TV news and views

[NekoFever]

One thing I noticed (and something I hope some of you film nerds might be able to shed some more light on) is that they are using a very interesting focus technique/style.

In each shot, only the actor or action that should be the centre of attention is in focus, and everything outside of that is out of focus. I don't think it's a depth of field thing because even things on the same plane are out of focus. It's like they've applied a circular filter so that only the important parts are in focus.

Anyone else notice this? Is this just some visual style I'm unfamiliar with?

It's very strange and quite heavy-handed IMO. It's like a fisheye effect with some extreme falloff.

There's a trend in film and TV at the moment for making stuff look like it's shot on crappy old lenses – chromatic aberration, distortion, lens blur, etc – because it's "characterful". I assume it's a reaction to the perfect, clean look of modern digital cameras, but it's likely to horribly date stuff made now in about 10 years.