Life-like colours?

[Craig Parkes]

I don't like unrealistic films with lots of CGI.

Please, name at least one hard science fiction film that is realistic.

Yup, that's what I thought. No one has done any.

The biggest mistake in film making is trying to pleasure the masses. Films today: lots of explosions, lots of bare skin, lots of CGI, no plot, lack of innovativeness.

No one has to watch my films. I'm going to make them only for myself.

Recently? GATTACA. Stylised, but realistic. In a similiar vein, Moon. And a huge number from the 70's, as well as a lot of trash. A lot of those 70's 'realistic' science fiction films (Andromeda Strain, or one I saw recently directed by Saul Bass, Phase Four) may seem a bit dated because their use of old technology, but they aren't the sort of film you are describing by a long shot.

You need to see more films.

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

Primer was ALL Science Fiction. Had NO CGi and was shot for under $20K on 16mm film

 

[JD Holloway]

I rather liked "Contact", "Alien", "Brazil", "Iron Man", "Matrix". Oh ya Blade Runner.
These all have FXs though.

Oh ya Gattaca was great. Thanks CP. Truely under appreciated.
What makes a good sci fi film for you?
Star Wars was pretty good I hear. It also had special effects though.
Does colour make a good film?
Some of my favorites are black and white.
I can rewatch Noir films over and over.

Shooting for yourself is a great idea. Thats the root of "Art" and being an artist.
As you sell it, your work is somehow diminished AFAIC. That being said, we all have to eat!

I'm gonna get flamed for posting this KR witicism but what are you gonna do?

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/7.htm

 

[Craig Parkes]

I just want the film to support Deep Color (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Color) right from the beginning.

Shoot on film, project directly from the answer print - I'm pretty sure modern stocks are more than capable of achieving 'Deep Color' as the spec will have come about from film scanners initially anyway.

Or, shoot on Red, work in 12 Bit linear the whole way through, find some device that can display and feed 12 Bit and apply a Gamma curve. You'll get more than a billion colours from that (Ignoring for a second the bayer nature of the sensor, if you could theoretically derive the full 12 bits of colour information for Red, Green and Blue, you'd have a theoretical maximum of 2^12 x 2^12 x 2^12 different values = Over 68 Billion colours.)

Or, just shoot RED and work at 10Bit, and you'll achieve 'Deep Color'.

You'll just need a 10Bit display (Dreamcolor or very new Plasma) 10 Bit driver (e.g HDSDI out of Red Rocket) and a way to connect the two.

And a ton of drive space and speed.

 

[Craig Parkes]

Primer was ALL Science Fiction. Had NO CGi and was shot for under $20K on 16mm film

I can't believe I forgot Primer!

 

[Henri H]

Well, the RED ONE and the new DSMC cameras can all shoot in 12 bits per channel if I remember correctly, which qualifies as deep colour (at least according to the Wikipedia article. I had not heard of the term before).

Remember though that your final product (if you're going to DVD, Blu-Ray or a web video format) will be converted down to 8 bits per channel, given the limitations in those formats. I'd say that those look close enough to being life-like, apart from some banding occasionally (but this can usually be minimised or even eliminated by good dithering).

Thanks for the info.

Someone has to be the first. I don't know, if it is possible to make "Deep Color" Blu-rays, but it definitely wouldn't hurt to shoot the source material in the best possible format. Maybe some day we have Deep Color capable media, so I can just redistribute my film in Deep Color...

 

[Craig Parkes]

Thanks for the info.

Someone has to be the first. I don't know, if it is possible to make "Deep Color" Blu-rays, but it definitely wouldn't hurt to shoot the source material in the best possible format. Maybe some day we have Deep Color capable media, so I can just redistribute my film in Deep Color...

There already is. It's called film. Or DCI (12bits per pixel, or 68 Billion Colors).

I would imagine that R3D Ray's deliverable format will allow 10Bit plus as well, so that will be Deep Color.

In terms of home media formats, I'd imagine the first 10 Bit home media format is likely to be a downloadable one, rather than a physical disk media type one, because Blu Ray doesn't support it and I don't imagine there will ever be another major non file based home delivery format.

 

[Henri H]

You need to see more films.

I have seen e.g. "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), "2010: The Year We Make Contact" (1984), "Moon" (2009). Yes, they are my favourite movies and quite realistic in some points, but Space Odyssey series also has some philosophical themes. There are also some mistakes: "The movie ship had no heat radiators, and the diameter of the centrifuge was too small. Arthur C. Clark was well aware of this, but was overruled by the movie people." http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ap.html#discovery2

 

[Rob Ruffo]

There already is. It's called film. Or DCI (12bits per pixel, or 68 Billion Colors).

