Is anyone watching Dr Who at midnight?

[Pixiesgirl]

I might if I'm awake, I was such an RTD fan girl but tbh he seems to disappeared up his own rectum ].
Intruiged to see the new Disney episodes though.

I thought it was truly awful.
I was surprised, I expected it to be rather preachy and a bit of a step back to an older RTD style.
But that was almost unwatchable.

Hoping episode 2 is better. Much better!

I think it's verboeten to say you are not keen on Ncuti, but he doesn't seem to have much range,

Sorry, watching it again for a second opinion. Everything is off, the pacing is weird and nothing has time to actually breathe it's like rush rush to the next scene and the acting is fucking awful.

Did anyone else feel like the picture looked oddly flat at times? Like, I dunno, it had been heavily processed to be extremely low-contrast and ended up exactly the same brightness over the whole area of the screen? I'm not sure I can describe exactly what it was, a sort of dull matteness, but it was really bugging me (when I wasn't irritated at the boring stories, poorly-written dialogue, singing and dancing, grossout humour or general shitness).

I think that may be a setting on your TV, something about disabling smoothing? Idk was watching it on my janky pc.

Everything else looks fine, tho, even other HDR content. (Well, it has its issues from time to time, including a weird issue with American Gods, but nothing similar to this.) I'm willing to believe it's something not playing well with my TV, because I can't believe everyone else was seeing this and having no problem with it, but buggered if I know what the issue is or how to fix it, or why it's only happening with Doctor Who.

Did anyone else feel like the picture looked oddly flat at times?

Didn't notice that but have felt the special effects despite increased budget look much worse - DH thinks they are going for a cartoon effect - could it be something like that?

Only other thing to do is play on computer/lap top and see if the same effect is there as on TV or watch on someone else's TV for comparison.

Yeah I think l see what you mean on that, it's a kind of comic book, pantomime, Willy Wonka fantasy kinda vibe.

I'd do that, but it would mean watching it again 😂

Naw, I've gone back and had a look on my phone at one of the scenes I remember noticing it, and it's still like that. Weirdly flattened and over-processed, somehow.

Like the whole screen's at exactly the same colour intensity, exactly the same brightness, exactly the same matte-ness, exactly the same something, almost like I feel like I'm seeing all matte grey, but just pretending to be different colours and brightnesses.

Or like the feeling I get when I'm extremely depressed and dissociating, where the world seems flat and dull and without variation or depth, and like everything's fake and just being projected onto a screen in front of me.

It's hard to explain what I mean, and it's more noticeable to me in motion, but I took a screenshot on my phone and whatever it is I'm disliking about it, it's still there

(And Rose for contrast — was probably cheap as fuck, but at least doesn't give me that uncanny dead light falling on insensate eyes feeling.)

It's not just the TARDIS interior shots either — I could sort of understand having odd, alien-feeling, uncanny lighting inside the extradimensional alien time ship, to make it feel different to everywhere else — if it was a tool to make it feel unsettling, exciting, liminal, alien, interstitial, outside of the day/night/light/dark dichotomy that regulates our sense of time and space. That would make sense to me.

But the weird flatness is in a lot of other shots too, so it's not like it's an artistic choice to help give the TARDIS a particular atmosphere — it's just like that sometimes, for some reason — like a thin veil over the screen, dulling and homogenising everything.

like a thin veil over the screen, dulling and homogenising everything

I can see from those shots what you mean - it's probably an over processing effect to homogenise especially if it's all scenes. Perhaps a side effect of bigger budget for CGI effects and post production fiddling.

I've heard similar with modern music and auto tuning - musical YouTube explained it - it apparently flattens everything and some people pick up on it more than others.

On the plus side, to me, the new episodes did still feel like Doctor Who.

They felt like shit Doctor Who, but IMO as long as they still feel like Doctor Who, and the actor playing the Doctor feels plausibly like they're playing the same underlying character, which Ncuti Gatwa does to me, then there's potential for it to get better. If it didn't feel like Doctor Who any more I'd give up on it now TBH.

Jodie Whittaker almost never felt believable to me as the Doctor, and not because she's female — I thought Jo Martin was very believable as the Doctor. (And Michelle Gomez was fantastic as Missy. She'd have made a great Doctor.) It took me a while to feel Matt Smith as a plausible Doctor, but I think either he settled into the role, or my brain made adjustments.

But Ncuti Gatwa, while obviously playing the part his own way, feels like he is a version of the same Doctor character. I just hope they have some slower, more thoughtful episodes soon so we can see some other sides of his interpretation.

And less of that massively over-processed (seeing a theme here), pitch-corrected to within an inch of its life singing would be nice. Especially if you're going to set it in the 1960s.

@LookAtMyTinyGameBoy Those pics look like the before and after scenes of a Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares makeover, and the new place 'has a fresh, bistro feel!'

I though the new Doctor Who eps were utterly awful too, in more ways than I could possibly say in one post.

I'm glad you can see it too and I'm not going completely mad It's definitely more noticeable (to me, at least) on some scenes than others. Interior shots are a bit worse, I think. I think you're probably right about post-processing, and to me it looks like they're also maybe doing a lot of fill-in lighting to make it look smooth and modern or something?

