What's Up With "10.5"
 

I turned on the last hour of NBC's "10.5" tonight -- I hadn't watched any of it up until now. What's up with the camera work? I suppose the intent was to give it a "live" documentary look, but it's just plain shaky, with lots of abrupt zooms in and out. It doesn't look "live" -- only annoying.

I guess cause its the big one...everything is supposed to be shaky/annoying, including the camera work. i just watched a trailer for it on the net...the zooms are realy funky, made me laugh a bit.

It became a game with my girlfriend, we started counting the number of zooms. At one point we counted 7 within 10 seconds.

I had to change the channel after a few minutes worth of that.
If the spastic zoom doesn't nauseate you, the acting will.

Nothing short of unwatchable.

-Luis

Dreadful stylization, obviously meant to distract and confine the viewer's focus from the low production value on the sets.

But let's not offend Rich--maybe he worked on this show!

Ha, ha!.... I was going to start a topic about this also, but then I thought that maybe I was just too much of an "old fart" and wasn't up on the latest trends in camerawork. And how about that corny split screen effect? Reminded me of a bad 60's movie. And then the plot (such that it was), right out of a soap opera where each character had a "relationship problem" with their wife, husband, father, etc. I guess they wanted to out-do Earthquake from the 70's, but they didn't have the all star cast to pull it off.

I watched it only to see the earthquakes!!

But after about a hour a told wife whats the deal with the zooms? Ok maybe every now and them for some shock value. But like everytime they showed someone they zoomed in then zoomed back. It was just kind of weird.

they tried to copy the look of "24" on Fox, for some reason. They seem to forget, however, that the reason the split-screen works in 24 is the quasi-realtime aspect of the show. I still get a kick out of the split-screen phone conversations and multi-angle action shots.

I thought the worst part about 10.5, though, was the models. The bit where the train dissappeared into the ground? The toy H2 falling off the golden gate bridge? They might as well have used legos. They couldn't even use big models to add some sense of weight to things; you could tell all the vehicles weighed in under a pound.

Hmm, there's also 8 1/2, 9 1/2 and 10. Do we really need a 10.5? ;-)

If there was ever a need for a great example of bad camera work, this certainly fills it.

I watched for about a half hour, but I found the constant zooming so distracting that it not only kept me from following the story, it also gave me a headache.

As others have said, perhaps the camera work was supposed to keep you from noticing how bad everything else was.

Why do MADE FOR TV Movies just plain suck? It is so rare to see one that is good.

Well, that's really the definition of a made-for-TV movie. If it was good (usually this means something more than a bankable star and a passable script based on subject matter that has already in some way captured the public interest), it would have been released theatrically and budgeted as such...

Although, the Young Indiana Jones movies were fairly good, but they tended to be experiments in digital effects as much as anything else.