I see Kate Mulgrew is in a new television series. This time she appears as an older mother in “Dope Thief”, an Apple TV+ action series coming out in the very near future. While the series is not really my cup of tea, I’m sure Ms. Mulgrew will be wonderful. She always is.
I watched the trailer for the show and I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been concentrating on video production so much, but this caught my eye immediately. Even though the shot is for a split second, this yelled out to me like a flashing neon light.
Look closely. All of the text in the scene is reversed. For all my life I’ve seen plenty of scenes were the film was played in reverse or there’s some other editing trickery used to make the scene more interesting. But I don’t recall seeing anything modern, in 4K or higher resolution, where it’s so obvious this type of editing technique was used because of blatant artifacts in the shot.
Before high-definition television it was easy to get away with this sort of thing. Movies and television shows shot on 35mm film but presented in standard 4:3 format hid things that were on the sides of the screen. But in today’s world where resolution is nothing like we’ve ever seen before and anything can be played and replayed repeatedly, this editing choice smacks of sloppy at best.
I still think Kate Mulgrew is going to be awesome.
Update: Someone on social media posted that maybe the shot is from a reflection in a window. OK, that’s fair possibility, but it’s not something I could garner from the trailer. I’ll move it from the “sloppy” to the “weird” column in my head.
