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Comment by tridao | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't have put it better (about lighting). I'm from the younger generation and have always kinda felt that movies from the 90s are too bright

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I always thought it was about visual clarity. Yes we can have very dark scenes now but why would you want to when you can't tell what's happening. Prime example being Battle of Helms Deep vs Battle of Winterfell. I get the feeling of nighttime from both of them but in one I can actually tell what's happening.

It's an interesting question: can filmmakers actually use this newfound range in a meaningful way? I feel the same about those two scenes -- one I can follow, one I cannot. But I wonder if anyone out there is filming high range scenes at night in a good way, and the Battle for Winterfell is just a failed experiment in figuring that out?

The final episode of Midnight Mass comes to mind. And much of The Vvitch. Both aren't totally ideal -- they can be difficult to follow at times -- but I think they use the range to convey chaos and fear of the unknown in a meaningful way.

Curious if anyone has other examples of this pulled off well.

One big hurdle is that just because the camera can deal with the dynamic range, that doesn't mean the viewing setup can. I can watch the Battle of Winterfell just fine on my laptop screen, or with an expensive beamer in a dark room. But on a TV that reflects the bright window in the dark parts of the screen?

The lack of dynamic range in movies meant we got away with glossy TV screens in brightly lit rooms, often combined with compression algorithms that do worse in dark scenes. And with more and more content shot for television or streaming instead of cinema, this will limit what filmmakers can do without causing problems.

We started watching House of the Dragon, and stopped because it was impossible to see anything on the TV in our bedroom with any ambient lights. Only way to watch is on our basement home theater setup which allows us to black out the environment. It's ridiculous. When we watched the GoT final episodes we had to wait until after dark to watch them.

I’ve had this discussion enough times to know that this is a minority opinion, but the battle of winterfell is a masterpiece. The darkness in that scene does so much to add to the tension that it’s essentially another character.

Watch it on a good screen in a dark room, and come away wishing other nighttime shots were done that way.

Edit: darkness is like a good score. It adds a ton but it doesn’t degrade well and people with potato setups won’t be able to see/hear.

GoT had several nighttime battle scenes with great lighting. I think that was the problem. They had to go darker than the fights they already showed.

I don’t understand the reasoning here, are you saying that GoT was a tech demo? To me it made sense that as the show got further along and the situation grew more dire that it would be visibly darker as a metaphor.

Sure, it's a tech demo. If you set the brightness on the demo to 7 early on and say "This is dark," you can then turn it down to 5 later and that will seem even darker. The idea is to start at 7, not at 5, because when you have to turn it down to 3 you can't see anything.

The Craster's fight and the wall fight were both at night and looked great. But maybe they should have been a bit brighter so there was more room for the narrative dimming and actually seeing things. This all feels like betting into an empty pot, though, because the darkness of episode 3 isn't even a top-10 season 8 complaint for me.

The problem is that if you've already done a battle scene that's as dark as reasonable, you have a problem when you then want to "go darker".

The former always seemed more like gloom than night to me. Which can be compelling, but it isn’t a replacement for night.

They were lit and graded with the pre-home-theater home video market in mind.

could be lighting. could also be a deliberate choice to make movies darker[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehsk_-Bjq4

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