John Cassavetes' SHADOWS, 1959

To shoot a project on the theme like shadows, you need of course, light… ideally direct light… like sunlight on a clear day. My plan was to shoot the Shadows outdoors, relying the hard light qualities of the direct sunlight to create the shadows. Unfortunately, Maryland hasn’t had much of that kind of light lately… plus, it’s been rainy and heavily overcast.

The soft light of an overcast day does still produce shadows, but shadows that are far less distinct, and disappear rapidly as object to background distance increases. The shadows from objects are therefore, very short or non-existent. I thought about using time-lapse photography to get the shadows moving and more visible but, as I looked out my window yesterday (rainy and overcast again), the shadows were extremely soft and without much source direction. Even time-lapse wouldn’t do much to make the shadows more noticeable.

So far I’ve only shot about 2 minutes for the project.  My goal is to shoot three 50′ rolls of Super 8, which at 24fps totals 7.5 minutes. As I wait for the skies to clear, I going to start my next project: Time-lapse. This is going to be a unique project, in that I plan to do a mix of traditional time lapse and long frame exposures using a digital camera to calculate my exposures. Not all film cameras can do the longer frame exposures and, as far as I know, video cameras can’t do it at all… at least not as single frames in the form of a motion clip. Please visit the post about the project to get more details: Filmmaking101_Project: Time-lapse

HARD LIGHT

SOFT LIGHT

Hope you all had (or are still having) a splendid summer.  Today, I begin work on the first Super 8 project for this blog. (See previous post, Filmmaking 101_First Project, 6-27-2011)  It’s cloudy right now but we’ll see what the remainder of the day brings.

I’ve decided to shoot this project on Tri-X B&W reversal film (7266) instead of on color negative as originally planned.  Watching other filmmakers’ Super 8 films online, I’ve been intrigued by the tonal quality of their B&W work.  Shooting B&W also forces one to think more in terms of dark (shadows) and light and therefore, I felt a more appropriate stock to use for this project.  Setting the exposure with reversal stock will certainly be less forgiving than negative stock, since inherently, reversal has far less exposure latitude  than negative stock and doesn’t bode well to overexposure (unlike negative) unless it’s done intentionally to create an high key type effect… but I’m up for the challenge.

As for the color negative 7213 stock, last month I shot a series of resolution/exposure tests with that film stock.  I have posted a portion of those results on the blog entitled “Beach”.

I plan to have this project posted by September 29th.

Super-8 live action test.

Last month I ran Super 8 film tests with 7213, a medium speed Kodak Vision3 negative stock.  Most of the tests were boring… resolution chart kind of boring, but very telling about the mechanical and optical integrity of my three newly-purchased used Leica Special Super 8 cameras and their lenses (the lenses are interchangeable on these cameras).  To see how the cameras/lens and, more importantly, the 7213 stock would perform in an actual situation, I shot some beach footage.  Not having seen the resolution tests results yet, I just chose the camera that seemed to have the least wear.  Turns out, according to the tests, all three cameras produced about the same picture quality.

Leica Leicina Special

To process the film, I used AlphaCine in Seattle.  I chose LightPress (also in Seattle) to do the film-to-file transfer.  The processing of the film was “normal” (no push or pull processing) and the negative was scanned with almost no color and exposure correction, outputting to a 10-bit 4:2:2  uncompressed Quicktime file.  From the uncompressed file, a ProResHQ 4:2:2 copy was made and brought into a Avid Media Composer in it’s native ProRes format.  After some editing, the footage sequence was exported “as source”, in other words, still in its native ProResHQ 4:2:2  file format.  This file was then taken into After Effects where I did some modest grain reduction and sharpening and exported that as a H.264 file for uploading to Vimeo.  Here are the results.  To playback in HD, be sure the the “HD” is red.  Oh yes, there isn’t any sound.

Beach from Steven Holloway on Vimeo.

OBSERVATIONS:

• The negative on a couple of the shots (the girl on headphones) was underexposed by about two-thirds of a stop.  An error on my part.  Generally with negative film it is always better to overexpose when in doubt to protect detail in the shadows of the image.  Underexposed shadows quickly begin to look “milky”  and lose detail as an exposure decreases.   When overexposed, highlight detail can generally be retained up to about two stops.  To my surprise, the 7213 held up well to this slight underexposure of the negative.

•  Sharpness was better than expected but the grain (particularly in the sky areas) was a bit higher than expected.  A technique sometimes used to reduce grain is to overexpose the negative and under develop the negative in processing.  This is called “pull processing”.  I plan to try the technique and post the results later this fall.

• I was hoping for a bit more steadiness in the image (some of the shakiness was due a few shots being handheld shots).  A jumpy frame is very common in footage shot with most Super 8 cameras but considered by some to be an important part of the “Super 8 look”.   I would prefer it be more rock steady but then the footage might for some start looking too much like 16mm.  For me the grain structure alone is enough to set it apart.

As always, I welcome your thoughts, comments and questions!