I make videos that balance creative thought with technical filmmaking concepts - the kind of content which I wished I'd watched before stepping onto a film set for the first time.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t like directors cutting their films decades later and putting new colour grades on them - yeah, sure it’s now closer to your vision, but to the original audience, the film has lost connection with it’s place in time.
All of these distinctions are rendered moot by colour grading and post-processing tools. Pretty much anything can be made to look like anything else these days. It's all become interchangeable.
Couldn't your first issue be solved with the Force Pro by DJI or something similar? Perhaps the master wheels?Basically, a 2nd operator that controls the frame while another holds and moves the gimbal?
Don‘t touch the fish, concentrate on the rice! Wisdoms from Japan 🇯🇵 practice and focus on the basics and learn to plan. Extract the Emotion out of a dialogue! Really good stuff! Good points thanks for sharing the story and your experience. Step by step following the Idols. #1 master the fundamentals. Contain the story!
[0:31] 🎥 Anamorphic lenses produce a "squeezed" image that is desqueezed before being presented to the audience. [1:53] 🔍 Anamorphic lenses provide widescreen aspect ratios like 2.35:1 or 2.39:1, different from spherical lenses which are more square. [2:32] ✨ Anamorphic lenses produce oval-shaped bokeh due to their cylindrical elements, contrasting with the circular bokeh of spherical lenses. [2:57] 🖼 Spherical lenses generally offer sharper images with minimal distortion across the frame compared to anamorphic lenses which exhibit more distortion and softness towards the edges. [3:47] 💸 Anamorphic lenses are more expensive to rent and require more lighting due to their slower aperture, impacting production costs significantly. [4:43] 🎬 Anamorphic lens sets typically offer fewer focal length options compared to spherical lens sets, influencing creative choices and versatility on set. [5:26] 📽 Anamorphic lenses, with their widescreen aspect ratios, create a sense of scale and grandeur in films like "There Will Be Blood," while spherical lenses in "The Lighthouse" use a more square format to emphasize intimacy and isolation. [6:49] 🌌 Lens characteristics influence the psychological impact of films; sharp spherical lenses in "The Tree of Life" create a naturalistic clarity, whereas anamorphic lenses in "Moonlight" enhance a dreamlike, nostalgic quality. [7:42] 🕯 Cinematographers like John Alcott used specialized spherical lenses, allowing natural light shooting in low-light conditions for films such as "Barry Lyndon." [8:32] 🎞 Choosing between anamorphic and spherical lenses is crucial for cinematographers to enhance storytelling and audience immersion in film projects.
I miss the film days. It might be coming back though. I went to a film loading class a few weeks ago. Even the kids in their 20s loved the hands on feel, the gears and weight of the camera. Though a few couldn’t grasp how to expose the film if there’s no monitor to tell you what it looks like.
It baffles me that new film makers can't grasp the concept of warmth vs cold feeling visuals. Over-saturated colors, not a shadow in sight and enough definition to see a blackhead on an eagle's arse at 300 feet. Half the time I feel like I'm on set. Old will be new again soon I hope.
I would be quite interested in knowing what alternative stocks were available at the time. Fuji? Or that was only branding for still photo film? If you do a follow-up, I would be delighted if you could find a few representative examples of movies using some of the alternative stocks, demonstrating the differences.
Hello, great video indeed. BTW Please note that the kodak 500 compared to the 100, is 2.5ish x more time sensitive, not 5x. Since From 100 to 200, and 200 to 400 is only 2 stops in difference :)
Technical correction: the anti-halation layer in cinema film stocks is necessary because the film is going through the camera much faster than in still cameras, but not directly. Both cinema and still film cameras both have pressure plates that hold the film against the gate to precisely position the film emulsion at the camera's focal plane, but the difference being that in still cameras, these are painted black so that light that passes through the film doesn't reflect off of the pressure plate and expose the film from the back side, which if allowed to happen would result in soft outlines on the image exposed from the back side, an effect that is called "halation", meaning that bright spots in the image end up with halos around them. Therefore the black pressure plates. But due to the faster movement of film through cinema cameras, any black coating on the pressure plate in the camera would quickly get worn down as thousands of feet of film go through the camera, leaving shiny spots where the paint is gone. So instead, pressure plates on cinema cameras are unpainted, and the back side of the film itself is coated black. To provide an alternate way of preventing halation. Thus, "anti-halation" coatings.
80's kid here. Back in the day, when a movie had 'the film look,' it meant we were in for a quality flick. Sure, the story could still be trash, but at least it wasn't made on a shoestring budget. If it looked different, you knew it was made for TV or on the cheap, and that usually made us less excited about watching it.
4:36 FYI 200 speed film adsorbs absolutlely same amount of light as 100 speed film! With same shutter and diaphragm of course. You support wrong side in "what is ISO actually"-disputs.
