Jaws on Home Video

Actually, I'd argue "Jaws 2" would be pretty much forgotten without its connection to the original.

God knows I maintain massive sentimental attachment to the film - I saw it before "Jaws" and just loved it - but as a movie, it's not really very good. It has a few good shark attack scenes but the rest is lackluster at best...

 

I don't think that's true. I think the movie looks fine. The Amblin people are extremely aware of post-production and are generally opposed to over-processing, particularly for stuff like enhancement or grain reduction.

 

Such as it is, J2 - I can't give it's full name, there's only one Jaws in my world - is a slasher flick in all but name; same tropes, it's just in broad daylight and in open water rather than night and in some creepy house.

The only good, and I'll admit very rewatchable, thing about it is Roy Scheider's terrific performance... "hang on, is anyone here telling me I don't know what a shark looks like?"... he gets paranoid, he gets edgy, he tears the town council a new one, he shoots the place up, he gets royally smashed and passes out onscreen (and all of that before he even gets to the water to save the kids)... now that's a performance! If the film was nothing but a two-hour portrayal of Brody's PTSD descent into madness, it would have been worth every penny...

 

Spielberg has a very interesting way to supervise coloring of his films, either new or remastered; he watches the film without sound so he can exclusively concentrate on the visuals... great idea! Do many colorists do it that way, Marc, or is that a Spielberg thing?

 

they were talking about the audio soundtrack........not picture/grain reduction.

 

I haven't watched it in a while [and may be wrong], but IIRC the only lower quality footage was of the live Shark from behind swimming away shot by the crew [in Australia?] which was cut in.

 

Are there different variations of that song? Just curious because the lyrics sung in the movie are slightly different....

 

Probably esp with me quoting lyrics since Im always wrong

Let me put my love into you - ACDC - Never knew it was let me cut your cake with my knife

My version was more evil Let Catch-cha-tate with my knife (never having a clue what is catch-cha-tate )

 

No, we always color correct without sound at all. In some cases, near the very end, we start rolling each reel for review with sound, even if it's just a rough mix, to get an idea on how all the ingredients appear in context.

They said "it may have been too aggressively cleaned up with noise reduction," with didn't say audio. I didn't find the sound bad at all, though you can argue about the stereoized foley and FX tracks.

 

Slightly off-topic but related to this post: how often do movies "color-correct" on the set?

We all know how rampant the orange/teal palette has become, and I always assumed the movies got altered in the color correction phase.

However, as I've watched "behind the scenes" featurettes recently, I've seen more and more movies that seemed to have been orange/teal on the set - maybe the colors got boosted in post, but even the raw footage already showed those tints.

Is that typical? I've been watching "behind the scenes" features for decades and don't recall seeing "tinted" raw footage until now!

 

It's pretty rare. The DP and the DIT (digital imaging technician) usually collaborate to come up with some kind of ballparkish look just to help the DP judge how the lighting and exposure are. A smart DP already knows how far he or she could push the image in post.

There are some directors who demand to be able to see the exact same image on set that is going to be in the final film, but I think this is a waste of time. To me, you have to be secure enough to understand that you can do anything with the image as long as the post crew has something to work with. They're trying to work very quickly on set, given that the shooting costs are typically as much as $1 million a day (for union TV or feature production), so if you're waiting 10 more minutes for the DIT to make the final touches on an image, add that up and you're wasting an hour a day that you could be spending just actually shooting the show.

There is a compromise technique called "near-set color-correction" where they just rent get in a truck or got to an office down the hall from the studio, and when the DP and director have a break (like lunch or at the end of the day), they go in there with a colorist and they set some temporary looks that get much closer to what they want. At least that way, they aren't making a crew of 100 people wait while knobs are being turned.

BTW, I gotta say it's very interesting to see the "behind the scenes" footage of what the set actually looked like in real life, and then they cut to the finished scene and it's massively different.

 

Which is what I'm used to seeing in featurettes: "on the set" footage that looks natural even if the movie is color corrected up the wazoo.

That's why I felt so surprised when I saw "on the set" footage that was already "tinted" orange/teal or whatever.