I did notice they're also following the digital-era trend for "let's have plenty of very dark scenes where you can barely see what's going on just because we CAN because we don't have to worry about actual light hitting actual film any more", too, which I really hope is going to go out of fashion soon, as a tell-tale early 21st century foible. But that's everything, at the moment. A while back, I watched a science fiction series on Amazon Prime called Night Sky, which is mostly about this couple in their late sixties. They were always wandering around their house without switching the lights on and I have NEVER met a couple that age that don't prefer the ambient light level to be somewhere between "intense spy movie interrogation" and "surface of the sun". (I think it's genuine physiological reasons — a combination of naturally smaller pupils and reduced light transmission compared to younger people, and preferring bright light to constrict the pupils further and aid focus in presbyopic eyes, as far as I know.)

Edit to add: Also I laughed at the fact you mentioned processing of music — I didn't see your post until after I typed my supplementary rant about the very obvious digitally-processed vocals I guess I'm one of those people… 🤣

The dark lighting is the worst - I watched Game of Thrones to bitter end and wished I hadn't but there was an important episode that was so dark had to keep going back to try and work out what was going on.

I've seen a lot of complaints about Shogun Disney+ -which I watched - as it was dark and wet - the 1980s setting was better apparently. Though my main issue was not believing main love story - couple did nothing but snipe at each other there was more affection shown by little gestures between one who went to be a Nun and Blackthorne.

I have similar issue with sound at time but apparently that's partly many directors set sound for particular sound systems in cinema - it's like the audience is an after thought rather than people paying for it in the end.

Also I laughed at the fact you mentioned processing of music — I didn't see your post until after I typed my supplementary rant about the very obvious digitally-processed vocals I guess I'm one ofthosepeople…

There a section of population who really notice and a section who sort of know it's not as good as past but no idea why and I am probably the latter.

I saw someone analysis why a well known USA sitcom/drama went off boil and started to lose audience -only change was new lighting director - it went from mood lighting with lots of shadows giving warm cosy vibes to stark everything lit same - and background cuttler was visible and whole tone changed. When it was pointed out could see it but I'd have know something was different not what without it being pointed out.

Apparently sound bars help for sound levelling etc, but I don't know what the answer is to the darkness issues. I often have to google the plot to find out what's going on in a programme these days. (I habitually have the sub-titles on. I can lip-read very well, but the darkened mumbling defeats me!)

I see what people mean now about the sameness of the image. It doesn't feel as, "real" to me as the old stuff, but I'd assumed it was the story etc. I'm glad some people like it though.

It will be the apocalypse on fan forums if the ratings go down.

For those struggling with dialogue and trying to avoid subtitles (I'd watch everything with subtitles if I could, cause I'm bad at understanding speech, but DP hates them so I do without), there are occasionally some things you can do to improve audibility:

On Amazon Prime, some programmes have a setting called something like "Dialogue Boost" in the soundtrack options (the same menu you would go to to switch from hearing English to hearing a French dub, or to switch to an audio-described track for blind viewers). Where that's an option, it's worth trying. I don't know if any other streaming services have something similar, though.

Another option that used to be helpful sometimes, but isn't so much any more, is that if you have a surround sound system, turning up only the centre speaker might help to disproportionately increase the volume of speech over background noise.

If you have equaliser settings, it can sometimes help to future with those, too, though not much TBH.

I agree that some of the dialogue audibility problems are for technical reasons to do with the difficulty of mixing soundtracks for a vast range of different audio setups. But some of the problems are, I think, down to the fashion for ever-greater appearance of realism/naturalism.

They got the idea that always having actors with faces visible, clearly enunciating all their lines, and saying sentences that always make perfect sense so that the context will help you with anything you might've missed, wasn't very naturalistic (true), and dramas might therefore be more realistic, immersive, and overall better if every second or third line was garbled nonsense mumbled into a pillow three miles away.

In the dark.

It's really fascinating once you get into it. Clearly, I don't know enough technical terminology to say what my problem is with the picture in the new series of Doctor Who. But I've still found myself watching hour-long YouTube videos explaining and demonstrating the difference between the style of lighting used in Star Trek: The Next Generation (as well as things like types of shots, blocking, editing, etc.) and that used in Star Trek Voyager and Deep Space Nine.

I think it's interesting because we're all swimming in the language of TV and film, we all instinctively read it, and yet we don't even consciously notice the techniques being used 99% of the time. But like you say, we know when it's "wrong".

If you have equaliser settings, it can sometimes help to future with those, too

Fiddle. Fucking fiddle. There, phone, that wasn't so hard, now, was it?

I gave it a watch, as have loved Doctor Who from the Tom Baker days, with a few blips since. I really hoped it would have improved, but felt it was like Doctor Who and Eurovision had somehow given birth to a new reality!!! Some glimpses of what the story could have been, but soon killed off by the hammy acting and the disneyfication of the endings! Also, did some of the sets look like those from a Christopher Ecclestone episode?

Agreed. Older teens & I have been proper fans for years.
I actually quietly left the room 'to make tea' both episodes as I literally couldn't bear to keep watching & didn't want to fidget & spoil it for them.
They both thought it was utter Disneyfied rubbish too. So sad.