Cinematography of “Andor”
pushing-pixels.org
pushing-pixels.org
I'd definitely watch a new movie if it were handled by the same team that made Andor. Prequel, sequel, side story, or re-telling of the originals.
A storyline which I'd argue was strongest in A New Hope & the initial trilogy & was weakened by the increased focus on individual storylines in the anakin & rey trilogies.
I honestly hope Disney will eventually remake them from scratch, with the excuse that FX have progressed dramatically since then. They could even reuse McEwan, considering he's supposed to be an older character already.
Whereas Senator Mothma's story arc had me engrossed from beginning to end. From the complexities of a Senator's social life, to her financial difficulties, to the medieval like politics of marrying off her daughter for the sake of a political and financial alliance, to her risking more and more, to her brave and powerful speech condemning the empire.
There is nothing in the prequels that hits nearly as hard. Because it's all dialog the audience isn't paying attention to because the Jedi stuff is more engaging, and because the political stakes never seem that great.
you have to hand it to Lucas for trying to
significantly expand his space opera by adding
in galactical politics
While "evil guy corrupting a democracy" is certainly a noble and relevant thing to explore, the prequels don't explore that in any useful or fun or insightful way. It's literally just an excuse for pew pew pew lasers and spaceships and laser swords.
(Remarkably, they also make the democracy, and the Jedi who defend it, seem almost universally super boring and dumb and uncool. Making Jedi uncool is some kind of special achievement...)
Even as a real-world allegory, it sucks.
The bad guys in real life aren't even remotely like the Sith, who are physically twisted freaks that are explicitly like "yep! we're evil!"
Real-life bad guys are often good looking and most of them think they're actually doing the right thing.
How did the Rebellion start? How was it organized? What led to building the Death Star? How did they get the plans to give to Leia to give to Luke?
The only part of the prequel trilogy relevant to the story in A New Hope is the final battle between Anakin and Obi Wan.
What's cool about the Force isn't the mechanics of how it works. What's cool about the Force is that it's a mystical thing that's everywhere, binding all living things together.
And we honestly don't need to know how the Rebellion started. It doesn't matter! They are the good guys, and they are messy but kind and loving and cool and they are rebelling against the cold and mean (but also sometimes cool) bad guys. In fact, the more dumb shit I know about them the less I can project myself onto them and see myself in their eyes. Because I have rebelled against mean authoritarian shit before, or at least dreamed of it, but I have never been involved with trade disputes or galactic senates or weird old religions.
This is true IMO 99.99% of the time.
Shockingly to me, Rogue One and Andor are so well done that they are exceptions to the rule.
Giving that concept a thematic heft well beyond its Flash-Gordon-supervillain origins appeared “fully armed and operational” in the story, but in the end it barely rises to subtext.
It's actually better for the Death Star to be unseen, so that its full horror can only be imagined - and hence, becoming greater - in our minds.
But real-world warfare history is full of these expensive disasters that, in hindsight, were spectacularly dumb ideas.
I don't think the Death Star was meant to be practical. More of a terror weapon or trump card, akin in some ways to nuclear weapons whose true value transcends their practical value. The destruction of Alderaan felt like an allegory for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But they still got built, for good political, and psychological reasons that have nothing to do with cost effectiveness.
They aren't ridiculous in the real world. They are in some theoretical worlds with alternate assumptions about what wars actually happen, but...
> They are utterly useless against well armed opponents.
They are quite useful, though, against the opponents that the US has actually fought against since WWII, though, which are mostly not with opponents that would be “well-armed” in the sense needed to make your claim true, are often also outside of the effective force projection radius of such opponents, and often would be inconvenient for US force projection without having convenient sea-mobile airbases with a air wing the same rough size as the median national air force.
In WWII they were absolutely invaluable against a peer enemy in the Pacific theater. They were the single most important bits of military hardware in that war.
They grew more vulnerable over time, first to peer enemies and eventually to rebels funded by sorta-peer enemies like Iran. In 2025, I don't think anybody doubts that a sustained saturation attack would fail to sink or at least prevent a carrier from functioning.
(Though it's also worth noting that the Houthis haven't been able to hit one yet, even with Iranian backing)
Still, a carrier group allows the US to project a tremendous amount of force anywhere in the world, and if a nation state hits one they're going to face an absolutely tremendous amount of military wrath from the US, which kind of gives them a strength beyond their literal combat capability.
There’s a version of Andor that does a bit more than hint that the Death Star is the ultimate (and ultimately doomed) metaphorical reply to Nemik’s manifesto.
In the final analysis, the Death Star is not about power. It’s not about control. It’s a choice, meant to be the last choice for the Rebellion: Submit, or lose everything you love, everything you were, are, will be, in an instant.
But, in the end, it’s this totalizing impulse that is the Empire’s critical weakness. There are always cracks in the edifice of tyranny. Other choices.
The first Star Wars movie is basically the story of the final part of the information's journey. It only gained depth with Andor and Rogue One.
But also yes, it's the closest thing to the original theme since the second movie.
The empire is a compelling thing to make stories about, and what Andor does well is actually make the whole thing believable. It’s not a bunch of cackling supervillains aiming to be maximally evil, like it is in so many of the movies… it’s an actually-believable thing, filled with characters with their own motivations, none of whom are explicitly evil by themselves, but through all of them evil is done. The episodes of season 1 when Andor is arrested and sent to prison are the most compelling and actually-scary depictions of the empire ever put to film. It’s just that good.
Whoever governs really should implement a R&D program to eradicate the midi-chlorian infestation and rid the galaxy of the scourge of both Jedi and Sith in one fell swoop.
I don't think we'll see anything on the same level as Andor again; they already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2; it's simply too expensive and costs too much time to do it this well. But I do hope that future Star Wars shows will try to follow at least some aspects of its example: better writing, more human stories, focus on core themes, not on fan service or milking established characters.
Of course production values will be lower, but I can live with that if they get the other stuff right.
Wow that's a shame. I had no idea. Assuming they could've kept up the quality, that would've been amazing for their reputation and retention.
He realised that everything, absolutely everything in Star Wars needs to be designed, that it took ages to do, and that it would be forever to make 5 seasons. So he pitched to Diego to only make one more.
Thank god. There's not enough meat on the bone, the writing would never have been good enough to support this.
We need more excellent, tightly spun stories.
If we didn't have them, it would turn it into a drag. A dramatic year looks much more impressive when you compare it to what was a year before, than when you look at it day by day.
I think there was more than enough room to fill at least another season. Maybe two.
But hey, I'm more than happy we got this much.
These I think were 12 episode seasons, maybe five 8 episode seasons would have been better.
From some of the interviews I saw it seemed like the time aspect was the big driver. One in particular Diego Luna was talking about a conversation he had with Gilroy and Gilroy was like "God it'd take us 10 years to make this". I get that logistically that can be a tough thing to do with actors, and also it'd be a bit odd to have Diego Luna be very noticeably older in Season 5 than he is in Rogue One.
