Yeah exactly.
And that’s the sort of micro-attention-to-detail thing that every art form needs - zillions of the little buggers, some really subtle, but some making a huge difference to the way something impacts an audience.
I only know this really well from the point of view of music, but I can only imagine it’s somewhat similar with visual arts as it is with games as it is with music - any complex art form, the really, really big difficulty isn’t the technical thing of making the thing. That, you take for granted - everyone at a professional level has the chops, or gtfo.
The really difficult thing is riding the wave of how so many tiny, subtle things can change the “gestalt”, the impact of how something hits the neutral end-user - some kind of overview as to how all the synergies of the work are working together.
For the team making the thing, they can’t afford to take that overview, they have to put all their attention on perfecting their corner of the work. But it has to be the job of someone to have that double vision - to be able to straddle both seeing it from the maker’s point of view, and seeing it from the audience’s point of view, as if they’d never seen the thing before.
Kind of an ability to reboot the brain and just suddenly see the thing afresh, each time you see it. Precious, precious ability, because it’s really what makes all the difference between those things that you see that have lots of bits right, but don’t somehow don’t gel, and those things that you see that really do gel, and are “in the pocket”.
I mean, there’s three levels: shit stuff that’s just shit because the people making it aren’t very good, then in the middle, loads of things that are made by people who are actually quite competent, but they don’t have someone on their team who has that overview thing, and then the great stuff, which is the same team, but this time with one or two people who can actually take that overview and have confidence in their ability to make those judgement calls (some of which can seem off to the team - again, trust is importantly involved here). (There’s another category, too I suppose, granted how I’m cutting the conceptual cake: stuff that’s made by poor teams but is produced well - turd polishing can also fall into this category, e.g. a movie with a shit script that’s passably entertaining because it’s been put together really well.)
Anyway, that Grey Worm event shows how easy it is to slip up in something so trivial that has quite a big impact. It’s not just us here that noticed that, I’ve seen it mentioned on several reviews too.
