HornDefined: Cloverfield - Horrorfilm for Encoders!

Note: I want to clearify, that this new category "HornDefined" soly represent my personal opinion and only brings to digital paper, what comes to my mind about certain topics. I leave it to the reader to make up their own minds. I heartly invite you to pass critizism on it to our forum, but you can stil discuss their in general as usual.

Even though I am going to repeat myself I am not willing to pay such expensive tickets just to attend a cinema screening anymore, and that's why I had reduced my cinema attandance to a minimum and I hardly buy sweets and candies at the lounge, but I still love to go there and watch a good movie and enjoy this very specific atmosphere.

Same situation last friday (02.01.08), my pal Schneemann and I watched the new monster-movie Cloverfield by director J.J. Abrams in Osnabrücker Cinestar cinema. We did so, because the effect and impression of monster-movies are better in a real cinema than in your own private home-theater, at least in my opinion. I know, I am gonna stoned by you for this statement, but I love it to see other people reactions of the bigger audience. And I think, only the few of us own a home-theatre for more than 50 people.

You don't have to be afraid, that I will spoil you with important information of Cloverfield's story. The story isn't my concern, so the text is spoiler-free. My concern is the way the film has been shot, because they used another style different to the rest of the moster-movie genre. One of the charakters is a quasi camera-man, because he is framing the happening from his personal point of view with a normal video-camera. Everybody, who has seen Blari Witch Project 1, knows how it looked like or imagine how the result could look like, because this movie's working is similar.
Alike in the real world the image is anything else then sharp and cinema-like, because as far as I know there was really a normal video-camera in use in some scenes. Some shots are intentionally blury or out of focus, or if the protagonists have to run for their bare lifes they don't care about what they frame and the normal hand-movement during running is reflected in the shot video and showing a bouncing video between ground and heaven and it is hard to recognize the surroundings. As the audience you are reminded, that the chrakter isn't thinking about filming but instead has to take to one's heels. However some shots aren't perfect, but could originated from an ordinary consumer HDV- or AVCHD-camera, because the video-image was almost theatrical 2K-resolution, but definitely not from a DV-cam. It was somewhere in between of these quality-limits. Almost all outward-shots of New York were done with a Sony CineAlta F23 High-Definition camera and were also filmed in the overall style of the movie, so that it looks like shaky hand-shot and that it fits to the rest of this hand-shots. When you look closer you can see a drop of the camera-frame and a strange passage follwed by a camera raise and everything goes on, as it would be seamless.
This accepted bad filming is the main stylistic device and is meant for making the viewer clear of the protagonists situation and to suggest the high grade of reality.
However this extreme shaky video is an absolute horror for every encoder, that will prepare this movie for DVD or for one of the DVD-successors (probably HD-DVD, because Paramount backs this format).
The most challenged media will be DVD, because even at the limit of 9mbit MPEG-2 can't surpress artefacts caused by high movement. I am realy anxious to see that result.
Concerning the HD-DVD the result will be not very different, because the newer alternatives to MPEG-2, namely MPEG-4 and VC-1, aren't magic and can't hinder artefacts to apear at low datarates. Additionally, if shot with a consumer cam, is it really worth to watch it in HD, if you can't tell a difference and and recognize an advantage in quality. Luckily there are more criterias than that. The better sound or new interactive features are predistinated for such kind of film-project, that offered a lot of gimmicks and lifed for thosethrough viral marketing in run-up. I would like to get a feature, where I get all hided and spreaded information of the monster during the film, collect them and interpret them afterwards.Because it is played with convention of the monster-movie genre and you merely get information about the monster itself. Consequently matching to the scenario, because when you flee from a danger as a civilian, you don't have an overview of the situation and you are just able to communicate via the remaining ways. That's your sole source of information. They used this TV-shop-window information and this could be a starting point for additional features for the HD-DVD release.
They can acquire something from this trimed on bad movie for the HD-generation and generate added value, but I won't be easy.

For my share of the experience I am looking forward to this home-release of the movie and I really liked this fresh idea in the monster-genre. Because the almost similar working "man-in-suit" monster-movies, in which a high ranked soldier gives the president all backstory information about the monster and the focus lies thereon on the hero and military, are really often enough. Fifty years of Godzilla defenitely represents or iconized it.
I'm still waiting how the result of the released media will reflect in quality and hope, that there won't be a sequel in Blair Witch Project fashion, which had been made completely different to the first installment and didn't reach the atmosphere of the first one. And I don't want to get a second film for the YouTube-Geneartion, in which other persons of the megacity New York are taping their flee from another perspectiv and thus presenting the same incident another way. That would feel very uninspired. So it is obvious, it isn't easy to walk this new branch of monster-movies and not branching back to the old fashioned way.
Hopefully Cloverfield will be a fest for cineasts and now fest at all for artefacts.

And as a last advise. Try to take the very last backseats. Your eyes will be thankfull!