Insipid Grey

It’s a bit of a cheap shot — you take an average picture of something and then suck the colour out of it.. And voila, you’ve just made “art”. Compress the image for web and it’s all ready for uploading onto your dark and atmospheric myspace page. And remember, use high angle shots to bring out your cleavage (it’s ok because it’s b&w, see?)
Now, I’m not hating on black and white imagery, I just think that if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it right. There’s so much stigma surrounding black and white photography, due to so many film students making terrible detective noir films on handicams and iMovie… or in the stills world, myspace users with compact cameras and a superficial understanding of Photoshop. If you want to overcome all this stigma, especially when making a short film, shooting colour images as normal and then pulling the saturation down to 0% doesn’t really cut it, even if you really like the results. I almost feel self-conscious telling people that our PP2 film may be black and white, as it feels very much like something a high school media student might say. But at the same time, I know we can do it better than that and it’s a great opportunity to make a film with a lot of visual texture.
When I watch old-school black and white films, I am often confronted by this very specific shade of grey that I heavily dislike.. it seems to permeate entire films and drench every scene in a wash of mediocrity. Looking online, I’m struggling to find examples, but late at night on ABC you’ll find the kind of films that I’m talking about. Here’s the one example I’ve found so far:

Obviously, the contrast ratio is going to vary depending on your computer monitor, but on the screen here at RMIT, this is a good example of the shade that I’m talking about. It’s somewhere close to zone 5, or middle grey, though I don’t have a great eye for judging zones just yet. Also, you may argue that I dislike this image because of the low contrast ratio rather than because the faces are exposed at around zone 5, and that’s probably true. But even if this shot had deeper shadows and some more intense highlights, I think I’d still dislike the skintones being at zone 5, it’s just a very muddy, indecisive tone of grey in my opinion.

Now if we look at the image above, which I like a lot more than the previous shot (which was from Invasion of the Body Snatchers), you’ll see (on my monitor at least) that there’s very little zone 5 within this image.. it almost ‘jumps’ from around zone 3 up to zone 6 or higher, skipping the mid tones. Obviously, this sort of high contrast look is only appropriate in certain scenes within certain films and genres, but it’s the kind of texture and tonality that I’d like to achieve in this PP2 film. The main question I’m currently facing is whether to light our shots like this, or try to maximise detail within the frame (a fat digital negative) and achieve the look in post-production. I’ve been testing all of this by grading still photography shots from my Canon 450D. By processing images with initially low contrast ratios and making them “edgier”, I’ve found that you typically have to make drastic sacrifices in shadow detail in order to make your midtones more contrasty. The result is that your skintones look fantastically mesmerising, but any vaguely dark areas of your image are brutally “crunched” in the process. Hence at the moment, I’m leaning towards lighting with a considerably high contrast ratio, so that alterations in post need not be as drastic. This hopefully means that I can maintain some degree of shadow detail… what’s the point of shooting a low-contrast ‘fat negative’ when you ultimately need to discard this excess detail in order to make your shot less bland?
I’ll find out in 7 weeks.

PP1 CP Self-assessment

Of all the myriad tasks required of us in completing PP1, the Content Producer project was the one I best understood. It was also the task that I best engaged with because at its heart, it involved physically making and designing media. The process was both familiar and alien to me simultaneously. On one hand, I was lighting and shooting video material, and I felt right at home. On the other hand, the story had to be conceived, shot, edited and presented as a complex transmedia narrative that harnessed the power of non-linear, online media spaces — something that I’ve never really done before. I guess that in comparison to many other PP1 projects, ours wasn’t quite as “out there” in terms of “new media”. We effectively created a fictitious character, Simon Brown, across multiple online spaces, and wove a narrative between our video episodes, blog posts, twitter feed and facebook pages. I liked the concept — it hinged on the fact that in online spaces, you can never come into contact with “real people”… only “people” who are pieced together from various fragments of online activity. Blogs, twitter feeds, etc, I don’t think it’s uncommon for people to systematically stalk a person across all of these platforms in order to get an understanding of what the person is really like. And this is the drive that we were attempting to harness in creating Simon Brown. I liked the concept, but the core challenge lay in marrying these fragments of online activity with our video content, which was arguably more blatantly fictitious in terms of its structure and content. Creating a transmedia project also challenged my ideas about typical media production workflows, the usual progression from pre to production to post. I’ll admit that although we initially conceived of Simon Brown as a transmedia story, we then broke the task down into smaller pieces, and this affected our workflow mentality. Early in the semester, we focused on creating Simon’s story in video-form, in terms of script development and shooting schedules. We knew that ultimately, this material would become part of a larger transmedia project, but at the time, we worked as if the video were self-contained, and this led to problems later on in our semester. Unlike text-based blogs and twitter feeds, video content is not particularly malleable — our production had to be finished within just a couple of days. Every extra day of physical shooting required great orchestration in order to get locations, equipment and actors — so it was difficult for our video content to “adapt” at all to the rest of our online project. If we had been aware of this problem earlier in semester, this may have meant that we would have planned our transmedia project more meticulously to begin with, before developing scripts or shooting individual segments. Without realising any of this at the start of semester, I guess I’ve learned a lot the hard way. When making transmedia objects, the typical distinctions between pre-production, post-production, online content and video content all break down and everything must develop simultaneously. This is the fundamental mistake we made in PP1 that ultimately limited what we could do with both our video content and the blog material.

