Side By Side

I found a documentary that was aired recently that investigated the history, process and workflow of both digital and photochemical film creation. Movies were shot, edited and projected using photochemical film. But over the last two decades a digital process has emerged to challenge photochemical filmmaking.

Produced by Keanu Reeves, the documentary takes an in-depth look at this revolution. Through interviews with directors, cinematographers, film students, producers, technologists, editors, and exhibitors, SIDE BY SIDE examines all aspects of filmmaking — from capture to edit, visual effects to color correction, distribution to archive.

I was researching many differences, pros and cons for my context of practice essay and in filming on location and filming behind a green screen. The context of this documentary gave me an insight on film making and put into perspective of the the challenges and roles of film making today, with both comparisons of digital and photochemical film making.

Side By Side

One of the first steps in the production process is capturing the images in the camera. The director, actors, cinematographer and entire production team work together to bring the script to life. The D.P helps the director achieve the look of the movie. The DP is responsible for knowing what equipment is needed and how it works in order to capture the scenes.

David Fincher – director, The Social Network, Fight Club, Se7en

A DP looks at colour and composition and angles and all these things in terms of how the movie is being built. The quality of light off skin, the quality of light through hair, the quality of light through a window or balcony or quality of light bouncing off the floor. They’re equating the building of this world in terms of energy that reflects off of objects.

Michael Chapman – cinematographer, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Lost Boys

Bringing emotion into the light comes from being appropriate and the great ones somehow being more than appropriate by stalking you with whatever they are doing.

John Mathieson – cinematographer, Gladiator, 47 Ronin, X-men: First Class

That technical expertise, you can’t explain what you’re going to do so people have to have a leap of faith in you, being the DP

Vittorio Storaro – cinematographer, Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor, Little Buddha

To be a Cinematographer, is to have the knowledge of the art, without any doubt. Cinema today is a mixture of art and technology

David Stump – VFX D.P, X-Men 2, X2, Mars Attacks!

Today in this area you also have to be a bit of a technician, you have to know the equipment, it’s really important for DP’s to understand the entire link of the image chain, from acquisition to exhibition.

The camera is a tool that focuses and measures photons of light and records them as images.

A Film Camera

Light enters through the lens and hits a frame of film behind the lens. The film is covered with an emulsion that contains grains of silver halide crystals. These crystals react chemically when light hits them and the crystals change into silver metal when they are developed, a photographic images is formed on the film

Digital Camera

Doesn’t use film, instead uses an electronic sensor or chip behind the lens. The sensor is made up of millions of pixels. When light enters the camera it hits the pixels and creates individual electronic charges, these charges are measured and converted in digital data that represent the image.

David Tattersall - Cinematographer

Grains of film are constantly moving, so the result is the fuzziness, where as with the pixel count it’s a very, accurate, exact thing.

Late 1880s visual artist have used moving images to create movies to inspire us

Help us share our dreams

Photochemical film has been the exclusive format used to capture movies

Documentary about the science and art and impact of digital cinema

Replacing 100 years of photochemical film

Martin Scorsese – director, Gangs of New York, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas

Reinvention of a new medium

Digital cameras the new aesthetic coming to cinema – going to mourn the loss of film

Chris Nolan – director, The Dark Knight, Inception, Memento

Constantly asked to justify shooting a film on film, don’t hear people asking to justify why film on digital

James Cameron

Whatever I can imagine to be something that you could realize

Wally Pfister

Not going trade my oil paints for a set of crayons

George Lucas – director/producer, Star Wars ep 1-4, THX 1138, American Graffiti

Top of the photochemical process, this is about as far as it’s ever going to go, when your using digital, your at the very bottom again, so you should jump over and help build that, because the more people that use it the better its going to get.

