Tuesday, August 30, 2011

It's a Trick!

The joke we make around these parts is whenever anyone does a cool move which makes the picture better "Oh, so movies are all tricks. I get it."
It's all about the tricks.

Irene NYC from Buffalo Picture House on Vimeo.
So I'm watching this nice little video about hurricane Irene. It's in black and white. It's very beautiful. The depth of field is very limited and there's all this nice bokeh and...
There's no grain.
It's no secret that video deals with shadow detail better than film. And film handles highlights like it's nobody's business.
But those inky blacks that we've always been searching for in film are now totally achievable in video. And... and I don't know whether I like it all that much.

So I'm playing with some color correction on Android Insurrection. We have this one scene which is getting hit with a mighty thwafth of color correction because it's in an office and... well just look at it -- we're shooting with overhead lights. How can this be a horror movie? (Note that this is the only scene in the picture being whumped this way).
So we're really kittywhumpusing this one scene. Still, the darks are inky black.
1101 Android Insurrection Juanita Arias, dead guy, and Tom Rowen.
 So I'm experimenting with adding a bit of film grain to the image.
Same shot with film grain added.
I don't know if this is just something that bugs me, or if it just bugs me because I know enough to look for film grain in an image, or what.
We have 26 minutes and 31 seconds of Android Insurrection edited. Maybe if I get my butt in gear we can be up to 30 minutes by the end of the week.

4 comments:

joe said...

is there a way to dial down the cool on Thomas Rowen? because, i mean, shit, that is blown out!

Andrew Bellware said...

Nah, he clipped it! ;-)

Daddy D said...

That Irene video is gorgeous...and you'll never convince me it wasn't shot on film. Drew, whatever those guys do: Do that.

The depth of field is fantastic. I know you like "flat" video resolution. And you're wrong.

You're also not a racist...as far as I can tell.

Andrew Bellware said...

It's all about the grain.
We can actually get a fairly shallow depth of field if we throw those manual-focus Canon lenses on the Panasonic GH-1.
And it's not you, it's your people I hate so much. ;-)
Still. All babies look alike to me.