In my opinion nothing ever came even close and I gave up on SW after the second Kylo Ren movie. Rouge one was cool though, also first episodes of Mandalorian..
Should I really try Andor after all the bad stuff Disney made?
A few days ago I watched the new LILO and Stitch and that was great, so maybe good people still work at Disney …
It's difficult to articulate Andor's quality to someone who hasn't seen it & is framing it in the context of things like Mandalorian. I can't stress enough that it's absolutely not just a "better" tv show than Mandalorian, &c. Not only is that an understatement, but it's also a fundamentally different beast to those shows. It's in a different category of quality.
We are not. Andor is the best Star Wars ever made, full stop. IMHO, it surpasses, by far, anything Lucas ever did.
At least X-Wings, TIE Fighters, Corellian Corvettes, Imperial Shuttles and Star Destroyers. Not a fan of the Millennium Falcon tbh.
Turns out that makes for pretty good adult oriented star wars.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Shadows
Krennic's meeting on kalkite:
* structured like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference
* takes place at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehlsteinhaus
the Aldhani heist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_Tiflis_bank_robbery
Ferrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
Vel Sartha:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Dugdale
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolours_Price
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
Kleya Marki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan
the Dhanis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people#Discriminatio...
escape from Narkina 5:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_Prison_escape
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen_concentration_camp
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobibor_uprising
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba%E2%80%93Wetzler_report
Rix Road:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporals_killings
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shireen_Abu_Akleh#Funeral
Mon Mothma's speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wels#Speech_in_opposition
Ghormans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Resistance
Ghorman massacre:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlatelolco_massacre
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabaa_massacre
* and perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_weavers%27_uprising
Obviously the comparisons aren't exact, but it's clear the show had a great many sources of inspiration (or maybe history rhymes as it always has).
You can't escape your influences, and you don't need to.
Compared to other Sci Fi movies at the time, Star Wars introduced a grungier, lived in universe where space ships got banged up and dirty, various species hung out in treacherous backwater saloons, and smugglers were just trying to make a living in the shadow of the Empire.
That's the reality Andor is set in, without the Jedi, and you really feels the difficulty of living in that reality without magic powers or a laser sword.
The latter episodes were incredibly laboured, with the narrative being spelt out, as if to a child, by various characters. I think it may have always been like that, but the look and feel overwhelmed the ridiculous dialogue for a while.
If they were more clever with the body language of the main character, then the others wouldn't have had to carry the direction of the storyline so heavily verbally. Again, I think this was done well early, but kinda lost in the desperation for grogu storyline and screen time cuteness.
I'd have to watch it again, and right now it ain't worth the time.
Haven't seen Andor, but now it's "on the list".
It really nails the feeling of watching an old Western movie where a cowboy bonds with an innocent person who needs protection against all odds.
There’s a bit where the main character very obviously levels up and gets to choose a power-up. Then he sees somebody else with a different power-up and goes “wow, I should get one of those”. That confirmed to me that it wanted to be a videogame rather than a serious drama.
I recently rewatched season one in preparation for season two with my partner who hadn't watched it, and she wanted to give up around the same point I did previously and only powered through for the same reason. She was also happy that she finished
And from there it was pretty much further and further downhill, with occasional glimpses of hope that were quickly dashed. I tried to watch a couple more entries after the prequels, but I finally gave up and wrote it off. I've missed almost the entire last 10 years of content.
A buddy at work finally convinced me to watch Andor, and I'm so grateful he did. It is superb. I read a reddit comment that said, "This is the show that made me feel ok to be a Star Wars fan again," and I can't agree more. In a lot of ways it still feels different from Star Wars. It's hard to explain because it's in the same universe, and has similar themes (which is why it doesn't feel totally out of place), but the tone is different. It's not about Jedi knights on a mission from destiny. It's about ordinary people making decisions, and choosing hope, in the face of the oppressive might of the Empire. But god is it good. Excellent writing, great acting, suspense, intrigue, nuance, and powerful emotional scenes (that are earned by proper story buildup).
So all of that is to say, it might not be exactly what you expect, and it won't simply be "Star Wars, again," but yes you should absolutely watch it. It's a fine work of art.
A big part of the problem is that these movies were written, basically, for 12-year old boys. You're not going to be able to get that spark back as an adult, and it's not easy to make a movie that appeals so strongly to both demographics. And much like wu-tang, star wars (and other fun stories) is for the children. Andor is at least more adult-oriented, I think.
So, do I like the new movies? No, I literally slept through the last two they were so boring, and I found the lack of coherent plot baffling. And yes, it does make me a little sad. But seeing little girls dressed up like Rey, I'm reminded that there are better things for me to care about.
But there's a reason why the star wars fandom has such a stank reputation, and it's 100% because adult men care way too much about something meant for children to a quite creepy extent. Two things immediately come to mind: 1) the explicit and physical sexualization of Leia, which I understand but definitely don't think was necessary in retrospect (at least not so ham-handedly), and 2) the abuse of the guy who did the Jar Jar Binks voice acting. It's not his fault Lucas wrote the character as a moronic alien speaking patois. I wasn't aware of the abuse until long after it was over, but I adored jar jar binks as an eight year old boy and didn't understand why he was thereafter sidelined. This makes me also question whether criticisms by adults of the new content is a reflection of what we actually loved growing up. Could a character as weird as Yoda make it into a film now without catering much stronger to people eager to deconstruct him into eg orientalist stereotypes? Would Luke really be allowed to kiss his sister? Would Han Solo be allowed to shoot first, really?
Even the sexualization of Leia—look I'm into pulp fiction, I understand what shallow sexual stereotypes can deliver in terms of entertainment, it wasn't and still isn't crazy. You can see the same phenomenon in the current explosion of mass-published erotica ("romance"). But the stories I've heard about what Fisher was subjected to make me look at the fandom with pretty severe prejudice. It makes nerds look bad, and I also think the success of Indiana Jones shows that this wasn't necessary. It's also not the easiest thing to explain to a child or teenager who grasps something of the power dynamic between Jabba the Hutt and Leia but doesn't have the social knowledge or, frankly, cynicism to make the sense of it we do as adults.
Season 2 of the ILM documentary on D+ goes into this, it’s a really fascinating documentary for folks into special effects and/or star wars.
I've never given up on Star Wars, though obviously there's little good to be said about the sequel trilogy and much of the Disney output. It took me a long time to even see Rogue 1, but I recognized it was something special, and Andor even moreso. (Though I will admit I like eps. 2 and 3 of the prequel trilogy more than I did at first.)
Star Wars after Jedi is garbage. Lucas got me with those awful prequels and Disney got me with the first 2 new movies. I will never watch another Star Wars anything outside of the original 3 movies.
Either you never really abandon your Star Wars fandom or you're lying. There can be no other choice.
One cannot be shat upon by corporate hucksters that much and still think, "okay. I'll give 'em one more chance to shit in my eyes and ears"
Is just not possible.
Update: Clone Wars especially benefits from finding a good best-of episode guide to help move the story along.