Film isn’t going anywhere

Mist of revolution that threatens the status quo

David Fincher

Cinematographers became cinematographers because they love the ‘voodoo’ of it

Geoff Boyle

Now with digital cameras everyone can see what it’s going to look like

1969 – George Smith & Williard Boyle created the first ccd chip, unique - ability to act as a camera– early 1970s Sony started investing and developing CCD chips. Sony produced its first consumer CCD cameras in 1980s

Film – roll of film lasts 9-10 minutes

Nolan – very tough to film a 45 min take and not reload the camera, actors  & crew can only concentrate for so long and everyone needs that 2 minute break replacing the magazine

Reed Morano – cinematographer, Frozen River, Little Birds, For Ellen

You can hear the money running through the camera

Danny Boyle

Actors infinitely adjust,

The beach filmed on celluloid

An enormous advantage, whist filming 28 days later they needed to roam round a deserted London, with digital cameras they were able to set up 10 consumer cameras (because they were so cheap) in each location in different parts of London where they had stopped traffic very briefly and would come out with 10 different bits of film for one scene, with shooting on film it wasn’t possible to do this

Makes editors job extraordinary

Over 100 years physically cutting and putting together

Digital brings you speed – challenges you in the sense of can I think that fast – do I need time to breathe

Editors don’t have the time to sit back and think do I no what I’m doing, if working on film you train your mind to do that a bit more

Editing film taught you a discipline, cutting and sticking film together

Keanu Reeves

VFX has been part of film making since the earliest years, camera tricks, lighting techniques, elaborate modules, lab process, all been used to alter reality and enhance the movie going experience

Tim Webber

Understand physics how light reacts to difference surfaces, understand animation, how animals people move – you’ve got to be an artist and technician

Dennis Muran

Originally VFX first 100 years was done with models and film cameras, very limited, lots of time and energy was put into making Star Wars

Adam Valdez

The environment he learnt in was a physical one, stage cameras lights, use all senses and physical perceptions under physical lighting, photography would end up in an optical printer.

Started to become possible to scan in film and bring the film into a computer and make changes to that

Digital became important for an effects point of view – using digital technology to realize vision

George Lucas

The first real image that we did that was completely digital was in young Sherlock Holmes (1985) – took 6 months to do 7 shots

The abyss 1989

Terminator 2 1991

Jurassic park 1993

Babe 1995

The fifth element 1997

Starship troopers 1997

Titanic 1997

Matric 1999

James Cameron

Still shooting on film, not digital yet but all post processes were starting to fall into line

George Lucas

Convert from film to digital in order to do VFX

Was determined star wars 2 was going to be filmed digitally

One of the problems with early digital capture was resolution, resolution is dependent on many factors, the number of pixels a camera can record, the more pixels you have, the higher the resolution, and the more detail an image will have

Typical standard definition (SD) camera usually had resolution of 720 by 480 pixels

Turning point was year 2000 bought the first Sony F900 camera, the first HD camera, before that everything looked like video

HD cameras recorded resolution of 1920 pixels across

George Lucas - 2002 attack of the clones – first major feature that shot HD

Image on F900 wasn’t as good as film at the time

Robert Rodriguez – director/cinematographer, Sin City, Spy kids, Once upon a time in Mexico

Sin city wouldn’t have been filmed if it wasn’t for digital camera

Keanu Reeves

Digital colour correction tools were first used for shorter pieces i.e. commercials and music videos. Digital colour correction began replacing traditional photo Chemical methods of colour timing

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Roger Deakins, 2002 – first film to use VFX in every scene

Michael Baullhaus – Gangs Of New York, 2002

Every set was built. What we had on screens was exactly what we wanted, didn’t have to have a DI to change everything. I’m trying to always do it on camera with filters and lenses. If you have a story where you need to change reality a DI can be great.

Martin Scorsese

Every theatre looks different; so many variables are different in each theatre. Some aren’t sharp, doesn’t have any snap, dark and shaky, sound can be loud or low, one real can be blue one real can be brown.

George Lucas

Quality of film is terrible in theatre, struggling to get quality in theatres, if it was digital you wouldn’t get scratches. In 1999 Phantom Menice was projected digitally (the first Hollywood movie)

James Cameron – titanic was played so long in theatres the prints started falling apart

1999 there were only 4 digital theatres, by 2002 there were 150, the post flow was already digital apart from cameras

Collatoral 2004 – Michael mans  - used Thomson Viper HD cameras that could see dark better than film cameras. It was supposed to look exactly what it looked like.

2005, Panavision genesis – full frame 35mm chip that allows depth of field to be very similar to film. First full frame digital camera for making feature films.

Carefully designed for film crews so that the transition would be easy for people making movies

Filmed superman returns 2006

Apocalypto 2006 (Dean Semler – cinematographer, shot Apocalypto – he felt it was like a film camera)

Miami vice 2006 shot on digital – James Cameron said they had colour space and resolution but not dynamic range

Wally Pfister – doesn’t feel it had latitude, that enables him to do what he wanted to do, cant over expose it by 5 stops and still have something in the image, cant under expose it by 4 stops and have a trace of something in the image.

