Meridian

Meridian (2016)

A deserted cliff. Lightning appearing out of nowhere. A mysterious lady all dressed in white. Netflix’s latest original program, “Meridian,” is spooky, confusing, and only 12 minutes long. That’s because although “Meridian” is available on the streaming service worldwide, it was made not for Netflix’s 83 million subscribers, but for algorithms and their programmers. Director Curtis Clark likely had artistic reasons for adding the film’s strange effects. But those elements are primarily there because they tend to trip up video codecs, or software that compresses and decompresses digital video, and other elements of the streaming pipeline.

Date of release
2016-09-21
TMDB
4.8 / 10 (4)
Runtime
12m
Genres
Mystery, Science Fiction
Director
Curtis Clark

Casting

Interesting facts

Meridian is a 2016 film noir thriller film directed by Curtis Clark and written by Clark and James Harmon Brown. The film stars Kevin Kilner, Reid Scott, and Elyse Levesque, and focuses on detectives investigating the disappearances of three men in 1940s Los Angeles. It was released on Netflix and Xiph.org in September 2016.

Production

Meridian was developed as test footage for use by video streaming services. It makes deliberate use of an extreme range of lights and shadows, as well as cigar smoke and water, in order to make the film difficult to effectively encode for streaming. In one scene, the sky changes from bright sun to dark and overcast, interfering with the light balance; this is a common cause of color banding in video streaming.

Meridian was designed as a test film for the Interoperable Master Format (IMF), an open-source standard developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. The format encodes video with instructions specific to regions, such as which audio files to use or when to censor content. It was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended