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Shooting with Film: Long Live Celluloid
By Bryan Michael Stoller
posted May 28, 2009, 14:25
Shooting with film.
Shooting with Film: Long Live Celluloid
A Glance at Working with Film Formats, Cameras, Lenses, & Filters
| Filmmaking for Dummies by Bryan Michael Stoller | Bryan Michael Stoller (www.
bryanmichaelstoller.com) is an international
award-winning filmmaker who has
produced, written and directed over eighty
productions that include, short comedy
films, half hour television, music videos,
commercials and feature films. Bryan has
directed George Carlin, Howie Mandel,
Gilbert Gottfried, Barbra Streisand, Drew
Barrymore, Jerry Lewis and Dan Aykroyd.
Dolly Parton wrote and recorded four
original songs for one of Bryan�s films. Jerry
Lewis wrote the foreword for Bryan�s book,
�Filmmaking for Dummies.�
Film. The magic of celluloid! I first fell
in love with film in the seventies when I
discovered Super 8. I eventually worked my
way up to 16mm, and finally graduated to
35mm.
Shooting in film, you don�t have to
worry about the whole new HD and digital
technology, at least not until you get into
post-production, but that�s another article
for another time.
Motion picture film has a nostalgic feel
to it. Creating the illusion of something
that�s happened in the past. The feeling
of reflecting on a cherished memory. Film
provides a softer more surreal image than
the sharp, sometimes harsh and unflattering
picture that video presents.
The film camera has been around since
the late 1800�s. A film camera also doesn�t
have the fancy circuitry found on a digital
camcorder. It�s a relatively basic but genius
concept � the film is advanced through the
camera, and a portion of that celluloid is
exposed to light, one frame at a time.
Celluloid comes in various formats: Super
8, 16mm, 35mm and 70mm (IMAX). Each
tends to lend itself to certain genres. Super
8 is great for home movies, documentaries
and even gritty music videos. 16mm is
often used for TV, low-budget features,
student films and documentaries. 35mm
is the norm for episodic TV shows and
theatrical feature films. 70mm, also known
as IMAX, is for epic event studio pictures
and highly commercial documentaries and
travelogues.
You usually want to shoot with negative
film stock, not reversal. Negative stock
is similar to your 35mm still photos that
come with a negative and you can make
as many prints as you want. Reversal film
is like Polaroid film where the actual stock
is developed into a positive image, and you
have no backup negative. The other great
thing about shooting negative, is when you
transfer it in telecine to tape, the telecine
process can automatically convert your
developed negative into a positive image
without having to incur the cost of printing
the negative in the lab.
A film camera can hold different size
magazines, the average size being a 400
foot magazine and a 1000 foot magazine. A
400 foot 16mm camera magazine holds 10
minutes of raw footage. A 35mm 400 foot
magazine for a 35mm camera holds half the
time at 5 minutes. Many cameramen like
to use 1000 foot magazines on their 35mm
cameras because they can get 11 minutes
of footage and don�t have to change out the
magazines as much during a shoot.
You can decide whether you want to
shoot with a fixed telephoto lens, or use
prime lenses on your movie. A telephoto
lens will give you most of the shots you
need, from close-up to wide establishing
shots, but the image will have more of a
flat appearance and not as much depth
as if you used prime lenses. Prime lenses
can be attached and removed. Lenses can
be wide at 18mm (giving your subject a
comically distorted look) to a normal lens,
50mm on a 35mm camera (appears exactly
as it looks to the naked eye in terms of
size), to a telephoto lens 100mm (brings
the subject closer creating a larger object in
frame). Lenses on a 16mm camera do the
same thing as on a 35mm camera but their
millimeters are cut in half. For example, a
normal lens of 50mm on a 35mm camera
(the subject four feet away, looks four feet
away), would be a 25mm lens on a 16mm
camera.
When shooting with a film camera, you
may want to consider a video tap, which
allows you to have video assistance. Video
assist was created by Jerry Lewis. In 1956,
Jerry attached a video camera to the film
camera to record his scenes on video at
the same time the film camera was rolling.
Lewis directed and starred in many of his
movies, but found it difficult to gauge his
performance while doing double duty
as director (and wouldn�t see the results
until the film came back from the lab).
This is how video assist was born. Similar
to a video camcorder, a video tap in the
motion picture camera allows you see the
image that is being captured to film. You
can record it to tape (or hard drive), play it
back to check the performance, and even
check for continuity concerns, etc. You get
a reflex image � which means, the video
will record exactly the same framing and
lens size that will be captured to film. Jerry
Lewis revolutionized a new technique that
virtually every filmmaker shooting with a
film camera uses to this day.
The cameras image can be manipulated
or corrected using filters. There are
correction filters and special effect filters. A
correction filter is used to correct the image
for color balance. If you�re using indoor film
stock outside, you would use an 85 filter
so you don�t get an unwanted blue hue. If
you�re using outdoor film stock inside, you
would use an 80 filter so you don�t get a
strange yellow/orange or red tint. Why use
indoor film outside? You can buy one type
of stock and make it work for both (using
color correction filters), rather than trying to
figure out what percentages of indoor and
outdoor film stock you�ll need. A polarizer
filter helps to dial out pesky reflections
when shooting through a car window. A
neutral density filter (ND) is used to cut
down the amount of light coming into the
camera (like sunglasses for the camera).
Then you have colored filters that can add
hues to your footage. You can create a gold
hue to your image, or turn a daylight scene
into a night scene using a blue filter (as long
as you don�t show the daylight sky in the
shot).
I�ve been in love with the film camera
since I was a kid. I�ve been tempted by
the digital camcorder, and felt guilty for
even considering it. I�ve also found that
distributors (worldwide) still prefer to know
that you shot your movie on film. Some
distributors are weary to even look at a
movie that was not shot on film. Long live
celluloid!
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Check out this article in the June 2008 print edition of StudentFilmmakers magazine, page 8.
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