I would imagine that R3D Ray's deliverable format will allow 10Bit plus as well, so that will be Deep Color.

In terms of home media formats, I'd imagine the first 10 Bit home media format is likely to be a downloadable one, rather than a physical disk media type one, because Blu Ray doesn't support it and I don't imagine there will ever be another major non file based home delivery format.

Blu Ray does support it, but it requires 10 bit all the way down the chain (player AND display) so too few consumers for a "10 bit special edition". Besides, blu_ray wants people to think all discs are "superb color" and claiming that one version is better would downplay the quality of all other Blu-rays.

That said, a TRUE 8 bit panel can dsiplay about all the color your eyes can see. The problem is that most displays are missing colors, usually in the darker end of the spectrum, and so you get banding and other innacuracies - in other words most displays, LCDs in particular, are LESS than fully capable of displaying 8-bit images. 12 bit and higher are only relevant for lattitude in grading, not for final output, where all you need is a creatively chosen 8 bit slice of the information, unless you want the end-user to be able to re-grade your footage, which is unlikely.

 

[Shane Nassiri]

Primer was ALL Science Fiction. Had NO CGi and was shot for under $20K on 16mm film

Add Pi to the same category. I would consider that science fiction.

 

[David Wyatt]

For what it's worth, this might be of interest to you ("New Digital Camera Sees Same Colors as Human Eye"):

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20091224/178841/

 

[Brandon Kraemer]

Add to the list of sci-fi films that have a look of realism...

"The Road" 2009
"The Handmaid's Tale" 1985
"Fahrenheit 451" 1966
"Sleeper" 1973
"THX 1138" 1971

All the above have little or zero CGI effects, all are sci-fi.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

That said, a TRUE 8 bit panel can dsiplay about all the color your eyes can see.

Except in the case of gradients. Subtle gradations without any noise dithering or grain become obvious very quickly. But you only ever really see those in motion graphics not realistic sci-fi unless it were on a screen and your camera had a noise free sensor.

 

[Eric Lange]

I have seen e.g. "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), "2010: The Year We Make Contact" (1984), "Moon" (2009). Yes, they are my favourite movies and quite realistic in some points, but Space Odyssey series also has some philosophical themes. There are also some mistakes: "The movie ship had no heat radiators, and the diameter of the centrifuge was too small. Arthur C. Clark was well aware of this, but was overruled by the movie people." http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ap.html#discovery2

I simply couldn’t resist to weigh in on this one.

My late father HARRY LANGE, was one of the principal production designers on 2001. There were many 100’s to 1000’s of alternate designs for everything for the movie. Even the monolith in some designs was not rectangular but a squat rounded looking crystal. My father used to work in future concepts at NASA, and was good friends with Arthur Clarke. So there were many designs that had the huge radiators for the ion propulsion engines for the dissipation of heat form the nuclear reactors. The discovery space craft when built as a large scale model had quite a few more structures on it that were later pulled off, simply because it looked too busy. If you look at all the alternate designs that were scientifically more correct for example from Arthur, they really looked plug ugly, and so in the end an esthetic compromise was made to have the ships look both believable and really cool/beautiful, rather than have something that is scientifically more accurate but bloody ugly. A lot of realism comes from purely meticulous work done by hand when building the scale models. For example the sphere of the discovery space ship was made from a six or eight foot diameter Perspex sphere. To get the correct drop shadows on the surfaces so things did not look flat, had another sphere of a slightly larger diameter, so that surface features could be cut out of the larger sphere and applied to the surface of the smaller sphere, so it does not look like stuff that’s just painted on. (This is only one example, but gives you the idea). Many engineering companies in the UK were pulled into to try and build stuff almost for real, in terms of surface finishes and rigid engineering, and with Stanley the camera could go anywhere so that everything had to be perfect to the last detail as a close up could come from anywhere on the entire set.

Ironically the original color stocks used on 2001 were very unstable and very quickly the colors had become very washed out and de-saturated. Since the movie has been digitally restored you get a sense of a much stronger palate (as originally intended), rather than the experience one would have had watching the movie ten years after its release.

Also ironically, I am working on 3d and stereo capture technologies that can in essence capture objects in 3d from the size of a mountain to a bug in exquisite detail and dynamic range for a very wide range of applications. One obvious one, being for digital capture of 1:1 built sets to miniatures. The CG models do not look computery or synthetic at all, the texture mapping is the most accurate on the planet. Some of the realism comes from the physical interplay of fine 3d surfaces with natural light which is completely captured, which is still very hard for conventional CG techniques to completely simulate with the time constraints of a conventional film production. I am hoping that the technologies that I/we are developing will enable a resurgence of physically built models over CG and usher in a new wave of super realistic and believable digital imagery.