Andor (at least Season 1) is very slow, boring, suffers from "static heads talking at each other" cinematography of modern movies [1], main character is just not a great actor.
All that said, it's definitely worth a watch:
- most, if not all, major characters (apart from the protagonist) are very compelling, chew through every scene they are in, and are great matches for their parts
- Empire is finally shown as a proper huge, relentless, uncaring bureaucratic machine it must have been. Run mostly by efficient ruthless bureaucrats.
- Rebels are not angels, are not a single conformist mass of do-gooders
- The dialog is mostly great
It's a much better show than Mandalorian. It's arguably the best Star Wars after the original trilogy.
[1] Most modern productions are incapable of shooting "walking and talking at the same time". Most modern movies and TV shows have actors placed against each other rigidly, with not a hint of motion, as they say their lines at each other
I think like the Asimov books, Star Wars is best as fantasy history. The forward looking ones (that horrific “final” trilogy) are just awkward stories.
(I think the prequels were worse than the sequels but they're collectively pretty unmemorable.)
Any way you cut it, it’s really cool how people consume them in different ways, and there’s enough material that over time we can just discard garbage like 8 hours of walking through the desert.
Rogue One was my favourite Star Wars production before Andor, now I wish they could throw it away and remake it as Andor Season 3. It deserves to be told in full.
- Andor running into Pigperson and Grover on Yedha
- That entirely random 20-sec scene with C-3PO and R2-D2
- "Red Leader, standing by" was archive footage from A New Hope (and arguably a tribute to the late actor)
More the presence of the Force and Jedi lore. They were so close to not having that be part of Rogue One but were still forced to include the mystical super beings in some way. Andor was able to fully detach from that baggage, focusing on the little people doing their part. And when they did bring in the Force healer in the second season, it was exactly how you'd expect average people to respond to a mystical power that you didn't directly witness. Hope, faith, skepticism, denial, rejection.
As far as Vader goes...it does make you wonder if he's just toying with Obi-Wan when he meets him like 3 days later...
I disagree.
If you set aside the difference in special effects capabilities, Vader is clearly being cautious in the light saber fight with Obi Wan on the Death Star. And we know that's because Obi Wan kicked his ass on Mustafar (THE KENOBI MINI SERIES NEVER HAPPENED I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT). And then Obi Wan never actually intends to fight Vader in earnest. He intends to become a force ghost all along. Still one step ahead of Anakin's understanding of the force.
10-20 minutes of static talking heads, 5 minutes of mediocre action. Repeat until the end. Meaningless side-quests. The final is a thousand cliches one after another culminating in a "main computer at the end of a rickety walkway" and "a kiss at the sunset".
The only reason it's hailed as the greatest movie ever is because so much of the Star Wars is just objectively shit.
They don't kiss.
And that's not a sunset.
There's nothing subversive.
> It's an ending about sacrifice that wouldn't make sense in any other context.
There are a million ways to make an ending about sacrifice. Rogue One chose the worst one, after a lot of other ridiculous choices
I'd argue they already proved this with Rogue One. Too bad we had the Abrams/Johnson dumpster fire.
> On the other hand, I guess it's still a business, at the end of the day.
You're right, in the sense that Andor was an exception regarding every other SW show on Disney+ for the past 4 years. All had high production costs and seems like Andor is the only one which recouped itself. Acolyte was a spectacular viewship failure.
So the business logic would be to cap costs, most likely in half for now on. I don't have high expectations of Disney learning the right lessons from Andor & Tony.
[1] https://www.thewrap.com/star-wars-andor-revenue-disney-plus/
The inverse question too: why do streaming platforms cancel popular shows? Watcher count doesn't seem to be the metric I think it is.
I think Rogue One is the best Star Wars ever and Andor is in the same vein. But.
The savior of the Star Wars brand is always going to be the latest lightsaber-fest for 10-year-olds. That creates customer loyalty that will survive forever. Those kids then grow up and get to bitch about the new lightsaber-fest, and to fawn over the artsy drama.
Basically treasure Island/ goonies in space, it is campier than Andor but does what it aims for amazingly. Cause andor can get quite heavy on the fighting fascism and sometimes finding a treasure map is more the vibe than seeing holocaust planning meetings
I didnt watch anything mandalorian past season 2, never watched boba fet, obiwan or ahsoka because I thought it would be Dave Filoni getting action figures and bumping them together, and friends who watched them agree with my intuition. But yeah of the new star wars stuff Andor and Skeleton Crew are both amazing in very different ways
They should make a new Skeleton Crew show every year with a whole new cast.
It really hits the lighthearted adventure button that to me is the core of Star Wars.
It feels like there's plenty of room in the timeline between those movies to keep telling stories about the rebellion against the Empire, in the same tone as Andor.
The other thing that has always plagued SW is the fact they can travel through hyperspace, have the tech to destroy planets, but largely lack CCTV, autopilot, effective homing missiles, HD displays, etc. It's a weird mix of 70s tech and super sci-fi.
It's like, if you were leading a rebellion, would you have your secret base rigged with remotely detonated explosives, or need to go back and cackhandedly manually destroy your comms, etc?
Suspension of disbelief is stretched to breaking point sometimes.
It is a weird mix, but the best thing to do is just leave any desire for realistic physics or Terran historic progress at the box office.
Yes, but by sucking big. The story is nonexistent, the scenes with children do not blend in the story, the story is boring as hell.
One point Nuyens makes in a few different ways is that they used a variety of tools and techniques at every stage. People often have simplistic, extreme viewpoints like "modern CGI can do anything" or "CGI looks fake and weightless, practical effects are better". But here's somebody with a big part in making a fantastic-looking show, who very explicitly embraces multiple approaches. Massive real sets with CGI enhancements; sometimes green screens, sometimes old-fashioned backdrop paintings, sometimes LED screens. It sounds like close collaboration between teams in different areas was key, like the VFX team working with the production designer from the start. "Some shots started VFX and then became sets."
It sounds like a big success for an artisanal approach, where every element is a bespoke construction by cross-functional experts, versus a modular approach where each team has a position in the workflow with well-defined inputs and outputs.
But maybe it's not worth the time and money, and the "worse is better" approach wins out? I hope not, or least I hope we get more shows aspiring to be as good as this.
On a smaller scale, interesting to hear how much equipment on a high-end film set is now wireless. That must be a massive change from just a few years ago, where you'd have had massive cables snaking everywhere.
This is the definition of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, and they're still some of the best-looking films I've ever seen, far surpassing the modern UE slop.
That said, I do agree, they made something truly incredible that has stood the test of time. And I wish we could have more of it (but I'll also take better working conditions every day until we figure out how to have both.)
They didn't have to. It's cinema quality. They could have spent less and gotten a goodly fraction of the quality. But I'm really glad they did.
Shogun did this too, I think also The Witcher.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsAndor/comments/15rjjcg/why_...
Like they actually took the actors to Coruscant to shoot scenes. Felt so much more lived in than Coruscant in the prequels.
