AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening

Yup, yet another example of the thing I'll never stop finding fascinating:

ANY noticeable percieved "flaw" in any creative media will eventually become an aesthetic choice.

For an example, watch Shogun. Director apparently thought that most of the screen being out of focus was a positive. Quite distracting.

Agree. Purely opining, but I assume that it's because of the emotional connection that artistic media has on people, despite the flaws.

People remember the emotions the artwork engendered, and thus the whole work is associated with the feelings, flaws and all. If the work is particularly widely known, the flaws can become a stand-in for the work itself.

I see this in video games - I'm fond of the NES-era "flaws" and limitations (palette limits, sprite limits, sound channel limits), but less connected to the Atari 2600 or SNES/PS1/NDS/etc flaws. Shovel Knight is charming; A Short Hike, while great, doesn't resonate on a style level.

I think there is a bit more to it. For example when developing a game when CRTs were popular they were using CRTs to view their game and making decisions based on what they saw on the CRT. If you display the same game with perfect square pixels it looks different. If the developers were viewing square pixels when developing the game they would make different decisions.

Or Snyder's terrible zombie movie Army of the Dead where he uses lenses with very shallow depth of field that makes almost everything look out of focus. It is very annoying.

I don't think this conflicts with what I'm saying; I've seen what you talk about -- and yet in modern days people will emulate the "square pixel bad style" regardless.

I've noticed this in a few things the last few years. The top and bottom of the shot are out of focus and it is super distracting to me. Maybe it is meant to draw the eye to the middle of the frame.

Even if you ignore all of the emotional attachment aspects, I think you would expect this to happen simply because people who are good at their craft will learn how to work with the shortcomings of their tools. If your cameras unavoidably add grain to everything you shoot you'll find ways to make that look good, and some of the things you come up with might not work without grain.

Yup, notice that as well. A blurry vignette. Needle sharp in the center, but objects that are the same distance are blurry at the edges of the frame. At first I thought they use vintage lenses, but it's probably done in post.

I sometimes do something similar on photos, where I darken the edges a bit.

I don't think it's just that here. Our brains simply prefer high entropy signals over low entropy ones. It's why mobile phones (and digital cameras before them) use sharpen filters to the point where the result looks unnatural.

> I sometimes do something similar on photos, where I darken the edges a bit.

Which is also an emulation of the shortcomings of older/worse technology.

Not necessarily, there are still lenses being produced today with vignetting, especially wide open.

Avoiding vignetting is a trade off between complexity, cost, weight, and other optical flaws. That said modern optical design and manufacturing has made it a lot easier to have nearly flawless (clinical) designs.