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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

The 'film look' is a Crock, Shallow depth-of-field is Banal and Rack focus is Lazy.

hans de vries said:
That article was long overdue; I hope he follows it up with another one about the urge of many filmmakers to keep their camera moving when there is no need for it, except to cover up the fact that there is no content. As video looks are associated with cheap video productions and too much shallow depth with people who want video to look like film, I can't anymore help associating fast cameras with footage aimed at children, who combine a need for lack of serious content and the feeling that something very dynamic is happening
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Totally agree.

Plus overused CU's, where you don't know what the hell is going on, who is where and sentence like "I'm buying a cup of coffee" carries a lot of suspense. Plus grading circus - from "let's all copy a blockbuster look" to micky mouse "simple but over saturated with complementaries in background" look. Plus how showing human head getting splattered with a baseball bat means you don't know of any other way to leave an impression on a viewer.
 
For what it's worth, I happen to love the 50mm lens on our RED. It is, by far, our favorite.

And I have to admit, I love the ability to get a narrow depth-of-field when I really want it.

Stephen
 
In this age when our media stars cash in on being outrageous, this is the kind of headline we can expect. Controversy sells, even if it's something as worthless as this.

Every competent artist chooses the techniques that best help tell the story. Sometimes it's shallow DOF, sometimes deep, sometimes locked down, other times not, and so on with every parameter we can select.

There, I've wasted some time I'll never get back stating the obvious.

Good shooting and best regards,

Leo
 
It's funny, I was one of those 'penniless indies" obsessed with the idea of shallow DOF because it would make my film look more "Hollywood". A year later, my favorite lenses are generally wides, and I almost never use the 85mm when I rent Super Speeds.

Getting over the desire to have your film look like the super-stylized summer blockbusters is a difficult hurdle.
 
Stephen Pruitt said:
For what it's worth, I happen to love the 50mm lens on our RED. It is, by far, our favorite.

And I have to admit, I love the ability to get a narrow depth-of-field when I really want it.

Stephen
Click to expand...

With the advent of video DSLRs like 5D and 7D as well as RED, the capability to get shallow focus will be within reach for just about everybody. So hopefully it will become something that is used appropriately for true artistic effect rather than a way to "stylize" a production to make it seem better than it is.
 
Jamie Havill said:
I hope that's sarcasm. I sense it very well may be.
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Pretty sure it was. Was Kubrick an amateur for shooting natural light with a F/1.0 lens? That was lazy and not proper lighting?

So filmmakers that want to shoot natural today are lazy simply because they are shooting shallow DOF?

I think the blog is slightly off the mark. The truth is there are bunch of filmmakers that are gearheads who don't study storytelling nearly as much as they study how to adjust their lens adapter.

Fair enough.

(edit - Leo's post above said it far better than I could... )
 
Michael Hastings said:
With the advent of video DSLRs like 5D and 7D as well as RED, the capability to get shallow focus will be within reach for just about everybody. So hopefully it will become something that is used appropriately for true artistic effect rather than a way to "stylize" a production to make it seem better than it is.
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I hope so too. I'm getting tired of stuff shot on lens adapters wide open at 1.3 under bright sunlight. It just screams that the most important part of the shot is the DOF.
 
Joel Kaye said:
Pretty sure it was. Was Kubrick an amateur for shooting natural light with a F/1.0 lens? That was lazy and not proper lighting?

So filmmakers that want to shoot natural today are lazy simply because they are shooting shallow DOF?

I think the blog is slightly off the mark. The truth is there are bunch of filmmakers that are gearheads who don't study storytelling nearly as much as they study how to adjust their lens adapter.

Fair enough.

(edit - Leo's post above said it far better than I could... )
Click to expand...

So many truthful things are said in this thread! You can't say that of all threads
 
Some years ago I watched The day after tomorrow, Lemony Snicket and Pieces of April in a row - at the end the only movie that left an impression on me was Pieces of April - the only film out of those three that had the least of what we would call a film look...(nonetheless, Emmanuel Lubezki did a terrific job on "Lemony")
 
The article also misuses the word "ephemeral". Sorry couldn't resist. He makes good points, though. :)
 
About 80% of this article is a crock. It sounds like the rantings of a writer that needed a controversial subject to publish this week and the dart landed on “shallow focus.”

"In the early days of cinema film stocks were slow and so apertures had to be wide open in the hope of obtaining decent exposure."

Yeah, in the first ten or twenty years. But Kodachrome 40 was created in the early 30’s, wasn’t it? You could stop all the way down to an f/8 – 11 split out in daylight! Cinematographers with the option to shoot shallow depth of field have been CHOOSING it since the beginning because it looks more natural to human vision. When we look at a subject close up, our eyes focus on what is in the foreground and the background falls way. And damn it... it's just pretty.

"Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, and the superb camera work of Gregg Toland, stands as a penultimate example of the power of deep-focus and spawned the host of new thinking about cinema aesthetics … bla bla bla."

As stated above, higher speed films had been around for a decade before Citizen Kane was made. Citizen Kane’s deep focus was a choice and it was as unusual and stunning in 1941 as it is today. It wasn’t shot that way because the technology was finally available.