"Lived in" is absolutely right. That's something people always praised about the original movies, but that was about the smokey dive bars, messy aircraft hangars and broken-down machinery. Getting that lived-in feel for massive Imperial buildings and cities is a great new twist on it.
whether real sets like on andor on fake ones like the man in the high castle.
And despite how good Andor (and Rogue One fits here as well) was, I think there’s some merit to wanting to go see a film that makes you feel good. There are certain films and books I won’t put myself through (especially fiction) more than once because I don’t want something ultimately meaningless adding stress to my life. It’s supposed to be an enjoyable escape. So Andor/Rogue One come pretty close to that point for me.
In a New Hope as Luke and Ben are inspecting the damage to the Jawa transport, Ben does say "Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise." Then the stormtroopers go on the rest of the series missing everything they aim at.
> Leia: They let us go. It was the only reason for the ease of our escape.
> Han: Easy? You call that easy?
> Leia: They're tracking us.
One aspect that’s really striking when you see Andor is how little the Jedi and the Force have to do with it; which highlights how central they are to the original trilogy. (Rogue One does a pretty deft job of bridging those worlds, eg with Donnie Yen’s character.)
And the Force was a big part of the charm of the original movies, right? All the scenes with Luke and Yoda are wonderful, for example. I wouldn’t want to take that away, any more than I’d want to shoehorn the Jedi into Andor.
I think the real problem with the original movies starts with the prequels, which doubled down on all the Jedi business but managed to make it feel very pedestrian, rather than mystical.
The sequel movies could have been great if they had really tried to explore the collapse of the Empire and what the reconstruction would look like, rather than shamelessly retreading everything beat-for-beat. The Last Jedi did at least try to be different, but its ideas were completely scattershot and (I think) not very fruitful.
The less Force, the better in my opinion. Save super-powers for comic-book movies.
In the recent Disney movies (Andor being the exception) it’s like they gave everyone the force, everyone is a super hero, it’s bombastic and annoying.
Let me run around with a rock and a stick for the first hour. Then give me a sword that looks cheap but I will cherish it. Then take it away. Let me earn it when I am awesome in the end.
To many games treat you like a toddler that wants shiny things. Yeah I want shiny things, but I want them when I deserved them. Similarily, yeah, I want powerful heros, but they have to earn it as well.
Sure, you'll be a badass at the end, but you're going to earn it. :)
If your standard for what science fiction is us The Expanse then almost all of what's considered science fiction is fantasy.
Star Wars doesn't even claim to attempt this. It is a world of entirely made up rules and places for the sake of the story. There is nothing wrong with that. But it completely misses this key feature of sci fi.
There isn't a very clear delineation between the two genres. Star Trek also crosses this line into pure fantasy pretty consistently (an anomaly that compells everybody to sing and eventually produces a Klingon boy band performance? Or one that gives everybody amnesia and turns them into actors in Shakespeare drama - costumes and all?).
I'm not saying the distinction doesn't exist - The Hobbit isn't SF and Ringworld isn't high fantasy, but I am saying that between the extremes, it's mostly just vibes. There is no objective reason not to consider Star Wars science fiction, some people just find the space wizards too silly (while having a bookshelf full of "The author's barely disguised fetish or hyperfixation but In Spaaaaace.")
I wasn't in both cases, communists considered it a capitalist propaganda about US might and banned it (maybe just heard about Star wars being US space program, took just first result on soviet gugel so to speak, but fight for freedom at all costs is generally not something you want to encourage in dictatorship).
They are an interesting flick (original trilogy), but nothing really magical for me in them. As mentioned by others they feel like 80s pop sci fi movie, nothing more, characters and acting are... mediocre and it all feels aimed at kids/teens. A lot of creativity with sets, but that's not primary reason for me to watch a movie.
Since I refuse (can't even) to be swayed emotionally of some good ol' memories from growing up, prequels felt even more childish (maybe apart from ep3), and this trend continued with last 3 movies. Rogue one was by far the best experience in whole SW universe, so if this goes even further happy to experience it.
That is to say, a sci-fi setting. Andor would not be correctly put in the sci-fi genre, rather in the political thriller genre.
I guess in short, I'm saying that you really don't have to be open to the sci fi genre to enjoy Andor.
And once you have relatable psychology you also get politics and weaponization of information (what the show was mostly about) - political thriller. Agree, those elements were damn good ones. And I loved the utilization of WW 2 analogues - French resistance, Spanish civil war, Wansee conference etc etc
I would say the show was very _grounded_ in that the high stakes were about humans doing human things.
What sets Andor apart is _excellence_ and (partly budget driven) restraint.
Not only was the acting superb, the script was intelligent.
But then the attention to visual detail was next level as well. The sets and costumes were mind blowingly good. For example I was convinced they had to had found some real life location for the Ghorman plaza (nope, built set + CGI). I would love to have a plaza like that. Not many shows have so good fictional architecture you would love to see the real thing.
So I was totally impressed with the show. But in my books it’s still sci-fi. It’s probably the best recent serialized sci-fi show in the last decade along with the Expanse.
If I’m reading between the lines what you are saying is that ”Andor is actually intelligent and high quality art … sci-fi can’t be high quality art”? I’m exaggerating to make a point.
Nope not at all, for example I personally would put the Expanse firmly in the genre of sci-fi. The major themes it explores centre around its setting; it doesn't happen to exist in a futuristic space setting; the entire show would cease to function as a concept without it. Major plot lines exist specifically to explore the "what-ifs" of that fictional future. And honestly, while I acknowledge it's intelligent and extremely well loved by its fans, it's one that I'd have trouble recommending to people that aren't big into sci fi, for that reason.
But compare that to something like Firefly, where's it's basically a heist/western that happens to be set in outer space.
Personally I have very hard time predicting why someone would enjoy _some_ fictional elements but not others. If someone does not like ”made-up” fiction then Andor still has many ”fantasy” elements to potentially put them off.
IMHO the idea that humans will colonize the solar system one dat is much more mainstream nowadays - so the setting in Expanse is in many ways much more grounded than in Star Wars where the latter is pure cinematic fantasy.
But maybe viewers don’t care about the milieu and just want relatable plot lines? There Andor is more familiar for sure.
They have some of it too. But it's a very well crafted scene showing how normal people would react to the force weirdos.
The Force though... yeah, as much as I'm a big fan of SW, the whole concept leans way too hard into soft magic territory, at least to my taste.
No, Finn used it fine in defense when fighting a trooper in TFA. It is useful even without the Force. We can only blame sequels for that :P
Although yeah, when compared to other weapons at the time, they seem overpowered, I agree, never thought of that.
Even in ESB, Han Solo uses it to cut open the ton ton
As a physical media guy, I'm happy that Disney decided to release season 1 on 4k UHD. And I hope to buy season 2 when it hits the shelves.
(I think that's in Lost Worlds of 2001, which is a fun read)
Or else.
Directors shooting something for streaming: please watch your show on a laptop or cheaper TV in a realistic bedroom or living room setting (with daylight leaking in or with some lights turned on). We don’t all have reference grade monitors and a pitch black studio. In fact, most consumers don’t have those things. If you really want to keep the cinematic purity, could you at least make a “normie edit” that pumps up the brightness?
