Super 16mm: Creating That Gritty 70s Look Today | Writer/Director David Lowery 

The realisation that modern 16mm is the grain equivalent of pre-2000s 35mm blows my mind. So it's a little more affordable nowadays than the classic means of getting a rich and textured image.

I just loooooove the 30mm from the 60s and 70s. 70mm is also lovely. It's a shame that almost everything today has to look like digital.

Interesting that he keeps calling it ugly. Rough yeah, but I find it pretty sexy. I've always thought of 16mm living on a quad graph where one axis is between comforting and terrifying, and the other between sensual and sexual. This feels pretty grounded on the comforting side and then fluctuating back and forth across the other axis.

This subject about film types is the missing link that many people need to be educated on. Thank you.

I could not agree with you more!!! I love the gritty look but another important thing that plays Into that for me is the soft gritty microphone and background music quality in those films. I think it sounds so cool.

I wish kodak still the filmstocks from the 70s 80s and early 90s. Allow filmmakers to choose.

Excellent, fascinating talk! Very brilliant, thanks for this!

I read somewhere that Paul Thomas Anderson had the same issue with the Vision-3 35mm stocks when making Phantom Thread, but his solution was to push process everything to add that grit back into the film.

This looks beautitul.

That's how they should of did the Nightmare on elm street and Night of the demon reboot

It's interesting to hear is line of thinking with this, but I do feel he overemphasizes "texture". I feel the graininess is not the most significant trait of Super 16 vs 35mm - it's the depth of field on wide and medium shots, and the fact that you tend to frame tighter on super 16. And also that the lenses generally just aren't as good, so you have more fringing and softer sweet spots. Grain (and grit) is the one thing you can actually fake in post. The "feel" of the optical system, vis-à-vis negative/sensor size and lens characteristics is the main factor for me. I also have to wonder if casting 80+ year old movie stars wasn't a motivating factor for having the image as grainy as possible? Well, hopefully vanity is mostly gone by 80, but you never know...

I watched this movie and you can definitely tell its film... but at no point would you say this is ugly.

What's the film at 0:55?

📙💯

Very good job and you're right absolutely, super 16 and if you add Anamorphic, its the best right now, to get the old look we all love so much. I wish they'd bring back some of the old 35mm stocks, remake them the same way, to get that look. Right now, 35mm and especially above that, is so clean and digital looking, it's not inviting enough, into the world filmmakers create. To be honest, the cleaner the film, the more distracting and the messier the digital with fake film or VHS emulation, the more distracting from the story. I couldn't enjoy Knives Out, because the director was being a dick, trying to show off that he can sew film and digital scenes together, but was totally failing, because you always underdo or overdo it, but never perfectly, so it looks like a very cheap and lazy stunt just to prove the point, that ruins the film, for me at least. I mean, shoot VHS if you want VHS look and so on. Your film has that old look and you've made the right creative choices and I hope Kodak listens and brings back old stocks, because nothing better than real.

I’d have gone for Techniscope (35mm 2-Perf) myself.

What is the film at 0:59. Just a flash.

MFT is todays Super 16

You do not need to shoot 16mm to create that look in my opinion. I think you missed 3 steps. You can normally shoot 35mm negative but do not forget about duppositive, dupnegative, final print and this is what should be scanned to have that look, I think.

It’s not the resolution of the film stock. The lenses of old were just shite.

everything he is saying about contemporary film stocks is true and important, but the final result completely fails to do anything he wanted it to do. “wanted it to look worse than movies shot on 35 back then” is absolutely insane considering what he got, there’s NO way he’s satisfied

So modern filmstocks is too clean???

So with all the video effects and editing techniques of today no one managed to perfectly emulate the 70s film look? You still have to use real film camera ?

Sorry but digital video photography looks ugly. Personal preference but film looks better