Jim Lennard founder of Red, One.  In 2007 Red One was available to the public, the resolution could now shoot from 2k to 4k

Che, 2008 filmed on red one

Social network 2010 – David Fincher asked Jim to make the ‘indie car’ version of Red one, it was reduced from 14 pounds (with a lens) to 5 and a half pounds.

Slumdog Millionaire, 2008

Danny Boyle – desperate to make something with all the fresh air in it, came up with idea for energy youth speed running, most wonderful place, wanted a camera that would capture that. Anthony’s job was to find a camera that would work with this.

Used Silicon imaging SI-2K – able to go places and capture images that would have been very difficult with film or early versions of HD cameras.

Anthony Dod Mantle – cinematographer, The celebration, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire

It was a sensor with a computer on the back of it. SI camera plugged into laptops.

No other camera small enough

Anthony wanted to run in the streets and track the children as they were running and be at the same height level as the kids, so they put Macbook pros in their backpack to use for their capture and recording system

Film cameras were always connected to cameramen bodies, with this SI-2K you could do different things with it, move it with your hand and improvise with it during the scene.

2009 Anthony won academy award for best cinematography, first time award was given to a film shot mostly on digital film.

The success of Slumdog puts hammers at stake further into the ground as far as acceptance of digital format.

Public Enemies 2009 – cam Sony F23

District 9 2009 – cam Sony F23

Tetro 2009 – cam Sony F900

The informant 2009 - cam Red One

Avatar 2009 – cam Sony F950

James Cameron

Started to think about shooting in 3D in 2009 after Titanic, for Avatar.

Future shooting  in3D was digital

Experiment by putting 2 HD cameras side by side

Vince Pace (CEO Cameron/Pace Group) and James Cameron built fusion camera system

Decided to put one camera on top of another

To create 3D, two cameras work as a pair like our eyes, they capture images from slightly different angles providing a sense of 3 dimensional depth and distance.

Vince Pace

Not only the camera systems duplicate, but also lensing, control over lensing etc. people ask if it’s twice as hard but instead it’s more work than that, the cameras have to operate like Siamese twins. When films are done right it feels like I’m there and immersed in the journey and story.

James Cameron

Avatar followed up by Alice in Wonderland and How to train your dragon all in 3D released in similar periods were the top 3 grossing films of that year. People saw the potential in 3D

Lorenzo di Bonaventura – producer, Transformers, Salt, Man of a Ledge

Thinks it’s getting harder and harder to impress the audience, due to peoples appetite and knowledge of film, hens 3D is a new way of looking at movies.

Martin Scorsese

The actor is like a sculpture that’s moving, Combination of film and theatre, music and everything.

Wally Pfister – cinematographer, dark knight, inception, moneyball

Hates 3D, its dark, the whole 3d phenomenon  is a marketing scheme

Dick Pope  - cinematographer, secrets & lies, the illusionist

As a viewer, uninterested, thinks it’s a fad and will burn out

Joel Schumacher – Director, batman forever, the phantom of the opera, the lost boys

There’s a reason Avator was filmed in 3D, it takes you on an experience; 3D wasn’t something that was added on for money, for a joke or a gimmick, its there because it was created that way.

James Cameron

Avatar two completely different forms of film making combined, only used lenses for 1/3 of the movie.  Which is all sets normal stuff lighting normal, live action. We used virtual lenses 2/3 of the movie. Never shot in a real jungle, it was all computer modeling, every blade of grass every bug buzzing around, not 1 foot of film was shot in a real jungle. 

Martin Scorsese

Big concern is that with the image of CGI, doesn’t think the younger generation believes anything anymore on screen, it’s not real.

Reeves to Cameron –

Your presenting complete unreality and making the audience feel like it’s real, whereas before it was captured in reality

Cameron to reeves –

When was it ever real? There was a wall there and not over there, 30 people standing around, a guy with a boom mic, fake rain, your street and night exterior new york was a day interior Burbank, what was ever real?

Lana and Andy Wachowski - director/producers, matric, speed racer, cloud atlas

We’re free of the old technology of capturing the images camera film, lens, exposure, computers give you more control more ways to access what your imagining in your head.

