I had another look at his videos to refresh my memory and it immediately brought to mind a post that I raised on the Newsshooter forum about dark and sombre lighting. The issue that I raised was the trend nowadays for Hollywood, and everyone else right down to YouTubers, to make everything dark and dingy so that you can barely make out anything but a face and some obscure background light. If it’s a scene in an apartment, for example, it’s lit by some dim bulb in a distant corner, like the person was living in a cave.
Andbery’s examples are darker scenes, but there’s still light about so that you can see the context and don’t feel like screaming into the videos for someone to turn on a light so that you can see what’s going on. Today’s film makers seem to think that almost complete absence of light is what makes a scene cinematic.
.