I’d rather they preserve the dynamic range than succumb to the loudness war.
a lot of video players don't get it right consistently codec-to-codec, even the gold standard FOSS classics (VLC, MPV) and wrappers like iina on mac.
i typically use iina and vlc as fallback, but wasn't able to get either to play correctly, even though they're fine players for some other examples. i wound up subbing to disney plus for a month to watch it properly.
if you're viewing MKVs of unknown provenance, use an HDR version to ensure it's not a bad encode. if you're not viewing on an HDR display, double-check that tone mapping is enabled and configured correctly.
Whole time I thought there was really no point watching on an OLED or in HDR cause it's not taking advantage of either.
You can even see it on the photos in the article. The BTS photographs have contrast and blacks while the stills from the show are muted and gray.
The whole series basically looked like it was trying to recreate the "Shot on Google Pixel" look and completely opposite of HBO's black on black on black.
I wish the crew behind it would be allowed to continue the story until the fall of the emperor, so we could get the whole "rise and fall of the empire" story told with the same quality, depth and overall "tone" for lack of a better word.
Three more seasons taking place during the same time as the original trilogy would be nice, but of course keeping the Skywalker and Jedi stuff mostly in the background.
A similar show as Andor with storylines taking place on Alderaan and the construction site of the death star, say.
Doesn't sound very relatable for today's audiences.
For someone who hadn’t watched the show, the article is a pain to read. The images are thrown in randomly, there is no relationship between the text and the images. Every images is pointlessly labelled “Cinematography of “Andor” by Christophe Nuyens”. The interview seems to have covered things in detail, like going into specific scenes and sets, and lens.. etc., but the accompanying images are utterly useless in showing any of that to the reader.
I gave up after a while.
Most likely promotional shots. They used them as examples of the work, and as stills they hold up. I thought the article cromulent.
I can understand it might be difficult to understand the context of some set descriptions without having seen the show but I think that would also be true with relevant still images as you'd still lack character & narrative context.
Honestly can't see how they could've formatted the article any better than they did. Seems fine.
But most importantly, I think Andor is less strong without the original movies. The looming threat and the Mothma high-society scenes become a lot less powerful. Same for the insights into the Imperial machine. And even the meaning of the Rebellion itself. I'd argue while technically great, well written etc. without the SW backdrop the storytelling suffers quite a bit.
I have friends that I can't convince to watch it because they are just too done with that universe in general.
But that's the thing, Andor could be outside of StarWars and just its own thing because the world building that it does on its own is excellent, the premise (empire vs rebellion/revolutionaries) is mostly intemporal.
The Force part was hamfisted. It was clear that they were trying to avoid "midochlorians" but didn't know how it handle it, and didn't spend any time to develop it organically. It felt more like highbrow fanservice connecting Cassian to Luke. It's similar to the Kleya hospital/flashback episode, which could well have been its own 3 episode arc and gotten time to breathe like the S1 prison arc. Since they cut the project down to be 4 3-episode mini seasons after S1, instead of 6+ episodes each, they rushed some story arcs and sublots that end up just being presented as bullet points.
WARNING, SPOILERS
The story is not properly resolved. If you have no SW knowledge, the threat isn't even very clear. Some galaxy government lead by an emperor is building a weapon, shown once. If S2 is the end it's pretty unsatisfying in general. The politics are kind of unclear.
The sacrifice of Mothma is very unclear without a SW background. A senator said something and had to flee to a planet (oversimplified).
Without knowledge of R1, the killing machine super droid is down right comical/a sloppy resolve for things.
Without SW knowledge the (imo) best part of the Imperial machinery, bureaucracy, power hunger also becomes awkward at times and frankly less interesting. Syril is my favorite character and Dedra probably second. I found their arcs great, every single non-SW viewer I talked to found them "boring", "that guy with the annoying mother was strange" and "why did they have to be a couple, that's pretty unimaginative writing" etc.
END SPOILERS
My personal quibbles are that the crashed tie episode was pretty bad filler. I have not heard anyone say anything good about it.
Someone else already mentioned minor technical problems (field scene).
I found Diego Luna's acting ok but not great. It felt wooden at times. To some extend that's subjective but it doesn't compare to the lead acting I have in my personal top tier (Breaking Bad for example)
I get that it felt like a bit of a diversion from the main story, but thematically the show is largely about the less palatable realities of being part of a resistance movement. That episode is about the reality that you'll probably end up getting waylaid by squabbling idiots along the way. I think it earns its place in the show.
I absolutely loved it. So much that I'm now watching the entirety of Star Wars film and TV in chronological order (I'm in the Clone Wars series now, before the timeline overlaps Revenge of the Sith, and I went out of sequence to watch Rogue One to see the conclusion of the cast from Andor). The full chronology can be found here[1], though I used a bit of JS to extract just the films, tv shows, and video specials as a markdown table to put in Obsidian
So as someone who can say I pretty much didn't have the context you claim is necessary to appreciate Andor, I can tell you that it 100% stands out as a masterpiece to people who are unfamiliar with the rest of the Star Wars lore.
[1]: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_canon_media
1) the themes it explores. Things like fighting fascism has been done to death by this point, half of YA is "goverment military and bad, young girl gets a love triangle and defats them". Andor shows the slowing, encroching effect of military rule. What a prision industrial complex looks like (from fake incarcerations to unescapable sentences). What colonialism looks like (bleak pragmatic bureocracy about mineral extraction while discussing genocide over hors d'oeuvres). How political silencing happens (mothma cannot find allies because they all understand they have very limited political capital and have to be very careful were they spend it). Those are serious topics, and you basically do not see them outside of shows which care on systems like Wire on the drug police system, or House of card with the political congress system. Certainly not on star wars
2) Cinematography. The show is shot like a spy thriller from the get go. It makes sense with Gilroy previous Bourne experience but for a disney property opening up with killing 2 cops outside a brothel sets a tone not seen previously. Thats carried with every arc having instantly recognisable look and feel, from the cold harsh lights of Narkina 5, to the warm beach vibes of Niamos (space miami), the future vibe of corusant or the jungle vibe of Yanvin 4.
3) Monologues. Most shows cant pull off one monologue without it looking awful, this show manages plenty of them, sometimes in the same episode.
4) The topics its willing to address. I mentioned themes before, but those themes can be explored in many ways. Prequels dealt with growing fascism in the republic then turned empire, but it wouldnt say genocide or have a isb officer talk about how annoying it is the army wants their interrogation techniques because their torture works so well. Or show insignificant middle managers so untouchable they attempt to rap* a main character. Saying the empire is very powerful and scary is one thing, showing how they behave with that power is way more chilling.