Despite this oversight, I think that our project still holds together well. From the beginning of semester, we had a strong idea of what we wanted to make, and in many ways this made our production process quite streamlined. I think that I was intimately involved in the project throughout all stages of production, especially in relation to our video content. I worked on set as the cinematographer/camera operator, but also had significant input into script development and later pieced together each video segment in post-production. During the shooting period, I tried to work efficiently in order to minimise downtime, especially for the epic shoot at Stevie’s house that could have dragged on forever. Given the mundane, depressingly neutral state of Simon’s life, my lighting was correspondingly quite simple and naturalistic. I typically used just one fixture, a daylight-balanced Kino that provided a soft and reasonably cold key light, and enough spill to cover multiple actors simultaneously. The poker game scene proved the greatest challenge in terms of cinematography, in that we were working in a cramped space and needed to light both sides of the table at once without having any lights in shot, and without actors casting shadows on each other. It took a bit of experimentation, but I pieced together a workable setup and fine-tuned things for the tighter shots.

In post-production, much of the video content was easy to put together as we’d followed the script closely, however the speed dating scene was most problematic. Because we were missing a main actor, we were unable to shoot a master shot of two actors at once — we shot Simon Brown’s tight shot while searching for the people he was meant to be talking to. This lack of wide coverage made the sequence become cut-heavy and contrived, as the viewer can never properly understand the space in which Simon is talking. There was little I could do to minimise this monotonous back and forth style of editing, except to cut unnecessary lines of dialogue and ensure that vision cuts did not exactly match audio cuts. Later in the semester, when showing our rough cut to our PP1 tute, it was pointed out that Simon never really develops as a character — he does the exact same thing in each episode, and happens to find friends in the end for no real reason. To solve this problem, Kyla suggest that we give Simon some housemates who he only properly interacts with in the last episode, The Poker Game. However, this proved problematic as much of our video content involved Simon answering the door to a group of strangers who ask “is this the poker game?” etc. In short, while we attempted to weave this plot-device into Simon’s blog, it would require cutting significant portions of the video piece and make it end quite abruptly. This was perhaps the most difficult point in our collaborative production, as we had differing solutions to the problem. Ultimately, we scrapped the “house mates” idea, and manipulated the blog to fit the video. This may be “slack”, but I also think it’s realistic and demonstrates an understanding of different media forms. A blog is malleable — it can be quickly written and rewritten, unlike video material. Also, I would argue that Simon *does* develop as a character over the course of his story. Rather than dress up as a goth or pretend to be someone he’s not in the speed dating segment, Simon finally finds friends by inviting them over to his home and letting them into his world. In this way, the poker game segment represents Simon’s attempt to show people who he really is, and as we all know, learning to “be yourself” always results in the conclusion of your film. So to some extent, I think we were justified in leaving the video content intact and working on the blog content instead.

