Disgusting product placement

Otis Grapsas

Otis Grapsas

Carbonite Member
Polanski's The Ghost Writer. Where everything the actors use is a Samsung and the novel's Ford with a generic talking GPS is replaced by a BMW using the recently introduced ConnectDrive that even plays a vital role in the plot and announces itself whenever possible. A BMW on the screen for minutes, lots of shots, driving scenes, a short car chase, a little high slope driving, shots of the dials on acceleration, parking/unparking, interior shots, shots of the recently introduced navigation system, humour on the GPS system, and all vital plot points revolving about the BMW.

Pity to see something like this from the creator of Repulsion. If it wasn't so annoying I would actually enjoy the mediocre adaptation of a novel. It does have solid cinematography by Edelman and decent acting. I just paid 30 USD for the sequel to one of The Hire BMW short films.
 
maybe he ditched the ford because polanski felt that he needed to use a younger, i mean newer model.
 
Otis i have all of the original 'The Hire' BMW shorts on DVD if you want them. i havent watched them in years.
 
I never watch trailers but it's obviously a bad habit. It's evident that BMW wanted many BMW shots even on the trailer.

Lets hope a Blow Up remake with Nicolas Cage and Canon dSLRs is not around the corner. I tolerated the Wicker Man remake, but perfect 100x magnifications of dSLR video?
 
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Otis Grapsas said:
I never watch trailers but it's obviously a bad habit. It's evident that BMW wanted many BMW shots even on the trailer.

Lets hope a Blow Up remake with Nicolas Cage and Canon dSLRs is not around the corner. I tolerated the Wicker Man remake, but perfect 100x magnifications of dSLR video?
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if nicolas cage and 100x were taken out of that statement it might actually make some money... :laugh:

im still not convinced DSLRs are up to par just yet. aside from CMOS issues; everything is so proprietary, the rig must fit the camera just so, the audio almost needs to be captured externally, and moire/jello is still so damn prevalent, plus foul codecs.

i RARELY watch movies or television, and only because its my job do i watch ads and music videos; i concentrate on what i am doing not anyone else. that said nicolas cage is not the worlds best actor, and DSLRs are not gods gift to film making.
 
Magnification in films. Blade Runner comes in mind. Their idea of the future digital image zoom consisted of multiple steps on small incremental magnification, by the worst possible user interface conceived by man, phonetic orders, in a distorted CRT with lots of green grids. Now it takes what? 1/2 a second to set a rectangle and zoom using a mouse. No androids yet but we did put science fiction to shame in the user interface department.
 
Otis Grapsas said:
Magnification in films. Blade Runner comes in mind. Their idea of the future digital image zoom consisted of multiple steps on small incremental magnification, by the worst possible user interface conceived by man, phonetic orders, in a distorted CRT with lots of green grids. Now it takes what? 1/2 a second to set a rectangle and zoom using a mouse. No androids yet but we did put science fiction to shame in the user interface department.
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i did a bit of a test a few months back. i took some footage of my fiancee and i in france, just random footage and some of us at the grand prix monaco, and edited it both as best as i could and as fast as i could. she isnt into photography or videography much if at all, and she never said a thing about the million details i could complain about. same with my parents and hers. these are the average viewers; they dont care. in fact my fiancee and both our fathers preferred the direct 60i video to the 24P pulldown footage, our mothers didnt care.

i, on the other hand, bloody hated it; to me it looked horrid. i took stills with the car static, wheels and background in motion, wide aperture, as well as very high shutter speeds which looked generic and static, no conveyance of motion, and guess what? overall, i was 'wrong', because i was not the 'target audience', and i actually like that the technicalities matter, but not so much as to inhibit what/where/how i shoot. everyone preferred the high shutter stills and 60i footage because it all looked 'in focus and higher definition' than the shots i took time and care to compose, rather than the stylistic composures.
 
Zissou said:
i did a bit of a test a few months back. i took some footage of my fiancee and i in france, just random footage and some of us at the grand prix monaco, and edited it both as best as i could and as fast as i could. she isnt into photography or videography much if at all, and she never said a thing about the million details i could complain about. same with my parents and hers. these are the average viewers; they dont care. in fact my fiancee and both our fathers preferred the direct 60i video to the 24P pulldown footage, our mothers didnt care.

i, on the other hand, bloody hated it; to me it looked horrid. i took stills with the car static, wheels and background in motion, wide aperture, as well as very high shutter speeds which looked generic and static, no conveyance of motion, and guess what? overall, i was 'wrong', because i was not the 'target audience', and i actually like that the technicalities matter, but not so much as to inhibit what/where/how i shoot. everyone preferred the high shutter stills and 60i footage because it all looked 'in focus and higher definition' than the shots i took time and care to compose, rather than the stylistic composures.
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I also prefer the high shutter speeds. One of the things I like about uncompressed video is its power to produce perfectly sharp high shutter speed images regardless of the frame contents or camera motion. You get 25 perfect stills per second. On the GOP compressed codecs these frames are a blurry mess because these codecs cannot encode 25 entirely different frames per second. They start showing major artifacts even with a 15% difference from one frame to the next. Combined with global shutter, it's wonderful.
 
Otis Grapsas said:
Magnification in films. Blade Runner comes in mind. Their idea of the future digital image zoom consisted of multiple steps on small incremental magnification, by the worst possible user interface conceived by man, phonetic orders, in a distorted CRT with lots of green grids. Now it takes what? 1/2 a second to set a rectangle and zoom using a mouse. No androids yet but we did put science fiction to shame in the user interface department.
Click to expand...
Ah but in Bladerunner, he's not only magnifying it, he's also moving around angles inside the photo.
 
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