"Video technology - the ability to capture a moving image electronically rather than chemically - came along in the 70's and 80's."

The first video cameras were being used as early as the 1920’s and 1930’s. The 1936 Summer Olympics were broadcast to viewing booths in Berlin and Potsdam using RCA and Farnsworth equipment.

The first broadcast videotape recorders were developed in 1956 and sold to NBC for $75,000 each.

"The simplistic result of this was that Video Cameras at this time were made, in large part, not to directly compete with film cameras for conservatively traditional cinema roles but to serve different purposes."

In its infancy, television was a DIRECT competitor with the motion picture industry, and that’s why the studios developed cinemascope… to get people out of their houses and back into the theaters. So in that sense, video cameras have been competing against film cameras since the day they went on the air. There were even small handheld cameras like the Norelco PCP-90 as early as 1968. It’s just taken them 60 years for the technology to finally progress to where it is today to obtain better images.

"As such they were largely small cameras with small sensors."

They were enormous! The head alone on early video cameras weighed 325 pounds.


"There is of course a direct mathematical correlation between the size of the sensor (the imaging plane) and the depth of field rendered. Small sensor = deep depth of field. Large sensor = shallow depth of field. Video technology, by nature of both its technological limitations and cultural position within media industry contexts, was innately deep-focus."

Innately deep focus? The first generation of television cameras, the RCA TK-40 and TK-41 had a 35mm image area and used motion picture lenses. On the turret it had a 35mm, 50mm, 90mm, and 135mm lens.

"Now, despite the thousands of website articles, posts, forum treatises and essays dedicated to the mission of how to get the 'Film Look' it is arguable that a useful definition with any clarity on exactly what constitutes the 'Film look' is near impossible to come by. Frame Rate, Progressive scan, Grain, Flicker, Weave, Dynamic Range, Gamma curve - these are all the traits often cited as the 'film look' but together they constitute such a broad palette of hazy and in-tangible possibilities that distilling them into a particular set of aesthetic traits is a highly ephemeral process."

I don’t think any of those attributes are intangible or hazy.

"Through all this, the ramifications of this for digital indie filmmakers have been profound. In working with Digital Video but desiring a 'film look' - that is near impossible to quantify - their efforts were skewed and corrupted. For so many digital indie filmmakers over the past 15 years their functional definition of the 'film look' was primarily whatever aesthetic characteristics were the opposite of what was innate to small-format video. Most specifically Shallow Focus."

What about 8mm & 16mm film? They have the film look and they have a small imaging area.

"Shallow focus and Rack Focus is the cinema equivalent of spoon-feeding the audience one small digestible and banal visual morsel at a time. Handing to them a deliberately unsophisticated and unchallenging image platter."

Are you kidding me? Of course we spoon-feed them. Here’s a list of the top 10 grossing films of all time: (to date)


Titanic (1997) $600,788,188

The Dark Knight (2008) $531,001,578

Star Wars (1977) $460,998,007

Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036

E.T. (1982) $434,949,459

Star Wars: Episode I (1999) $431,088,295

Pirates of the Caribbean: (2006) $423,315,812

Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375

Star Wars: Episode III (2005) $380,262,555

The Lord of the Rings: (2003) $377,019,252


I don’t see any of Akira Kurosawa’s films on that list. I’m not saying I’m much better than the general public. I’ve seen every one of the above films… most of them more than once.



The author of this article is a flowery writer, but I prefer Yates.:001_tt2:
 
rodbradley said:
Hey, somebody needs to do an analysis between box office gross and average frame depth-of-field, pronto!
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Well, none of the top ten films have FF35 @ f1.8 characteristics in daylight, that's for sure ;-)

Star wars new episodes were shot partly (EP I) or fully (EP III) on 2/3" HD video. Shrek was 3D animation. I haven't seen Dark Knight, but none of the rest of the films has a particularly shallow DOF in my recollection.
 
One of the most compelling reasons to use a 35mm adapter is the opportunity to use a lens that doesn't suck. Even if you stop way down on a 35mm adapter it still looks much much better with almost no work. What used to look terrible suddenly looks passable. Don't have money to put into production design and expensive sets? No problem! Put it out of focus. Problem solved. Lighting package too small to fill out an entire set? No problem! Put it out of focus. Don't have a large VFX budget for really detailed set extensions? No problem! Put it out of focus.

This article is just a "I'm sophisticated because I don't pay attention to things which are trendy or fashionable" rant. You know what else is overused in movies right now? Sound. Some of the best movies ever made were silent. All these indie film makers are all chasing after the mainstream talkies because that's what's popular but it's just a crutch! You don't need a microphone to make a great movie... blah blah blah blah blah.
 
The point, I believe, is the ability to choose your tools as you wish/need. Shooting on a camera with a 2/3 sensor means that, should you want shallow DoF, tough - the whole bloody world's in focus. On the other hand, if you're shooting on an S35 sensor or larger, if you want deep focus, stop down. Choice.
 
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