Personally I don’t care what they wear; it’s just that I can understand if the anchor was worried that the uniform effect could be distracting to some non-negligible portion of the audience.
I can easily imagine a similar situation with three men wearing the same or similar colour ties, and the anchor telling the other presenter to go and get a different one. I would still personally not be bothered, I would still understand the anchor’s worries, and I would still feel those worries could have been expressed in a less dickish fashion.
Bravo. The universe needs more people who can just go ahead and own their mistakes like that. I’m going to remember that way of putting it too, thank you.
Go back and rewatch the first few Republican Presidential debates, if you can stomach it. One of them, every male candidate except Trump was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, red tie. No one said anything. Men on shows like this are dressed nearly identically all the time, and no one notices.
So not quite a flush hand. Was the presenter/moderator a man in the same uniform? If so, did he have a junior male colleague similarly dressed?
First result on DuckDuckGo for “why do all presidential candidates dress the same”:
This election’s early favorites are a yacht-load of honkies who all default to boxy charcoal gray suits, starchy white shirts, and shiny silk neckties (nearly always red, regardless of party affiliation). It’s a classic high-contrast Leadership color palette I like to call “Fascist Contemporary.”
I don’t think that movie gets enough love, i was looking for it a few years back to show it to a friend and could not find it anywhere. I hope i’ll have better luck next time i decide to look for it.
And speaking as some one who’s done a lot of production work. Making the person on the right of the frame wear the black blazer looks worse. It makes the frame unbalanced. Drawing the eye to the left. And away from the Anchor who’s been placed at center, because she’s the lead and we should primarily be focused on her. You can argue that breaking up all that white does look better. I personally disagree. 3 in white looks rather stylish, and its a bit different to what we usually see in news casts (which I think is good). But if you’re going to break it up. Sherlock, in the center, needs to be the one in black.
You get a more symmetrical frame. Which is more pleasant in a raw way than an asymmetrical one. And the eye will be naturally drawn to the center of the frame, which is where focus needs to be.
No there was no problem according to how TV works. 3 vs 2 in white is an aesthetic debate. Mechanically very pale colors and can be problematic for video (or really all photography motion or not) because it’ll be more prone to over exposure. But black has the same issue (in reverse, underexposure). Make any of those reflective or shiny and its even worse. It can be tricky some times to shoot a very pale person in a very dark garment, or vice versa. And if you stand those people next to each other you just complicated it further. But all three of these people are pretty damn white and wearing white, and isolated in their own shot. So none of that comes into play until the black blazer shows up. And any professional crew with decent equipment can pretty easily avoid all of those exposure issues.
But it is not the anchor’s call to set wardrobe. With typical news work flows that’s going to be the director or some form of producer. And the thing is exposure and lighting were already set for that presenter in a white blouse. The change was made with no time to re-set those elements. And you can see that in the last part of the video. When she returns with the black blazer on. Its is shapeless and lacking in detail because it is underexposed. A black blob with bright white collar extending from it.
They created a problem with how TV works. In that situation you get a better exposed, cleaner shot. With all your presenters looking good. If you stick with what’s already there rather than making a change. And that’s aside from the framing problem I mentioned above.
Its really atypical for news. They shoot for “conservative and unfrightening to your granma” to convey authoritative credibility. “Sleek, modern and stylish” doesn’t necessarily mesh with that.
But if’n your gonna change that. Its Sherlock who needs to change. And she needs to change into something that’s saturated enough to differentiate from white. But not so dark that it fucks exposure. But that’s absolutely not the time to do it, and its absolutely not her role or right to be dictating other presenters wardrobe. Its a shitty power move. She put everyone else on set out. While singling out a particular co-worker for orders. I’d leak this shit too.
She now does the Weekend News on SBS ( http://www.sbs.com.au/news/videos - possibly geoblocked ) and pops up on SBS2’s The Feed sometimes.
She’s also on the Twitter.