5) The carnival of interesting people explored. Most shows have a few main characters and then supporting characters whose mission is to not have a personality and be a plot device of some kind. Here outside of the incredible inner life of even minor characters you get to see the journey of peopel as varied as Andor, a colonial genocide survivor who was a petty thief and became a high ranking member of the rebellion. Luthen, an ex empire soldier who after crumbling on a mission rescues Kleya and becomes one of the leaders of the rebellion from within Corusant, sort of batman/bruce wayne. Vel, a nepo baby from Chandrilla who joins the rebellion. Syril, a dadless little shit who is obssesed with following the rules thinking he would get far inside the empire system. Dedra, an orphan that cares so much about results she might be actually responsible for the fall of the empire. Kleya, another genocide survivor, taken in by Luthen and basically nightwing to his batman. Like whether you like womanly women, or tomboy super killers and whether you like manly rebels who dont follow the rules to super organised overachiever you can find a character with an entire arc in andor for you.
I could keep going but honestly its just a great show. From ideas like making 3 episode arcs, to how well it ties into Rogue one I think there is so much to praise there
I'm quite sure that they were empty on ideas in terms of scenario, so they tried to spread the longest possible what would have fitted in a single movie of 2 hours.
I think that also explains why they didn't manage to do more than 2 seasons when their original goal was 5.
"Think about a planet like Ghorman in rebellion. A planet of wealth and status."
"And if it goes up in flames?"
"It will burn... very brightly."
There's barely any recent popular TV or movies I can think of with the level of subtle, complex, morally grey themes Andor explored.
I'm sure it's a combination of techniques (locations, Volume, CGI, green screen, etc), because that's what keeps your eye guessing. But I'm continually blown away by how expansive it is in both the foreground and background (and moving between the two).
I saw an interview with Tony Gilroy where he said he didn't make use of it, but I can't recall if he was referring to Season 1 or both, so it might've been introduced in S2.
Kirill: The show spends a lot of time at the apartment with Bix. How big was it?
Christophe: The nice thing about that set is that everything you see is captured in camera, including the view outside which was an LED wall. That wall allowed us to be more creative and find some extra shots. You have shots from the outside where you see the city below in reflection with raindrops on the window. You see cars passing and light coming in.
My two favorite shows ever are Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (w/ Alec Guinness), The Wire, The Simpsons seasons 1-8.
Denise Gough and Elizabeth Dulau are particularly good.
(albeit every single other performance in the massive ensemble cast was also excellent)
Second season is great, but I still appreciate first more. S01E09 has one of the best space battles I ever saw in sci-fi. Ever.
I suppose there's more good examples that could be mined from the show.
Ties in well with Andor as the book discusses, realistically, how the rot set in with the Republic. How it could be transformed into the Empire with little initial protest. How the Empire sustained itself via a mix of military control, propaganda, and moving towards making the population feel helpless and thus apolitical. And how the blind sides of a rigid, fascist system led to the Rebellion winning despite the huge power disparity.
It's the perfect companion book for the series. And is a good introductory book on how authoritarianism takes hold, how the insurgents can exploit weaknesses, and what should be done, post-rebellion, to keep the fascists from returning. I think many people, who otherwise would not be obsessive about Star Wars lore, would find it interesting.
On a side note: the book does address the events of Abrams sequel trilogy with an interesting angle. That the New Republic essentially didn't do enough de-Nazification and that led to their downfall. This approach to those terrible movies doesn't entirely succeed, but does make them a little more interesting. And matches what we've seen in real life reconstructions after the downfall of various regimes.
I’ve been there. Too much tech and compatibility among them is a major source of frustration. For a movie tech guys I see that as opportunity to come up with an OS where everything can be integrated where all stakeholders being users and multiple technologies working together with cohesion
But, the reason it probably did so well was they let people like Christophe just make something cool instead of overly commercial.
I'd love to see VCs start funding film production like they fund video games. Maybe then we'd have a genuinely new film the quality of Andor, that was as popular as the original Star Wars instead of another thing inside of Star Wars.
Something genuinely new, there's only been remakes recently.
I just want a new universe to geek out on.
Not to mention I don't even put Andor in the category of a typical Star Wars story. It's just great geopolitical writing. The boardroom scenes were some of my favorites of any show I've ever watched.
However, I had previously watched a few eps of S1, and everything was fine and very well made.. but I just didnt care about anything that was going on, so I stopped.
Just wondering did anyone else feel the same about S1 and then get blown away by S2?
S2 has great, great acting and characters along-with good pacing since they apparently jammed in at-least 2 seasons into a single season. It starts out strong too.
S2 shows the larger republic and it's politics and factions. This gives you a broader galactic context of what's going on. This enamored me and got me to go back and re-watch the first 6 movies. I originally watched them as a teen and was lost at the time. Really started to appreciate the setting and story now.
I need to go back and watch the remainder of S1 though since they say it gets better later.
No. This is why everything is so dark. With film, cinematographers had to hedge their bets. They could not risk a scene being too dark, something they would not be sure of until the film was developed. Today, digital tech means they can see the results live on monitor screens. So they can cut the lights and make everything super dark without worry. Forget "natural". There is nothing natural about watching a screen in the dark where your eyes cannot properly adjust as they would in the real world. Also, I want to watch TV in my kitchen without having to douse every light in the house.
LCD screens can't do true black. Film, CRT, and OLED can.
The darkness problem is also quite annoying, though varies a lot by show. I just started watching Silo, and while I understand most scenes are supposed to take place in a pretty dark environment (inside of a silo), everything is just so dark in almost all scenes.
Watching on my 7.1 setup was actually more annoying than watching on my computer with 2.0. There's a very obvious bass-boost as if they assumed there isn't subwoofer in the setup, and dialog didn't get any clearer with a dedicated center, it was still kinda floaty across the front. Surround channels just sounded like they echo'd the L/R channels.
So yeah, not seeing shit can be natural. Whether it is good for the narration or 100% of your viewers like it is a different can of worms. Let's only say that the cinematographers thought making the viewer have to concentrate on what is going on at that point was benefitial.
The "natural" part about shooting digitally is that you can go outside and use a camera in dusk and the picture isn't all black or incredibly grainy as it was back when you shot at film. And that's about it. In digital you can shoot with available light only in more situations than before. In the end cameras perceive light situations different than the human eye so it is still the task of the cinematographer to do that translation.
Spoilers:
People seem to gush over Maarva's hologram speech, I thought it was pretty weak (it started good then it was fumbled).
Maarva's act of rebellion should have been killing herself to deliver her speech at the right time. She's old and sickly, so it'd add gravitas and cost effectively nothing. Then she should have said that she'd resisted all her life, but killing herself was her first act of rebellion. Then the bomb that gets thrown into the Empire ranks should have been baked into her brick, giving her the chance to fight posthumously.
They had nearly all the plot points set up so nicely for the slam dunk, I was perplexed when it ended so dryly.
They really take their time filming this kinda stuff so don't hold your breath.
There indeed is absolutely no planned sequel to or continuation of Andor, nor currently any known plans for the creator of it to create anything else in this franchise. I'd sure like it if he did, though.
They're not making a movie; the entire series is a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One.
In any case, i would be careful with such absolute statements
It is logical enough to conclude that a story ending in two intelligence agents flying off for a time-sensitive meeting with a confidential informant, is an immediate prequel to the story that begins with the same two intelligence agents landing and meeting that confidential informant.