As an VFX Artist (and i am speaking just for myself, just saying) i like high Resolutions and more fps. But it is a lot more work, you have to put in the image on the whole production process, to avoid that TV-Look. As you mentioned like with these filters for example, which also creates more problems for the VFX, but thats where you have to choose right :)
The negative stock is important, but the baseline look is always the combination of the neg with the print stock, the lab process and the illumination used to print. That's before the color timer starts fiddling with the printer lights.
Fun fact I once worked on a commercial and we used use the relatively new T-grain material for highspeed shots (with a 35mm photosonics camera running up to 360 fps) unfortunately the stresses in the film loop of such a highspeed camera are so high that the T-grain molecules got stress exposures where they bent… quite a headscratcher to find out the reason and in those days not easy to fix in post …. Turned out that Kodak/photosonics had a tech-note warning of this just our camera rental house was too stupid to follow these and warn their clients…
Wonder if a modern film can be filmed with regular digital tech and made to look like it was filmed on Kodak 100T with filters and effects. Would serve to give time specific feels.
2:07 "28 Days Later" was shot on Canon XL1S cameras: they were 1\3'' machines. 3:13 Sorry, but the standard everything is derived from is full frame. That's the "1x" format. As such, Super35 has a crop factor of approximately 1.5x (different sensors have a slightly different diagonal while with film it really depends on the amount of perforations and wether or not you're shooting open matte).
It’s the same thing with photo film stocks. Kodachrome was had a more red tinge and thus was better for skin tones. Fuji Velvia was more green tinged thus better for landscape photos. They made film stocks as high as 1600 and as low as iso 8 until the 1980’s. The only remaining film stock of that generation is Fuji Velvia 50. High speed films are few and far between. I don’t believe anything over ISO 800 is made today. The highest speed film to my knowledge made today is 3200 black and white films made by Kodak and Ilford. The coolest film (no pun intended) is Cinestill 800T. It’s tungsten balanced 800 iso cinema film with the ramjet layer removed so it can be used in still film cameras.
Nice video! Just a few corrections, though. First, completely factual, the anti-halation layer isn't there to absorb scratches, though depending on how it's incorporated, that may be a side effect for people who don't know how to handle it. It's there to absorb light that passes through the emulsion layers, so it doesn't get reflected back through the emulsion which would result in reduced contrast and especially in bright points getting little halos (halation). During processing it's either washed away or made transparent. It's also common in film for stills use. Properly handled cine film in properly maintained equipment should not get scratched in the image forming area. Second, maybe more a matter of terminology: I wouldn't say a film with a higher EI absorbs more light, rather it needs less light for the same result, so it needs less light during exposure. At the chemical level, this may well be because it absorbs a higher percentage of photons (before they're absorbed by the anti-halation layer) - or it may be that each photon causes greater change, I simply haven't studied the chemical reactions enough to have a clue - but the practical effect in any case, is that higher EI means you have to expose it to *less* light to get the same exposure. Exposing it to more light to absorb will give you a serious case of overexposure. Third, certainly personal opinion, but I'm not the only one: This may be because I have seen a lot of old movies also other than 80s Hollywood, but I do not see greater variation in look in modern cinema, quite the contrary, as exemplified brilliantly by the examples you include of the "more diverse range of looks" of modern movies, that get nowhere near the diversity you illustrate for just the single Kodak stock that is the subject of the video. (Maybe you just do tongue in cheek with a very straight voice) Digital colour grading may *allow* for all sorts of different looks in post, but I guess the sum total of present day colour graders just have less collective imagination than the cinefilm engineers, DPs, directors, and labs of the past, because they routinely make most modern movies look almost exactly the same. The sickly green of The Matrix for instance (and in particular because it's easy to identify), has infected sci-fi, action, crime, and fantasy, as well as a lot of movies in other genres to such an extent that even a movie like the new Dune, while going to great lengths to achieve a different palette for the daylight desert and flamefilled nighttime shots, still falls back on flat semimonochromatic variations of sickly green and other sickly hues for most of the interiors and nighttime shots. Even the latest installment of the Blade Runner Cuts has adopted hospital green grading in place of the original steel blue, much to its demise. It's! So! Dull! (Not Dune in particular, but all of modern colour grading) Of course it makes hiding green screen reflections easier - an excellent illustration of how a particular technological detail can completely dominate an entire field of (supposedly) artistic expression.
I like older films because they are not over edited and the sound doesn’t have you reaching for the remote as often… We recently watched Psycho and were blown away
Nostalgia aside, these old movies don't have a great look. The colours are weird and the low dynamic range really squashes the image. Coming from someone who shoots film and loves old movies and the film look. Digital (and yes, modern film stock) offers a much more detailed picture.