It may be argued that in this post I’m focusing too much on the production of video content and not enough on transmedia storytelling. However, given that this is a self-assessment post, I have to acknowledge that my primary concern in assessing Simon Brown, and indeed anything else I make, is the quality and appropriateness of my cinematography. This still remains the most important part of my CP role, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve also learned a lot about transmedia storytelling and the way this effects conventional media workflows. I’d definitely approach transmedia objects differently if I were to complete PP1 again. But as I previously outlined in my project brief, this is a secondary concern, subordinate to the technical quality of my work, and my ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with others on set. Transmedia production is undeniably different to what I’m used to. But in terms of online *video* content, no matter how non-linear or convergent the material is, ultimately, you’re still going out with a camera and exposing images onto film or tape. Feature films and online video series are thus born in exactly the same way, regardless of where each form of content ends up. In assessing myself for CP, I previously wrote that I would look at my practical research (cameras, codecs, etc), technical skill development and my collaborative work. I think that on all of these fronts, I’ve done well this semester. I’ve been heavily involved in group collaboration, I’ve worked closely on set under director Emma Judd and again in post production, making sure to voice any concerns that I have in a constructive manner. I’ve researched the camera we were shooting on, the Sony HVR-Z7, making sure that we were shooting in pseudo-progressive standard-def for optimum web compression quality, and I’ve experimented with ABC Pool’s video compression to find that it was altogether unusable for our purposes, hence our videos are hosted on vimeo. And in terms my practical application of this research and knowledge, I think that my cinematography was appropriate in conveying Simon Brown’s life to an audience, and in Final Cut I ensured that the story moved at a fast pace, understanding we fight many potential distractions in an online space. Overall, in terms of my initial criteria, I’ve done well, and I’m giving myself a 93% for the content producer task.

I do my homework

There’s only so much you can get from reading. I’m trying — I now have many, many books covering cinematography, lighting, colour correction, camera assisting, shooting on RED, plus the RED ONE build 30 manual, etc.. But nothing substitutes for going down to the rental house and putting a RED kit together, or loading a film mag. I have to break this vicious cycle of “so have you ever shot on 16mm?” “..no..” “and what about RED?” “…. no.” “Alright. So you know shit all and you have no idea what you’re in for”. In many ways, I guess that’s correct. I’m preparing to shoot on formats other than freaking DVCAM as much as I can, but ultimately, there has to be a first time and until then, I cannot say that I know what I’m in for. I can draw you diagrams of where all the buttons and inputs are located on a RED ONE with reasonable accuracy. On the dumb side, closest to the lens is your EVF output, below it is the LCD output, below that is the aux 232 interface, used to communicate between camera body and low-powered lens motors, etc. Further backwards are four 3-pin mini-XLR audio inputs, 5-pin audio output, timecode input, HDMI output and USB master and slave connections. But it’s all meaningless until I’ve got the damn camera in my hands and I can press record. Until then, I’ve shot projects on DVCAM and HDV. That’s it. Nothing XDCAM. Nothing on P2. Let alone anything on film. I’ll get there. But until then, rental houses are going to assume that I don’t understand the concept of “metadata”, or that I like to juggle prime lenses in my spare time. Until you’ve touched something, you have zero knowledge of it. And it’s a frustrating mentality.

Back in the day, I’d have dropped out of high school, found my way into working at my dad’s old camera shop, and worked my way up from there. I’d be slaving away in a rental house, recalibrating cameras, cleaning film gates, checking back focuses. But for some reason, I’m in uni. and so working fulltime at a rental house isn’t particularly viable right now. It’s not all bad. I’m actually shooting my own projects.. lighting them.. seeing how they look and cut together in post-production. But I am not “schooled” in a practical sense. The RMIT mentality is that if I want to learn cinematography in practical terms, I can do it myself via wikipedia or something similar. It’s true.. to some extent. But ultimately, it forces me to make this awkward jump from “reading books” to “suddenly shooting for three days on RED” with nothing in between. We’ll see how I go.

