Soft Focus Look?


Noggie

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I haven't watched the entire series in years but I remember them going to a darker soft focus look late in season 3. The early episodes look normal with the exception of the color scheme. Then everything gets misty. Was that a look they were going for? I never liked it. The sharper image of season 1 & 2 is what I preferred. Am I remembering this wrong?

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In season 3 they got the whole neon thing going on

 

It's not until S4&5 that the cinematography starts looking really cheap with that mist look. You can tell the budget was cut drastically so i guess that means less talented crew members or they couldn't be bothered about quality, or all of the above.

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I noticed that white seems blurry in seasons 4&5. Or, everything bight has a glare.

Edited by SL1DE
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Another thing i hated in the later seasons were the tinted screens. For instance when Caitlin dies, the scenes on sonny's boat  have this grey filter over 3/4s of the screen and it looks hideous. They were going for the Tony Scott/jerry bruckheimer look but it doesn't work on tv.

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As with most Vice fans, I've seen every episode a hundred times and I know the scene you're talking about but I can remember back when the episode originally aired I never thought anything of it. Maybe it's because I was young and stupid but it's funny how you remember certain things like this, until years later when you view it again and then you see goofy little things like this.

 

That particular scene did look really strange but I guess they really, Really, REALLY wanted it to look like dusk but could only shoot the scene in the middle of the day, or so I'm guessing. Either way it was rather weird lookin'.

Yeah and there multiple times where they tint grey overcast skies blue as if that'd trick you into thinking it's a clear summer day. It's very distracting. I think it's more down to laziness then the attended effect. They never used that tint in the first two seasons

 

As a kid you remember stuff later on with rose tinted glasses, i remember as a kid i used to like "Batman Forever" xD

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Yep, it's interesting how we remember stuff like that but I was only guessing they were possibly trying to make it look as if it were dusk but who knows what they were really trying to do. By season four Vice was a completely different animal altogether but I still love the hell out of it regardless :thumbsup:

 

Back when the show was in production I can remember really disliking season four & in particular season five, but today I look back and love the series so much to the point it doesn't really matter near as much today as it did back then, which is probably because we want to bring the old days back again so we tend to overlook the things that bothered us about Miami Vice that we sorely disliked back then (at least for me). I guess that was the long way of saying I miss the 80's  :)

 

Im not as forgiving of S4+5 as some of you guys are but i'll admit there are some awesome episodes in there. But even in great stuff like Death and the lady they reuse footage and it's just stupid and lazy.

 

But then again how many times did they reuse shots from the In the air tonight scene in the pilot ..oh well

Edited by thedeparted94
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Im not as forgiving of S4+5 as some of you guys are but i'll admit there are some awesome episodes in there. But even in great stuff like Death and the lady they reuse footage and it's just stupid and lazy.

 

But then again how many times did they reuse shots from the In the air tonight scene in the pilot ..oh well

Then there was the reuse of the song itself in A Bullet for Crockett, which went against Michael Mann's rules of never reusing a song twice. 

 

Even after watching the entire series on DVD, upscaled on a 1080p TV, Season 5 always looked a bit hazy, especially in the interior OCB scenes. It just gave the show an older look, like it was filmed 5 years before the series began, even though they were filmed 5 years after the series started. I chalk it up to cutting corners and cheaper budgets. Plus, the cinematography was poor at the tail end of the show's run.

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Then there was the reuse of the song itself in A Bullet for Crockett, which went against Michael Mann's rules of never reusing a song twice. 

 

Even after watching the entire series on DVD, upscaled on a 1080p TV, Season 5 always looked a bit hazy, especially in the interior OCB scenes. It just gave the show an older look, like it was filmed 5 years before the series began, even though they were filmed 5 years after the series started. I chalk it up to cutting corners and cheaper budgets. Plus, the cinematography was poor at the tail end of the show's run.

 

I wonder if they ever re-painted the OCB. It some episodes the green and pink offices look very bright and vibrant, and then in others in looks like they threw mud all over them..

 

If they didn't then in S5 those sets are 5 years old..and they look all grimy..

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I know the look of tv was evolving & moving toward a more natural almost muted look. Watch a show from the 70's like The Six Million

Dollar Man & you'll see rich but unnatural color. By the time you get to season 5 of Miami Vice, everything is hazy. Nothing was bright as it was in season 1.

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the late 80s-early 90s movies/tv shows always looked bland and silly. Even in stuff like Silence of the lambs the fashion is very drab and ironically even more outdated.

 

Atleast in the mid 80s you had that cooky eccentric thing going on where everyone dressed as silly as possible and now it's become ironic to wear, like "hey look i'm dressing like DJ". But then by the early 90s they decided vibrant colours were a no no and everyone wore those ridiculous tight jeans up to their mid chest, guys and chicks.

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The tone of S4 and 5 is really odd.

 

In the first 2 seasons you got the pastels, then in S3 you got the Neon colours and lighting. But then in S4&5 they put pastels and neons together and it looks like an eye sore. 

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