Im working as DP/Camera Op for a first time low budget indie filmmaker. She is going to shoot HD. I managed to talk her into shooting certain scenes in super 8 because, well, Its an awesome format. The scene is hell, not the sterotypical hell, but more of just an endless abyss. I think the texture and look of super8 would very much help the look of this scene. Ive shot with k40 before, so im not totally oblivious, but I do know that K40 will probably suck in low light. We allready drawn up the storyboards and there will be ALOT of tight close ups so as to fully utilize the format, but there has to be the occasional wide shot (which we will shrink in post to look like a much larger area). I read somewhere that there are better filmstocks for lower light, and the director gave me a go ahead in getting k40 along with a better film stock. Any info you guys have would be much appreciated. How hard will it be to process/transfer/buy? Like I said before, you know you guys love playing the genius role to my dim witted dolt, so have a go at it! Thanks again.What film should I use?
Moderator: Andreas Wideroe
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Joshua Ryan
What film should I use?
Ok, I know I can do a search for this, but just in case mine is a special case, I dont want anything wrong to happen, and even if you guys claim you dont like redundant topics, I know you secretly love to share your mass wealth of knowledge with a newbie like me many times over, making you look really cool Im working as DP/Camera Op for a first time low budget indie filmmaker. She is going to shoot HD. I managed to talk her into shooting certain scenes in super 8 because, well, Its an awesome format. The scene is hell, not the sterotypical hell, but more of just an endless abyss. I think the texture and look of super8 would very much help the look of this scene. Ive shot with k40 before, so im not totally oblivious, but I do know that K40 will probably suck in low light. We allready drawn up the storyboards and there will be ALOT of tight close ups so as to fully utilize the format, but there has to be the occasional wide shot (which we will shrink in post to look like a much larger area). I read somewhere that there are better filmstocks for lower light, and the director gave me a go ahead in getting k40 along with a better film stock. Any info you guys have would be much appreciated. How hard will it be to process/transfer/buy? Like I said before, you know you guys love playing the genius role to my dim witted dolt, so have a go at it! Thanks again.
Im working as DP/Camera Op for a first time low budget indie filmmaker. She is going to shoot HD. I managed to talk her into shooting certain scenes in super 8 because, well, Its an awesome format. The scene is hell, not the sterotypical hell, but more of just an endless abyss. I think the texture and look of super8 would very much help the look of this scene. Ive shot with k40 before, so im not totally oblivious, but I do know that K40 will probably suck in low light. We allready drawn up the storyboards and there will be ALOT of tight close ups so as to fully utilize the format, but there has to be the occasional wide shot (which we will shrink in post to look like a much larger area). I read somewhere that there are better filmstocks for lower light, and the director gave me a go ahead in getting k40 along with a better film stock. Any info you guys have would be much appreciated. How hard will it be to process/transfer/buy? Like I said before, you know you guys love playing the genius role to my dim witted dolt, so have a go at it! Thanks again.
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JoshuaRyan
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Really Mattias? Even I am going for a totally different look? We want to seperate reality from hell as much as possible so i thought the extreme difference in format would help. Are you saying the quality of the image with be too drastically different? And thank you everyone else on the suggestions. We might shoot the scene on super8 and HD just to be safe I guess. Are there any quirks to shooting in those other filmstocks? Thanks again for the help guys, and Mattias, if you could elaborate a little more I would very much appreciate it. I would like to cover all my basis on this and when someone who knows way more than me about this kind of thing mentions its a bad idea, Im not dumb enough to shut my ears to the matter.
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christoph
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well, best would be to shoot a short clip and decide if it is what you are looking for yourself, no?JoshuaRyan wrote:Are you saying the quality of the image with be too drastically different?
as for film choices:
b/w with medium grain: plus-x (80asa under tungsten, light hard)
b/w and really nicely grainy: tri-x (160asa tungsten)
color and still nice tight grain if you have a good telecine: vision2 200T
color and really low light: vision 500T
biggest problem i can see is that you're going to have to crop the frame image to get to widescreen (ie HD).. personally i would shoot regular 16mm and crop that if the budget allows. advantages: reliable registration, huge film choice, more options for transfer, better image quality, easy sync sound.
