the hobbit and hfr: building a better big mac

So I finally saw The Hobbit. It's not the sort of film I would normally write about because I don't know that I can make the movie any more interesting by writing about it. More than the movie itself, actually, I'm interested in the technical innovation that it sports: high frame rate.

"HFR" means that instead of the normal 24 frames per second, the movie was filmed and is shown at 48 frames per second. That is, each second 48 individual pictures are projected on the screen.

People are of mixed opinion on whether HFR improves the image, and many seem to find it unsatisfying, but I have found that I'm not one of them. Overall, I think the HFR format looks better than film at 24 fps. However, what I discovered in seeing The Hobbit is that I don't really care about HFR nearly as much as I ought to. Watching the movie, I wasn't disappointed in HFR so much as I was disappointed in my reaction to HFR.

The first part of my problem is that The Hobbit just isn't the kind of movie I'm ever going to love the holy crap out of at any frame rate. For uppity fuddy-duddies like me, its CGI and Hollywood ending are the cinematic equivalent of McDonald's; I feel a little guilty indulging in them and I would never hold them up as a winning example of the medium. Making the movie in 48 fps or making the Big Mac more intensely Big-Mac-ish are not going to make either one significantly more appealing.

photo by Travis Hornung under cc

But it's also the new technology itself that gives me the shrugs. I'm an analytic sort that wants to rip apart the significance of a film, and HFR is as nearly a purely formal innovation as I can think of. By "formal" I mean relating to the actual shapes and colors actually projected on the screen, as opposed to the characters, story, thematic strands, and meaning more generally.

Even if we take it for granted that 48 fps makes films look prettier, we can still agree that the "pretty" part of the film seems unrelated to those aspects of movies that I want to get down and chew on — all those fancy things I just mentioned, as well as goodies like plot and metaphor. For the most part, HFR doesn't improve those; it just ramps up the joy of actually taking the image in through our eyeballs.

Here's some theoretical fine print if you want to object that these colors and shapes have got to mean something. It's true: Part of film's art is to show us the story by using the images to suggest those off-screen abstractions I was just talking about. Yes, at a fairly basic level, the strictly formal part of an image is impossible to separate completely from its meaning in the human mind. This fact is nicely demonstrated by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, where he shows how hard it is to avoid seeing a face in just about any visual arrangement that vaguely resembles one. So I will admit, the "formal" part of an image is never really differentiated from the thing it's supposed to represent.

photo by lel4nd under cc

That philosophical caveat aside, HFR tends to be much more about the colors and shapes than about the significance or ideas behind the work. Whether HFR can be made to create meaning is a question that I've been lending my substantial brain power to. Even if we conclude that HFR is not natively very suited to changing the meaning of an image or sequence (and I don't think it is), I still wonder if a determined filmmaker could use HFR creatively to do more than just make the picture better.

I can only think of one example: If HFR at 48 fps were alternated with the regular 24 fps, the two rates could be contrasted to build up an idea or communicate a difference. Maybe 24 fps could be used to show footage in a flashback, while 48 fps could be used for the present day, like how tints (among other effects) are often used in movies to set off flashbacks from the main thrust of the story. I have no idea if it's even possible to switch up frame rates within a film, but this is my best stretchy guess to find a use for HFR along these lines.

But that's my only example. And as someone who wants to write about a film's meaning more than its picture (as lovely as it can be), I don't care much about HFR. From my perspective, the technology is already there to make wonderful movies. We just need wonderful filmmakers and wonderful ideas, not (more) wonderful images.