Shooting high ISO on purpose. Anyone have any cool stuff?

[Thomas Koba]

I´m thinking about shooting a movie on high iso. I want that grainy look, and would like to light the scenes with low intensity light. That realistic/dirty light. Anyone have any Vimeo or high res Youtube footage of a short or something, where you have decided to shoot the Scarlet/Epic with high ISO to get that feel? Or do you guys think the Red grain is too ugly for this?

I've seen some great shots fron Gunnleik, but they where all stills.

 

[Paul Schneider]

Unless you are going to desaturate it or going b+w, you might want to do a bit of experimenting first. Red at high iso is a particularly ugly grain consisting mostly of blue artifacts.

 

[Naim Sutherland]

I almost did that once, but I didn't like the test results.

There is some pretty good post grain you can get that are alpha scans of actual film stocks.


If you or the show does have $500 to throw at it, some of this 60D footage looks pretty damn authentically super 16 (at least on vimeo, i think compression and softness is helping). Some of it still looks really fake and tacked on, but a few setups are really successful. http://www.lightsfilmschool.com/blog/how-to-get-film-look-using-dirt-dust-grain-scratches/2041/

One thing that I haven't thoroughly tried that my gut suggests if you really want to go this route is to try exposing normally and then pushing your footage way down in Redcine with ISO and then boosting 'exposure' or 'brightness' to get it back to normal, or the opposite of that. Use the settings against each other. You may end up with a better grain pattern because the sensor wasn't actually starved for light, so you should be pushing up better looking grain than if you just intentionally underexposed on the day which as Paul points out can give you some undesired results, exactly as he says plus maybe a screen door effect, which to me is unacceptable.

I'd love to hear more input from more people on toning down the very sharp, very high res and very clean look of these cameras. That is often not what I am after, and I often wish I could afford super 16 or 35, or I often wish that if things are to be crisp and clean that at least people don't know what camera I shot with. I have used a lot of Black Pro Mist in the past, but I am growing tired of it, and its uniformity in blooming still doesn't feel organic, it feels too clean and perfect too. I had good results with rear netting recently, using some $4 pantyhose, but that was a pretty heavy handed approach (which worked perfectly for the story I was telling), and can't be used for most things.

 

[Thomas Koba]

Very interesting thought about playing those two parameters against each other. I will try that.

Just stumbled upon this on Vimeo. I very much like the graininess of this one. Is this something that was made in post? Or is it the Alexa doing it's magic?

http://vimeo.com/50390047

 

[Mark K.]

Add your grain in post, and simply shoot low key.