XHcY

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Strawcrazyman]

Confession time: Until this video, I genuinely thought most of the Blank Check discussion about 4DX was a bit. I've never been to a 4DX theater, and I assumed the water spraying and smells were just comedic exaggerations. In retrospect I should have listened when they said "no bits."