Seems alright

I’m wrecked after yesterday. Wrecked but content. It’s not even week 7 and we’ve now shot all of our final mockumentary footage for PP1 (post production is another story). The 2nd shoot took around 15 hours, with multiple setups, multiple waves of cast and some crew changes as well.
Considering that this PP1 group was randomly thrown together via the “1, 2, 3, 4″ system, everything has gone extremely well. Our idea took shape within 20 minutes of our first meeting, and has developed steadily into a monster-production. Emma Judd and Emma Haarburger have both effectively worked as producers on this project and orchestrated so many different aspects of the shoot, I don’t think it would have been viable otherwise. On set, Emma J took on the role of director and did a great job of it, while Emma H continued producing, prepping actors with makeup, mixing fake blood and all sorts of things, which was a big help. Liyana ended up mixing sound for us, which is an awful job and I feel bad, but she performed the role perfectly, getting strong levels and letting us know whenever planes, trucks, sirens or stoners approached.
I really enjoy working on shoots with skilled, driven people that I can trust — and this was one of those rare shoots where I felt surrounded by capable people. Sam Capol arrived later and took over audio, and again, I knew that our sound was in good hands (Sam will also be joining us on The Tip, which I’m also looking forward to..).
Massive thanks to Stevie also, for letting us use his place for such a long and chaotic shoot — it makes such a difference to be shooting in a controlled environment, and to know that you’re not going to be kicked out by 4pm or whatever. We had as long as we needed, which was great.

Any regrets?
Not yet.. We haven’t started post-production so I’ll wait and see. I think certain scenes, especially those involving 4+ actors, were difficult to light and shoot in such a cramped space with limited time, resulting in some unfortunate shadows and not the most realistic-looking lighting.. but it’s a bit early to predict all this. It may turn out that these rushed scenes with unfortunate lighting are my favourites, while the shots I labored over are mediocre. Whatever. For now, I’m very happy with how things went.

Thanks to everyone who worked on this project, I honestly don’t think it could’ve gone much better than it did, and it never could have come together without your input.
So. I guess I’ll see everyone in Edit suite 10..

Getting ahead of myself

RED ONE kit from Panavision: $900 per day
Camera body comes with:
- Electronic Viewfinder
- Onboard LCD viewfinder
- SDI Signal Breakout Box (needed to run a split I’m guessing?)
- 2x RED Drives (320GB ea.)
- 5x 8GB CF Cards (ideally we shoot to CF card and have a DIT duplicate our footage on location… it’s more reliable than shooting on hard drive)
- Handheld kit
- 4x Batteries
- Charger / AC Power supply

—Here’s where it gets interesting…

You can get a “Zeiss Standard Mk 2 Primes RED Bundle” for $600 per day from Panavision… and this “bundle” miraculously includes a set of tripod legs, a 150mm fluid head, a mattebox, 15mm rods and a follow focus.
(Oh yea. and 4 Zeiss standard mkII lenses — a 24, 32, 50, and 85mm, each opening up to T2.1)
OR
for an extra $70 per day, you can swap the 4x Zeiss standard mkII lenses for 5x Zeiss superspeed mkIII lenses, each opening up to T1.3. Then you’ve got 18, 25, 35, 50, and 85mm lenses to work with. It’s a pretty good deal, as far as I can see. It would throw us over our expected budget by $210 for a 3-day shoot.. but it’s a good deal right?

On top of this, I wouldn’t mind getting a Zeiss 60mm T3 4:1 Macro lens for $110 per day from Cameraquip.. if it’s at all necessary.. even if we rented it for just the one day. 4:1 macro could be pretty intense..

So.. 900 + 670 x 3 = $4710
Plus $110 more for a day with the macro lens = $4820..
This shoot is going to be fairly massive by RMIT standards… Now we just need an idea… something to actually shoot. sigh..

“Camcorders”

Back in high school, I decided to get my own video camera. It was my final year of Media, and the Media cameras.. I just didn’t like them. They looked too small. (I had no logical reason at the time, as I had very little camera knowledge). So I shopped around online, looked at all sorts of fancy “camcorders” from Sony, Panasonic, Canon, JVC… There were miniDV cameras, HDD cameras, direct to DVD cameras.. sorting out what I wanted was a great learning experience. I ended up getting a Panasonic NV-GS500 for cheap on eBay.

It was shiny, relatively large, and I’d read it had a big sensor for shooting in low light conditions. Great reasons for buying a camera, I know. But anyway. While shopping around for my camera, I became curious to know.. what was the most expensive video camera out there? You could browse the cameras in certain price brackets, so I went and looked at the $14000+ section, and thought “shit, what an intense camera, and for $14K that must be what professionals use, wow”. I think there was only one camera in the 14,000+ section — a Canon XL-H1, or something like that.