++ christoph ++
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mattias
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i was thinking of the post production. you'll have to either transfer to hd for editing, or bump up an sd transfer, the first which will get complicated and really expensive and the second which won't look very good.JoshuaRyan wrote:Are you saying the quality of the image with be too drastically different?
as for the look, it's not so much that it will look different, but it will probably also look bad. hd is so crisp that it pops off any screen, while the super 8 will look like a mud pit or something. this might be what you want, but if you've been fooled by the "super 8 is as sharp as hd" nonsense i think you should reconsider.
/matt
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JoshuaRyan
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mattias
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i haven't really shot anything but k40 in super 8, except for a few test rolls, so that would be my choice. :-) just curious, if you have a budget and all, why not shoot it in 16 instead? you can easily get a grainy look with that too but with more reliable equipment and better post options...
/matt
/matt
Joshua,
I hear you saying, that you are shooting both tight close ups and wide angels that you will shrink in post.
You must remember that every filmstock has grain, super8 even more so. Shrinking in post reduces the size of the grain. This means that within your "Hell" scene you will have varied grain size.
I've seen people depict Hell with super16 on green screen scanned to SD and put in 3D enviroment. It looked like crap with the people with grain, and the enviroment cold as computer graphics. I do not know if it is some like this you are planning to do, but you should at least take grain size into consideration.
One way to work around this is with a goos on-liner, who will keep the grain on the full screen. But since you are shrinking, you need larger grain.
So B/W could be Plus-X for close ups and Tri-X for wide.
Colour would be Vision2 200T for CU and Vision2 500T for wide.
This is all theoretical. I'm not shure you can make an exact match. In fact, I very much doubt so. But it is worth a try.
You should also make shure you film some black screen, white screen and green screen. You will then be able to overlay the other footage with the grain making the overall look consistant.
michael
I hear you saying, that you are shooting both tight close ups and wide angels that you will shrink in post.
You must remember that every filmstock has grain, super8 even more so. Shrinking in post reduces the size of the grain. This means that within your "Hell" scene you will have varied grain size.
I've seen people depict Hell with super16 on green screen scanned to SD and put in 3D enviroment. It looked like crap with the people with grain, and the enviroment cold as computer graphics. I do not know if it is some like this you are planning to do, but you should at least take grain size into consideration.
One way to work around this is with a goos on-liner, who will keep the grain on the full screen. But since you are shrinking, you need larger grain.
So B/W could be Plus-X for close ups and Tri-X for wide.
Colour would be Vision2 200T for CU and Vision2 500T for wide.
This is all theoretical. I'm not shure you can make an exact match. In fact, I very much doubt so. But it is worth a try.
You should also make shure you film some black screen, white screen and green screen. You will then be able to overlay the other footage with the grain making the overall look consistant.
michael
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JoshuaRyan
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This is what Im thinking (pardon the crappy drawing by the way)
Shooting it like this
to get as much resolution as possible. then in post do this.
we have a entire black room and from what I shot on K40 we get pitch black if we get enough rim light around the subject. Will this be difficult to achieve with tri-X or the 200T? Now of course we will take out the black so as not to have the grain on one portion of the screen and not the rest, but other than that you guys have any thoughts? By the way, thanks for the help allready. I love this board ALOT.
Shooting it like this
to get as much resolution as possible. then in post do this.
we have a entire black room and from what I shot on K40 we get pitch black if we get enough rim light around the subject. Will this be difficult to achieve with tri-X or the 200T? Now of course we will take out the black so as not to have the grain on one portion of the screen and not the rest, but other than that you guys have any thoughts? By the way, thanks for the help allready. I love this board ALOT.
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JoshuaRyan
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Well its more of a learning experience for all of us. And we dont have the budget for 16, but she can get HD equipment half price. I wanted to shake things up a bit for the hell scene, because she wants it to be different in many aspects to the "reality" of the rest of the movie, and since 16 is expensive, i figured super 8. But from what you guys are saying it might be more trouble than its worth because of the grain factor. But it is more for our learning experience than anything else, we will shoot it both ways.