Computers will only get better and better, will be able to produce whatever you want completely realistically

James Cameron

Technology doubles in everything once every two years

Camera companies like Red, Arri, Sony and others are constantly developing new products and continue to make advances in dynamic range, resolution and colour

..

Dynamic range of a digital camera up until recently has been limited to a maximum of 10 stops

You don’t see that problem in the epic, or alexa.

Bradford Young – cinematographer, pariah, nasceu maria, entre nos

Alexa takes all that we were excited about in terms of low budget film making and brings the texture quality that films has.

The new Red that’s called an epic – 60% more resolution than a Red 1, resolution is 5120. Creates these beautiful, rich, very natural or very stylistically wonderful colours.

Delivery system of cinema is going to change, Lana Wachowski is very excited.

The old way of having to ship giant film cans around is very expensive, so the business realized there was a tremendous possible savings in digital delivery and digital projection. Everyone wants the pristine print, but not everyone can have it  so you have to copy it and the advantage of a dcp is that theres no real copying, once its scanned it doesn’t get copied again. It’s cloned so it’s exactly the same thing.

…

without digital video culture I don’t think I would have been making movies because I came at it from being a writer I thought you needed certain knowledge, I thought you needed to be a dude who operated machines to do this job. I was able to experiment in making movies in this small private way.

Geoff Boyle – cinematographer, Street fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, Mutant Chronicles, Dark County

5D’s and SLRs were designed at the request of ap and royters so that their news stills photographers could shoot news video for their websites, that’s it! Then people came along and thought I like the look of that I’m going to use that, and it can work! But I hate them being used as movie cameras. It’s not good enough.

Keanu – but their inexpensive, people can make movies

Geoff Boyle

If I’d been at art school and I had a canon 7d or a canon 5d it would have been wonderful.

Student being asked why shes using a Canon 7d on her second year grad film.

It’s accessible you can capture but it’s not super expensive.

Wanted to shoot for with the 7d primarily for budget reasons and because given a week to shoot film, she would lose too much time by changing the film, checking the gate, it’s time efficient and wouldn’t be able to film half her scenes in this time.

Martin scorsese

Celluloid will still be a choice

The artist, 2011, shot on film

Moneyball, 2011, shot on film

Mission Impossible – Ghost protocol, 2011, shot on film

Tree of Life, 2011, shot on film

War Horse, 2011, shot on film

Hunger Games, 2012, shot on film

The Dark Knight Rises, 2012, shot on film

Chris Nolan

A transition starts with people offer you a new choice, but it finishes with taking the old choice away and I don’t think we’re ready to take traditional film away.

People like to shoot on film because it has an incredibly beautiful look

The documentary featured:

James Cameron – director, Titanic, The terminator, Avatar

George Lucas – director/producer, Star Wars ep 1-4, THX 1138, American Graffiti

Martin Scorsese – director, Gangs of New York, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas

Donald McAlpine – cinematographer, Wolverine, Moulin Rouge, Romeo & Juliet

Danny Boyle – director, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire

Lars Von Trier – director, Melancholia, Antichrist, Breaking the Waves

David Lynch – director, Blue velvet, lost highway, inland empire, eraserhead, Elephant man

Richard Linklater  - director, School of rock, before sunrise, waking life, Slacker, A scanner darkley

Steven Soderbergh – director/cinematographer, traffic, haywire, erin brockovich

Wally Pfister – cinematographer, dark knight, inception, moneyball

Bradford Young – cinematographer, pariah, nasceu maria, entre nos

Lana and andy wachowski - director/producers, matric, speed racer, cloud atlas

Joel Schumacher – Director, batman forever, the phantom of the opera, the lost boys, Phone Booth

Dick Pope  - cinematographer, secrets & lies, the illusionist

Lorenzo di Bonaventura – producer, Transformers, Salt, Man of a Ledge

Sandi Sissel – cinematographer, Meet the browns, Salaam Bombay, The People under the stairs.

David Tattersall – cinematographer, Star wars Episodes 1-3, Speed Racer, The green mile

Phil Meheux – cinematographer, Casino Royale, Legend of Zorro, The Smurfs

Geoff Boyle – cinematographer, Street fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, Mutant Chronicles, Dark County

Ellen Kuras – cinematographer, Personal Velocity, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blow

Caroline Kaplan – producer, Tadpoole, Personal Velocity, Pieces of April

Darnell Martin – director, Cadillac Records, I like it like that, Prison song