This is not quite the same situation as the end of Rogue One and A New Hope, where some people make the argument that Rogue One ends just a few minutes before ANH begins; I am not convinced by that argument, although the cinematography certain seems to be leading us there.
The ending scene of RO is the data handoff and narrow escape of the Tantive IV with Leia, R2-D2, and C-3PO on it.
How is that not a direct continuity into the opening scene of A New Hope?
I think you might've fallen for some of the jokes about it being a prequel.
No. A masterpiece would not have any fluff. There are all number of scenes/characters that could be cut from Andor without any real impact. Entire scenes and characters could be dropped without impacting the narrative. (The entire forest planet sequence imho.)
Andor is a product of the "for your consideration" form of review made popular by the Academy (oscars). Each scene is excellent. Each scene is a cinematic tour de force. But they are all independent scenes. Rearrange the order, shuffle the scene deck, and little changes as the scenes are not dependent on each other. The overall narrative is thin. That may make for good/popular television but it is not deserving of "masterpiece".
I would say that there is not a single scene that can be removed from these movies without negatively impacting the story/theme/narrative.
Some say that Star Wars IV and V fit this definition but I would say there is some eyecandy fluff that could be cut.
Appropriating Saint Exupéryian (et al.) notions regarding the unattainable (perfection) to judge an artwork is a sucker's bet to me.
And in the cited works I rate as cinematic masterpieces scene editing (e. g. removal) is most certainly possible without having a negative impact on your criteria, but that is a completely moot point anyways.
With regards to Andor's forest arc: It is, amongst other things that are most certainly more appreciated by a specific set of people, a very interesting mediation on time and the notion "where there's competence, there's always also incompetence", often manifesting in very comical and surreal ways.
I also think "masterpiece" is a heavy term to throw around but the emotional impact of the this series and the complexity of its narrative as it catalogs a hero's journey from reluctant participant to true believer with an epic story arc can be held up next to most film and historical epics like Laurence of Arabia, Ben Hur, The Matrix, the Original Star Wars trilogy, Dune, Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, The Handmaid's Tale (series), The Odyssey (epic poem). His personal journey which leads to his persecution and enslavement, his role in leading a slave uprising, rescuing his friends from the aftermath of a rebel uprising, building the foundations of a rebel army, risking his life countless times and ultimately sacrificing himself to prevent his enemy from having an insurmountable edge.
The series makes the very popular "Avengers" film series look like trite dogshit and does the same for most of the "Star Wars" sequels and prequels so I don't fault people for using the term "masterpiece".
Was your gripe about superfluous scenes, where you mentioned the forest planet, a reference to the first few episodes of season 2? That forest plant is Yavin IV, the plant where the rebels eventually build their first base, and those rebels are some of the first recruits to the rebel army. I believe those scenes were intended to show how the rebellion lacked leadership and how Andor and others had to step up to provide that leadership.
For reference, Rings of Power, Jupiter's Legacy and Citadel (US version) cost about twice as much per episode on Amazon, and Game of Thrones on HBO started at five to six million per episode and went up to 15 million by the final season.
Sarcasm aside, there is something to be said about industries that let professionals do their work, and everyone is doing their bit towards a clearly defined shared goal. Considering the IT industry has taken so much ideas from industrial production, it wouldn't hurt to take some from artistic production too. After all, both are work concerned with refining blueprints where the final draft ends up being the product.
Software is different because digital systems are messes of rigid causality. If reality were like software moving a table could trigger the elevator to stop working and birds to fly upside down by breaking DNS by way of a change in server load triggering Kubernetes to get into a weird state where it kills and restarts DNS too fast to allow it to properly initialize and serve requests, but only when it is raining in Bangalore, India on a Tuesday.
The other nice thing about reality is reusability. A table used in one movie set could be used in a different movie without rebuilding the table.
There has been a ton of work on good system design to avoid this, like well done (not enterprise Java) OOP, and we were getting there until the web and cloud hit and we decided to trash all that and go back to piles of slop on Unix servers. Still wouldn’t have been as inherently causally ordered as physics but it might have been nicer.
1 person teams?
When you ship a piece of software, it's often expected to be usable by a million people reliably for years.
In film and video production, you're duct taping shit together to get it to stay in one piece just long enough to get the shot and get the film out the door. You're fixing shit in post because you were in a hurry on set. It's a sort of barely controlled chaos.
Game development is somewhere between the two.
Given the way things are, whole movies are going to be made in post...
Honestly it's almost more notable these days when that kind of stuff doesn't happen.
You're basically paying more money to decouple and delay decisions as much as possible.
Though, nit pick -- when people say "fix it in post", they're not usually talking about editing.
Editing is an expected, normal, traditional part of the art of filmmaking. You're not changing or fixing the shots themselves; you are cutting and pasting footage sequentially to tell a coherent and compelling story. The YT you linked is a masterful example of how Star Wars was saved through this sort of editing.
"Fix it in post" refers more to making sloppy shots full of errors and then correcting those errors later with CGI.
Does that make sense? The art of stitching shots together, versus shooting crappy shots and CGIing them later.
That said, directors shoot v differently - some will do literal hundreds of takes and still do plenty of post, others will shoot max three takes and send to edit.
They do multiple, sometimes dozens, of takes for most shots.
And what specifically, comparatively, has modern corporate software production organization contributed to to this point?
Music, film, and text are static. Software is dynamic.
However, the fact that software can readily embrace dynamism, can make it a self fulfilling prophecy.
But back when games were shipped on CD or burned into ROM cartridges, it was much more of a ship it and it’s DONE process and culture.
What I meant is that software is interactive, while a video, for example, is not, it's static in the sense that it will always played in the same way.
Curiously I think this shares a lot with other types of engineering. If you're putting men on the moon, you have to get everything right a single time.
Is this really true anymore? I feel like people release software now expecting to continue to patch it repeatedly, so there isn't a push to get it perfect the first time.
Software can be like this, e.g. if you were building a small team to do something you cared about it would probably be more like a 3* kitchen than support team inside IBM or something.
Of course there are also Executive producers who are far far up the financial food chain of a movie, and sometimes these titles are also just vanity plates for the production.
As an example of the value of a good/great producer, look at Gary Kurtz. He was essential for both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but wasn't part of the team for Return of the Jedi. In my opinion, that's one of the reasons that ROTJ is the worst of the three films. Lucas didn't have someone pushing back against his worse tendencies.
For an example of the wrong director, look no further than Rogue One. While it's very difficult to sus out what was wrong with Gareth Edwards directing, Tony Gilroy was brought in to fix the film. Both are appropriately quiet about what the changes were, what was re-shot (simple professional courtesy), but the result is a film that (while I love it) is just slightly off.
But in the context of this discussion, the producer is the one that coordinates and brings together the huge complexity of the project. That is their defined role. It is the director’s vision and decision-making, but the producer ensures the execution across hundreds of people and many departments.