For Stanley Kubrick, absolute “believability” was a number one priority from the start. However as much of a fan of the sets and technical work as I am, the screen play/storey does leave a lot to be desired. I think it was an excellent short storey by Arthur Clark, then taken a bit too far. As far as CG goes, I am a huge BSG (new Battle Star Gallactica) fan, as the storey and plot lines are wonderfully long and complex, (fantastic drama, some of the best writing I have seen in years), the storey is so good that you really don’t care about how good or bad the CG may seem or whether the dynamic ranges really match in the various composites; the storey , action and characters are so compelling you don’t give a "frak" about the CG, good or bad!

Cheers,
Eric

PS Henri H, one of the illustrations you cite in your link my father made a long time ago for the book "Conquering the Suns Empire" these design concepts have been around since the 1950's but for some reason no one wants to put very large and dorky radiator fins on their space craft (no matter how technically accurate they are), I kinda like them, but the genral public percieves them as being wings, and everybody knows you don't need wings in the vacuum of space, so in 2001 it was important to not have winged space craft as this would seem like something from the Disney movies made of Von Brauns "rocket Ship" concepts.

 

[Matt W.]

You do realize that humans are able to differentiate between only about 10 million distinct colors and that 8-bit per channel (16.7 million distinct colors) color is generally sufficient for exhibition? (Apparently there are some 10-bit blu-rays now and the DCI spec is 12-bit at 24fps/10-bit at 48fps--but the difference between that and 8-bit color is barely noticeable, particularly in motion.)

The advantage of "deep color" isn't that it looks inherent better or even any different. On an 8-bit screen it looks identical; on a 10-bit screen it looks virtually identical, too. The difference is that with a more precise colorspace you have more data to play around with before you get posterization, banding, etc. while grading. (Granted, some color spaces can represent colors others can't, but all "deep color" means is 10bit+.) Any footage from the red has a definite digital look that, unless strongly graded, is pretty distinct from film irrespective of colorspace; a high bit depth won't change that at all except that it will allow you to grade the footage more.

There's nothing borderline "revolutionary" or even interesting about shooting in an acquisition format with more color data. Most sci-fi films have been shot on film, which has billions or trillions of distinct colors, all of which are retained when finished photochemically. There have been dozens of interesting, aesthetically significant, sci-fi films with varying levels of "realism" and there continue to be innovative ideas about how to approach the genre (i.e. Chris Cunningham was going to direct Neuromancer using only 300mm+ lenses to eliminate the sense of space and depth many sci-fi films rely on, in favor of a disorienting flat aesthetic; unsurprisingly he was taken off the project). Nothing you've cited about your movie is interesting or unique and if you really want a "real" look, just shoot on film and finish on film, even 16mm. Beyond that, "realism" itself is subjective; many would cite a video look as the most realistic and some directors shooting on 35mm (David O. Russell on Three Kings) intentionally emulate a video look on film for that purpose; Blomkamp did something similar in the overrated but interesting film District 9. Write an interesting script before worrying about colorspace.

 

[Eric Lange]

Continuing on from what Matt W writes,

It’s what’s in front of the camera (whatever the camera/process is) that makes for realism (not the camera itself), but sometimes what you don’t show or put in front of the camera is even more important!

Depending on the script, this can be very cheap or amazingly expensive. In 2001 they ran out of money, in the final sequences, there was much going back and forth about how to visually represent the advanced (multi temporal/dimensional alien presence). In the end they decided not represent it all (thank god) but instead relied on weird music and sound effects from Gyorgy Ligety. Just imagine rubber puppets etc. if they did have the money! The power of suggestion is much more emotionally powerful than the explicit image. You are left with your own sense of paranoia to mentally fill in the gaps. A movie like 2001 has more in common with a Hitchcock in terms of the eerie mystery that has to be supplied by the viewer’s insecure imagination. Like 2001, Hitchcock movies, and even fun movies like Star Wars, they would all be virtually nothing without the film score or the music. This is something that cuts right through to people for which they have no defense against and are totally swept up by. Even movies (cited above, like Farenheit 451 (one of my favorites) really rely on a strong film score to communicate the emotional impact of the ideas that they are trying to get across. If anybody needs to make a campaign it would be against cheap music rather than lack of visual dynamic range. Take a work like La Jetee (Chris Marker), the impact of the story is not diminished by dynamic range, color or even frame rate (he he).

So Henri H, what kind of stories do you like and want to tell?

 

[Henri H]

So Henri H, what kind of stories do you like and want to tell?