I was incredibly impressed by the number of dedicated buttons, the lens hood that made the lens look huge and intimidating, and the matte black finish.
But now when I think about it, I hate these sorts of cameras. They’re not “point and shoot” cameras by any means, but there’s this horrible emphasis on automated, computerised functions to make things easier.. and the marketing of these cameras can be extremely deceptive. They look like theyr’e on the bleeding edge of camera technology.. space-age submachine gun things.. yet most of this advanced technology simply helps the camera cut corners and interpolate data. If this sounds too general.. I guess I’ll name names. You’ve got the Canon XL-whatevers, and the Sony HVR-Z-whatevers, Panasonic HMC-whatevers… I don’t like them. They occupy this awkward space between consumer camcorders and fully professional cameras, and everyone seems to think that they’ll have “superior resolution” because they look so futuristic and confusing.
What’s not to like? I’ll tell you a few of the things I hate about said cameras.

Sensor size.
They’re all pretty much 1/3″ CCD or CMOS cameras, meaning that the crop factor is huge. You need wide, wide lenses to squeeze a picture onto such a tiny set of sensors. Hence it’s difficult to get a shallow depth of field, hence your video looks even more like ‘video’. What’s worse is that these cameras are usually HD. Squeezing so many pixels onto a small sensor increases noise

Lenses that stop down as you zoom.
Apparently, this has something to do with making zoom lenses more compact. I’m not sure about Canon’s or Panasonic’s lenses, but Sony’s HVR-Z1/Z5 lenses stop down rapidly. The Z5 goes from F1.6 at wide angle to F3.4 at full telephoto… God help you if you’re doing a night shoot with it (I was last week). I guess if you’re going to use the camera with auto-shutter and auto-gain, the massive light loss won’t be as much of an issue, if you’re prepared for your tight shots to be grainy as hell. But for regular, sane people who aren’t going to resort to auto-gain, getting a tight shot could mean completely changing your lighting setup.. massive pain.

Interframe compression
HDV. It’s.. sort’ve HD.. but not. It uses MPEG-2 long-GOP compression, with sprinklings of keyframes and strings of interpolated pictures in between. Now.. I’m currently editing a project in HDV, and it actually looks quite good, but it takes a lot of processor power to work with HDV footage, and your colour correction options are quite limited because you start seeing compression artefacts everywhere. It looks good, providing you don’t mess with it in post, or confuse it by shooting lots of movement or complex detail. HDV chroma subsampling is also terrible.. 4:2:0.. don’t shoot anything red. Red shirts, people under red lights, etc.. it all blows out, looks flat, blocky and extremely saturated.

Auto-anything.
Alright. So it’s not necessarily bad for a camera to have automated exposure software. But they make it so freaking hard to turn off. You switch the camera to “manual”, but that’s not good enough in many cases.. that only toggles autofocus, that sort of thing. To make shutter speed, aperture, and gain fully manual, there’s some other trick you’ve got to pull off.. it’s quite deceptive.

Fake zoom/focus rings.
By “fake”, I mean digital. You can turn the focus ring round and around and around forever, I guess because the ring isn’t mechanically attached to the lens elements.. it controls them indirectly through digital circuits instead. something like that. The point is that these focus rings aren’t designed for focus pulling.. at least, not the Z5. Maybe I was completely tripping, but on the Z5, the sensitivity of the focus ring seemed to change as you moved from wide to telephoto. This meant that accurately marking focus points on the lens never worked.. you crash zoom, focus, mark the focus point, then zoom out and your focus point will be somewhere completely different. wtf.

that’s probably enough complaining for now. my point is.. don’t be fooled by the shininess or the buttons or the price tag.. they’re usable cameras, but there are many many corners cut.

Dangerous ideas

I’ve been reading again.

Paul Wheeler’s book on High Definition Cinematography is a very interesting read because it goes against so much of what I hear about film vs digital. Obviously it’s biased, as it’s a book specifically about digital cinematography, and because Paul Wheeler admittedly prefers the look of digital cinema. But he raises some very interesting points. I’m going to summarise a couple of things that have.. slightly affected my views.

The resolution of the human eye
One minute. 1/60th of 1 degree out of 360. That’s the limit to our perception of visual resolution. Any detail that occupies less than one minute (1/60th of a degree of our field of view) will not be properly resolved by the human eye. Hence there is a point at which individual pixels onscreen cannot be resolved by viewers sitting a certain distance away. Beyond this distance, pixel-based and film-grain-based images will both look seamless because our eye cannot identify individual pixels at that size, density or distance. 1920×1080 images have just enough pixels to pass under this threshold of 1/60th of a 360th when stretched across a large cinema screen, assuming you’re sitting towards the back of the cinema.