(Source: i worked in films)
Not the least of which, if you screw up a release in your software engineering career, you’ll probably get many chances to correct and have a fine if not better career later in. Fuck up a release almost any time in your film career and you may never work again.
Rather than "hey I just wanted to add one word and they pushed back"
Found the Amazonian. It’s amazing how the corporate jargon seeps in, no matter how hard you try :). In some ways, deciding to work there is definitely a one way door.
Have you ever watched a "bad" movie? There is your answer :)
While most things in entertainment do not pass the first test. There are plenty of examples that absolutely pass all of the others.
I only say most because there are numerous circumstances where in the entertainment industries where maybe not always the final product but definitely during production where lives are on the line.
I have a problem with defining things as critical or not because you have no idea what your products or solutions may end up being used for. If things are being used by people in a production capacity and the collective stake of the success or failure of the endeavor rests upon the tools and solutions performing as designed then one could argue these are critical. But to whom? When designers don't see their solutions as critical it breeds laziness and pushes the responsibility for auditing onto the user who most likely doesn't even know to audit because they were sold a solution and made the mistake of taking a vendors word. Which maybe we should all be tearing down all of our electronics and reverse engineering all of our software so that we can have some semblance of functionality… And I know plenty of studios which do just this down to tearing down and making all and I do mean all of their cables because for them one stray bit of interference is critical. Why are they in this position? Because nothing and no one in tech or any other industry can be trusted. And when your career and reputation, and livelihood is on the line then everything starts to look critical. Maybe its only the livelihood of one? But to them its critical.
1. Life 1. House 2. Salary 3. Reputation 4. Physical or mental health 5. Time
> definitely during production where lives are on the line
You can say that for any company - if they wired electricity in a bad way on my job, lives can be lost.
> because you have no idea what your products or solutions may end up being used for
Many products are used exactly for 1 thing. For example, online banking. You don't use it to for dating, although you theoretically can if you really want to
> But to whom?
Only end users.
All the things you're describing -- in the spirit of tickets, sprints, etc. -- do happen. They're called pre-production. It takes years (months if you're lucky) to set up how everything will run on set. Producers have a huge list of actionables (tickets), and there is constant iteration (sprints) of parts of the script, of what the film's visual look will be, the tone, figuring out the budget, the crew, etc. And there are huge differences in responsibility between producer and director. A producer doesn't "run around speaking in precise terms" when that would step on the feet of the director, the cinematographer, etc. That would be micromanaging and unprofessional. The producer does very much stick to "user stories". When film crews want to change something, they don't "just do it". They very much do check in with the director or showrunner.
I suspect you're talking about execution, where everyone does "just do" things. When filming, every minute counts and shit needs to get done. Yes, every single person is tremendously empowered to do what's right, within their remit. But that only works because preproduction already worked out most of the kinks, and they should all basically be on the same page. But even then, things constantly go south. Shots take hours to set up and then turn out to be wrong for an infinite number of reasons. There are endless compromises. And during that process, only one person is in charge -- the director -- because they have to make a ton of decisions to compensate for all the things going wrong. So it's teamwork... but it's also a dictatorship and once the director makes a decision after collecting the input they want you do not argue.
You seem to be under the impression that film production is somehow more individually empowering or trusting than software development. It's not.
It's sad that tens of thousands of kids attend film school, yet there are too few roles of autonomy for them.
The "Hollywood" system only makes a few thousand film and tv productions of scale per year. There are way more people with visions and ideas and dreams, and they're all left to wither on the vine.
How many Chris Nolans, Stanley Kubricks, and Ridley Scotts have we lost to the rat race?
I think this is the biggest potential for AI. Suddenly all of those directors and dreamers who couldn't { hack, struggle, nepo } their way to the top of the pyramid can pursue their vision.
YouTube and TikTok have been huge enablers of creativity. They're a much fairer and wider platform for enablement and distribution, and already today's youth are setting this target as their new generational dream.
We're likely about to see a film industry that resembles the gaming, publishing, and music industries. Studios will exist for large scale "AAA" fare, but individual auteurs and small teams will be able to make their mark. Steam Greenlight, Bandcamp, Wattpad, and Medium for the director. It's like what the DAW did for music production - no more need to spend tens of thousands to book a studio - except even more orders of magnitude in cost reduction.
We've needed studios for two things historically: (1) distribution (2) financing. YouTube and streaming solved #1, and Gen AI puts film [1] squarely within the "ramen budget" of college students. So pillar #2 is about to fall.
[1] I don't mean low budget films. Gen AI will give directors the VFX to achieve expansive science fiction and fantasy visions, exotic locales, and a stunningly beautiful cast (that most audiences prefer to watch).
> Kirill: How much time did you have in pre-production to talk about ideas, visuals and inspirations?
> Christophe: We had a lot of time, and it’s a rare thing. The director Ariel Kleiman and I went through the same process for each episode. We were reading the scripts together, and throwing ideas and brainstorming. We did that twice for each episode, and then we started making moodboards. After that we did another read through, and then we started blocking the scenes. We had a lot of 3D pre-viz with ILM, with our camera and lenses in those virtual sets. That allowed us to start looking for shots and to refine everything.
Jira in four words.
Also, unlike software engineering, the film industry has been around for 100+ years. They've figured stuff out.
(We could say software engineering has been around for 50+ years, but I think that in its modern form it's probably more like 20 years. Highly subjective statement, I know.)
The fad also seems to be to aggressively forget learned lessons and abandoned proven techniques, so 20 years is probably generous.
This is how software development compares to other fields: https://xkcd.com/2030/
Software development really has gone off the deep end. In any other field, people actually document what they do, and verify that it works, before releasing anything. Restaurants have recipes and food handling requirements, manufacturers have tolerances and verification, architects have building code, warehouses have inventory management, and so on and so forth. Because non-software development relies on products that actually work, and are not built around the meta game of abusing arbitrary metrics, workers can rely on other departments to make sensible choices.
Fun fact: Waterfall development never existed; it's a straw man argument against the common sense idea of finishing what your working on, before starting something new.
AI is going to pop the bubble of software development, not because it's good at it, but because because the entire field is too broken to compete against it.
But a lot of movies are terrible because this doesn’t happen.
The truth about the world is that it’s poorly managed, and competent people don’t always rise to the top of complex organisations.
Film production at this level have a lot of process. There are many teams and the director or showrunner acts as “product owner”. The crew is very hierachical and specialized with clearly defined turfs. Pre-production is iterative but when shooting starts it is waterfall - it is incredibly expensive to make small changes after shooting have started. Digital has made it somewhat more iterative since you can “fix it in post” but this still has its limits. You can remove a beard and add a spaceship but you cannot fix bad acting or bad lines.
Film production is definitely not just letting the creatives run wild. Any idea has a price tag attached and will ultimately have to be approved by the accounting team. And film production tend to have a hard deadline and no possibility of patch updated.
Software development is a lot easier since you can keep developing iteratively.
"How do I light and shoot this green screen?"
I disagree with the sentiment that Andor goes beyond the original trilogy. The world building in the originals is incredible.