Yea, I have found that "Star Wars: A New Hope" has a less dramatic feeling without the music by John Williams.

A recipe for a hard sci-fi film by Henri T:
- good plot (?)
- good music (?)
- realistic
- ground-shaking image quality with unique styled cinematography (Red Epic?)
- minimalist dialogue
- minimalist comedy

I like stories like the Space Odyssey series (I have all the books: 2001, 2010, 2061, 3001), Back to the Future trilogy, Star Wars (all the films), Moon, the Terminator film series, and Contact.

I like the future depicted in the Back to the Future, Part II. I like the futuristic clothes and gadgets in that film.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Yea, I have found that "Star Wars: A New Hope" has a less dramatic feeling without the music by John Williams.

A recipe for a hard sci-fi film by Henri T:
- good plot (?)
- good music (?)
- realistic
- ground-shaking image quality with unique styled cinematography (Red Epic?)
- minimalist dialogue
- minimalist comedy

I like stories like the Space Odyssey series (I have all the books: 2001, 2010, 2061, 3001), Back to the Future trilogy, Star Wars (all the films), Moon, the Terminator film series, and Contact.

I like the future depicted in the Back to the Future, Part II. I like the futuristic clothes and gadgets in that film.

- Clever punchline.

It seems like all good Hard Sci Fi always had a good punchline.

 

[Eric Lange]

I really like the Back to the Future II movie too. Not to harp on about 2001 too much, but the thing that’s really missing in the movie is that you don’t ever get to see the future on Earth. In 2001 they tried to show “domestic scenes” on the moon, but thankfully these were left on the cutting room floor. It seems that a lot of Scifi movies are really just war movies in disguise (which is OK if you like that kind of thing).

In Back to the Future II (I haven’t seen it since its first release) that you get to see the kind of shit that people have to deal with on a day to day basis with great humor (nobody gets blown up or destroyed by aliens or mechatronic killer robots). I originally studied archeology and archaeological conservation for my first degree and we spent a hell of a lot of time obviously studying the technology of mankind. I think the thing that’s interesting also, are not necessarily what is new in the future, but what of the old beliefs, culture and technologies that still persist (i.e. things that still cause problems that humanity has not found any good solution too, or that certain ancient values are still treasured no matter how stupid they may seem to a rational mind). Technology and culture go hand in hand, and I think good Scifi tries to explore that. The 3001 book was a real page turner for me, I couldn’t put it down.

One image that I remember vividly from the Back to the Future II were these giant compressed cubes of crumpled up discarded optical disk media left out for the trash (in the 80’s the CD had just taken hold and was kinda expensive) so I thought that was a good prediction.

I also was/am a fan of Futurama even though it is completely absurd, it really does explore the inane human and cultural angle of the stupid shit that only humans and (deceitful crooked robots can come up with) in spite of advanced technology. … Another guilty pleasure for me is Galaxy Quest, as this directly puts under the microscope the whole Trecky phenomenon and pokes fun at it (especially the William Shatner “type” actor), in a surprisingly respectful way (good CG too???) (really cute movie)

It's hard to beat bender's "Bite my shiny metal ass!"

But I guess by punch line you also mean the "Oh My God" moment in the movie that completely fucks with your head. So always in Scifi an unbelievably clever idea or concept could be a pre-requisite (given that so many ideas have already been explored it is very hard to come up with a new one). Having also studied physics I have a hard time with Scifi movies that take an absolutely moronic idea as its foundation and then expect you to suspend disbelief. I had trouble with the Matrix as I couldn’t believe that an advanced machine culture could really be bothered to use human beings as batteries and have them pacified in a virtual world, you don’t need to be an expert in thermodynamics to see that this is beyond moronic! So some times the SCIENCE in Scifi can be pretty important, No? Similarly I didn’t get on with Dune very well either in spite of being visually very interesting for similar reasons.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Haha. By punchline I mean "It's PEOPLE! IT'S PEOPLE!!!" (not really hard sci-fi), The Statue of Liberty Reveal in planet of the apes (again not really hard sci-fi), anything written by Philip K Dick, the real ending to I Am Legend, the reveal which completely turns your perception upside down. Humanity is all wiped out. What we perceived as evil was actually the good guy. Every episode of the twilight zone hahaha, the pig people in the hospital being the classic example there. Even 2001 has its punchline "OMG it's full of stars!"

I try to stop myself from questioning things like "Are people really an effective form of power generation?" since I don't even think there'll be people in the not too distant future. We look at Star Trek TOS now and kind of chuckle at their antiquated technology. I think in 30 years we'll look at all sci-fi and chuckle at the antiquated people. Humanity is going to be the obsolete and antiquated thing hanging around.