Generational loss in replicating film
Film negative captures an incredible amount of detail. Estimates range from 3K to 4K to 6K equivalents and beyond. But what seems extremely scary to me is that in order to distribute your film on a large scale, the conversion from interpositive to internegative to whatever else significantly degrades the resolution of whatever you originally shot. The resolution of 35mm you see in cinemas is apparently estimated at around 1.2K.. 1.4K by more optimistic people. Obviously films shot digitally are still subject to this same degradation when release prints are made for screenings, but there aren’t as many generations, as footage remains free from degradation until after post-production is complete. And, considering the push towards digital projection in cinemas, you could theoretically make a digital film with almost zero degradation throughout the entire process of mass distribution and screening.

Now the question is.. do we *want* to maximise detail in our films? Without thinking, most people are going to say yes. That’s what we’ve spent ages trying to do. Sharper lenses, cleaner film stocks, more pixels, greater resolution… that’s all “progress”. But now.. clean images don’t look “filmic”. They’re harsh, there’s no magic in them, no life, no grain… Maybe we just need some time to acclimatise to the look of digital cinema. Or.. perhaps we decide that we don’t want any more resolution. Maybe 1.4K projections look the best anyway — they’re slightly soft and hence filmic, and you can see grains of cellulose dancing around.. etc. If so, we may as well stop developing new imaging technology, as any ‘improvements’ in resolution or grain reduction are only going to make things worse.

What a backwards idea…

some kind of workflow

Why has it been so quiet here as of late?

Well.. I’ve been away. And now I’m back, but I’m in post-production hell. 6 episodes, 22 minutes each. 15 days of unlabelled HDV footage from two cameras, only one of which has usable audio. Most shots are slated, but there are various mystery-clips that have no slate, and many others have a flash of slate for three frames in the top-left corner of the shot, out of focus with motion blur.. usually you can guess what take it is though.

Post-production hell has its benefits, however. The job will cover the cost of my new 4-core Mac Pro, which I sort’ve need anyway in order to cut a whole project in HDV (I’d need at least 2TB of space to transcode all the footage to ProRes, which would’ve been necessary for it to run smoothly on my old 2006 iMac).

I realise, I’m not an editor.. and a 4-core Mac Pro with 8gig of ram isn’t really necessary unless I properly want to be an editor. But one implication is that if we shoot anything on RED this year, we’ll have an intel-mac to run REDALERT and REDCINE-X etc on. (the RMIT computers are good, but pre-intel.. which is a pain). The Panavision money would cover two days of shooting on RED (it’s 900 per day, but another 5-600 for lenses, adding neatly up to around $3000).

I’m thinking that in post, the best option for RED shooting seems to be using the Quicktime proxies which are part of the larger 4K shots. I’m reasonably sure that this requires no processing, just the installation of a plugin in FCP. Using proxies would be faster initally as there’s no process of transcoding everything to ProRes, and hence you also keep all the flexibility of RED’s ‘RAW’ codec.. would be pretty good for colour grading, I imagine. Especially since any colour grading of the 4K source files automatically alters the appearance of the proxies to match.. And (using CRIMSON, I think) at the end of your edit, you can link your proxies back to the larger source files and finish the project in HD.

So yes. There are benefits to this job I’m doing. But I’m eager to get back into production, it’s been too long.. and it’s frustrating having to spend every day doing at least 8 hours of editing when I could be applying to assist in productions or whatever.

Over the next few weeks, before uni starts, I need to figure several things out, in terms of this final RMIT film I’ll hopefully be making.

I need to visit Lemac, and possibly other places that offer telecine services, and ask for quotes. I also want to know what formats they can scan in.. ideally, an HD or 2K scan of our 16mm footage would be great, but the cost might completely destroy us, I’m not sure. It just seems a waste to shoot on 16mm and then end up with footage on digibeta..