So either they color corrected the featurettes - which would be bizarre - or they're getting the "tinted" look on the set.

BTW, not saying these colors = "final colors", as I'm sure they're still tweaking them. However, the colors on the set are clearly a lot closer to "tinted" than natural...

 

I'm betting the decision was made to heavily color-correct the BTS (behind-the-scenes) video to match the movie. I kinda wince at movies where they go to a very, very aggressive color correction style, because to me it calls too much attention to itself. I think color correction is one of those things that has to be so subtle, you're barely aware it's being done at all. It's great when lots of color-correction tricks go on kind of under the surface, and yet it's a great illusion and you never notice that anything odd is going on.

 

I have a VHS of Jaws that was dubbed from a rental copy on one of those Go Video dual deck VCRs that could copy any tape.

 

You think? These featurettes don't show the "tinting" on everything - it's not like the talking head interview segments are orange/teal or whatever. It's just the shots from the set.

Seems like it'd be a weird expenditure of time/effort to color correct shots from the set for DVD/BD featurettes...

 

I'm sure that'd look great on a 65-inch TV!

 

The BTS footage has to be color-timed anyway, so if they get a call that says, "hey, make it look sorta/kinda like the movie," I doubt it takes more than an extra hour to do that. It's not that big a deal. Though the natural inclination is to make it look like it was shot, rather than how it was finished.

 

I think it's the footage of the shark struggling in the cage?

I know a bunch of footage was shot in Australia (I think off the coast of Queensland), but the cameraman dropped the camera and left it in the ocean for a while before retrieving it.

 

Something I've always been curious about....

In the autopsy scene, there's a really weird edit that occurs during Hooper's dialogue. Fast-forward to about the 4:40 mark in this video:



Right after Hooper asks Brody to "not smoke in here", there's a sudden awkward jump cut to a close-up shot of the severed arm, over which Hooper says "this is what happens", and then it returns to a wider shot and the scene continues on. Two things have always struck me as odd about this:

1) When the sudden cut to the close-up of the severed arm occurs, aside from the awkward visual cut, there's also a noticeable jump in the audio, almost like what you hear when something is edited out of a film during a TV broadcast. It's so awkward that when I watched the movie on TV when I was younger, I assumed that something *was* being edited out at that point... it wasn't until years later, when I owned copies of the film on VHS and DVD, that I discovered that's how the scene *is* presented in the finished film. Was there originally supposed to be more to the scene that was just trimmed out for the final product? If it's just a case of a really sloppy edit, I find it hard to believe that Spielberg allowed it in the finished film.

2) Hooper's line "This is what happens" also sounds strange and out-of-place. For starters, what is he referring to? The way the scene is edited makes it sounds like he's referring to Brody's smoking (i.e. "This is what happens when people smoke in here") but obviously that makes no sense. If he's referring to something to do with the shark attack, then it seems like there should've been more dialogue to give the line some context. But the scene then switches to the wider shot and continues on, almost as if the severed arm shot and the "this is what happens" line had never even happened. Maybe they weren't originally part of the scene and were inserted later?

So, does anyone have any further details about this weird little part of the autopsy scene? I'd love to hear the explanation for the awkward flow during those few seconds of footage. I don't know why it bugs me so much... maybe it's just because it's such a strange, sloppy-looking cut in an otherwise perfect movie.


EDIT: Apparently I'm not the only one, as I've found several other articles/pages discussing the same topic. Here are a couple of them:
Missing dialogue in Jaws [Archive] - DVD Talk Forum
Jaws: The Morgue Scene

 

Am I the only one who thinks it sounds like Dreyfuss says "this isn't not a boat accident"?

 

I think it looks fine as well. : )

 

didn't notice that have to watch my BD now...If I noticed it I forgot...

 

well if you enjoy your VHS copy that's good for you! I remember watching VHS taped TV shows that looked like it was snowing and I still enjoyed them...LOL
years ago I had a double VHS machine, but many retail tapes would not copy.

 

Is it like that on the Blu-ray? I don't remember that weird edit at all, but that is really noticable.

 

It's always been like that. I'm too lazy to dig out the BD and check, but I'd be shocked if it's changed - that'd be revisionist history...