Once I’ve figured out the telecine options, I can begin to figure out whether this project would benefit from being shot on multiple formats.. namely 16mm and RED. Obviously, you’d need a stylistic justification for using multiple formats as they’ll look significantly different. But assuming we found a justification, we could effectively afford two free days of shooting on RED, and we’d be covered for if we ran out of film stock. It’d allow for a larger-scale shoot, since there’s no way we could afford to shoot for more than a couple of days on 16mm.. if we shot on RED as well that’d be 4 days.. that’s a lot more production time than I’m used to on RMIT films.

Then, assuming that multiple formats sound like a good idea, there’s the question of framerates.. do we shoot everything in 24p, or shoot the RED at 25p and mess around with the 16mm footage in post..
And after that there’s the question of aspect ratio.. although that’s fairly easy.. 1.78:1 is most likely the best option, now that I’m sure the SRII can shoot in 1.66:1..

Many things to consider. But first.. over 100 more hours of editing.

Film, man. It’s beautiful

I’ve come to hate the Kodak website. All useful information is buried in convoluted layers of film-propaganda.. about why I should use film, why “Industry professionals” choose to use film, why I should buy Kodak film, yet it’s so hard to find anything about the fucking film itself. And I don’t want to hear the word “latitude” ever again.. jesus.

Anyway. I’ve finally found Kodak’s catalogue of stock. It’s available at http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Products/Product_Information/index.htm.
And Kodak’s brief descriptions of each stock, as well as in-depth specification lists and curves etc, are online at http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Products/Production/Vision2_Color_Negative_Films/index.htm

Now that I’ve got both of those elusive urls to refer back to, I can move on to more important matters. I realise that everyone is sick to death of film vs digital arguments.. it comes up everywhere, and I guess it’s a bit cliche.
But after visiting the Kodak site, I was surprised by how blatant.. and desperate.. the film propaganda is becoming. You know Kodak’s having a hard time when you see how much effort they’re putting into advertising. It’s everywhere.



Dont’ get me wrong, I’m not against shooting on film, not at all. But it irritates me when supporters of film completely dismiss digital alternatives on a seemingly irrational basis. So many testimonials supporting film are just like

“Yea man, shooting 35mm Kodak film allowed us to really see the detail because there’s so much latitude, you know? You can see like, highlights and shadows at the same time like ’cause there’s lots of latitude, so we didn’t have to have lots of lights because of the latitude. It’s awesome dude. And there’s.. these grains.. y’know man, these grains.. and it’s just beautiful man. You don’t have to have all these computer things, or these cables or digital things, it just works and it never breaks and it’s so simple.”

Why does Kodak target their products to complete idiots when complete idiots probably can’t afford to shoot on film in the first place?

No one seems to be able to articulate exactly why shooting on film is so wonderful. They always resort to “latitude”, or some magical quality of the “grain structure” that allows for the capture of practically infinite detail. Or they just give a list of successful movies shot on film and suggest that because they knew what they were doing, you should probably follow suit and shoot on kodak stock as well, because that’s obviously what made those movies so fantastic.

Negative film does have a lot of latitude.. you don’t have to worry about the about harsh clipping of highlights. The grain does look good in many contexts.. digitally-shot films can look strangely sterile because of the lack of film grain. But.. it’s not magic.. it’s a light-sensitive emulsion.. and in recent times, film often gets scanned digitally for post-production, so whatever “magic” there is to film is quickly reduced to pixels.
It’s not romantic, but it’s true. Digital intermediates are becoming increasingly popular, and although film is scanned at extremely high bit-depth (16-bit would be 65,136 different degrees between a black pixel and a white pixel), it’s still a collection of pixels.

What puzzles me is that when I watched the VCA FTV graduate films at ACMI, projects shot on 35mm looked far superior to those shot digitally on RED or HD, even though all projects were ultimately exported as Standard definition 10-bit ProRes files. They’re all digital. All 720 x 576. All have 1024 different degrees between a black pixel and a white pixel. Yet the HD/RED films showed significant aliasing.. jagged edges in wide shots.. lots of stair-stepping. This sort of thing is common when projecting SD images on a large screen. There’s often lots of deterioration because you’ve only got 720×576 pixels to work with.
So.. it didn’t surprise me that the films shot on RED had stair-stepping in the wideshots.. it seemed like a natural result of down-converting to such low resolution output. What did surprise me was that I never saw any of the same artifacts in the 35mm films, despite the fact that they were digitally scanned and down-converted to standard-def.
“It shouldn’t surprise you Josh, digital cinema is still in its infant stages.. how can you expect it to compete with 35mm film, which has over a hundred years of history? It just can’t handle fine detail or highlights in the same way as proper film emulsion, it’s obvious.”
But it’s not film any more. The 35mm projects were scanned at 2K or whatever, then down-rezzed for playback at ACMI. Why no stairstepping when it’s converted to measly standard def? I don’t know. People say “that’s just what film does, it’s different.” But to me this makes no sense. Film cannot defy all logic and reason just because it’s expensive and traditional and inherently “beautiful”. It’s not inherently beautiful. It’s light rays and chemicals.. and when it’s scanned, it should behave like anything else that’s scanned.

Whatever. I still don’t know the answer. “It’s film” is not an answer.

What I’m ultimately getting at is that I like the fact that no one romanticises shooting digital. We know there’s no magic. We know that pixels are ugly, we know compression is ugly.. shooting digital can be pretty damn ugly. But we know how to minimise this ugliness.
It’s simple. It’s down to earth. For many purposes, it’s not as nice as film. But at least it’s not full of itself.

Digital: “Hi I’m a digital imaging sensor”
Film: “And I’m a strip of 35mm Kodak film, baby”
Digital: “So what have you been up to, 35mm Kodak film?”
Film: “Well for over a hundred years I’ve been working with Industry Professionals to make some of the finest motion picture images imaginable, using my Advanced grain structures and emulsions to bring superior image quality to every production I’m a part of. I’ve been the most robust and reliable format in the known world and the guys at Kodak just keep making me better and better by changing my grain structures. I’m fairly overwhelmed by how great I am, really.”
Digital: “Aren’t you going to ask what I’ve been up to, 35mm film?”
Film: “Fuck off man”

By all means, shoot film. I want to shoot film. I’ll probably like shooting on film.
But I don’t like film-dogma.

Don’t ask

An 85B filter is used when shooting on tungsten stock in daylight. CTO gel serves a similar purpose when shooting on tungsten stock with HMIs or 5600K lighting of some kind. That’s all fine.
What gets me is that in all situations, an 85B filter is meant to cut down light by 2/3rds of a stop.
I should leave it here. I know that to compensate for an 85B filter, you boost levels by 2/3rds of a stop.. and that’s all I really need to know.
But.. how is this possible? How can an 85 filter reduce the intensity of all lights by the exact same amount?
I’m sure it does.. It’s a rule for a reason. But to my mind, it doesn’t add up. An optical filter absorbs certain frequencies of light (preventing them from passing through the filter) more than others, which pass through it more easily. So.. the 85B filter absorbs light in the blue spectrum (high frequency, short wavelength), while allowing orange light to pass (lower frequency, longer wavelength), thus achieving an orange colour bias for shooting on tungsten stock.
Now.. consider the fact that different light sources have different colour biases. Tungsten lights throw out a great deal of orange/red/infrared light. HMIs and fluorescents have a colder bias, and do not have a continuous output across the visible spectrum (I’m fairly sure). This means that there are many peaks and troughs across their output from warm to cold.. (possibly meaning that these lights are prone to having low CRI?***) and that certain frequencies of light aren’t present at all (this possibly only applies to fluorescent sources..).
Anyway.
It seems that filters absorb (eliminate) certain frequencies of light while letting other frequencies through. It also seems that different light sources have different spectral distributions and colour biases. So.. if an 85B filter absorbs blue and violet, allowing more orange/red light to pass, surely it would have more of an effect on an HMI (with high levels of blue, violet and ultraviolet) than on a tungsten fixture (with a bias towards red/orange output).

I don’t know. It doesn’t sound right, now that I’ve written it.

I’m not saying that placing an 85B filter on a tungsten light would do nothing, obviously you’re going to lose light output because of the filter density, resulting in light loss no matter what fixture you’re using. But.. are you really going to lose exactly the exact same amount of light regardless of the colour bias of your fixture? If so, it’s a strange world…

****** ED: According to David Mullen’s book on Cinematography, and another book by Blain Brown, this used to be the case, but no more. HMIs and fluorescents are now made ‘quasi-continuous’ with the addition of rare earth metals to fill the gaps in light output, achieving a high colour rendering index (CRI)