nighttime with slow speed stocks

[Deniz Zagra]

I've started noticing how clean, sharp, and properly color-balanced night shots in older movies look. Maybe it's because I'm an amateur, and don't know how to expose properly, but I'm curious how they were able to get such clean shots. A few movies that come to mind are Someone To Watch Over Me (1987) and William Friedkin's Cruising (1980). I suspect that street lighting was helpful on Cruising, but to shoot all of that on 5247 (maybe they pushed it a stop as Friedkin usually did) just doesn't seem plausible. The opening shot of Someone To Watch Over Me was probably shot on high speed stock (250T, 400T maybe?) but still the grain level and sharpness hold up extremely well. The only logical way I can think of is maybe, these types of scenes were shot with low speed stocks since everything is almost black during the night, and then the film was exposed for the highlights. Is this how they did it, or am I missing something? What do you think the selected aperture, shutter speed would be for such scenes?

Additionally, I was surprised how the ugly green tint from fluorescent and mercury lightning wasn't present in these shots. Did they use to correct the tint in the lab with a magenta filter (I'm not sure since the filter would also add magenta to the shadows as well, right?) If not, is there way to replicate this without requiring post-processing?

[Brian Drysdale]

During that period, there's a good chance that they used film lights for night exteriors, combined with wide aperture lenses as an option.

35mm high speed film neg became available in 1983 with 5294 rated at 400 ASA. Newer stocks followed in 1986.

[David Mullen ASC]

You could get fine-grained results on 80s high speed stock at night as long as you didn't underexpose them too much.

And 5247 with a one-stop push wasn't that grainy. Again, it's all about the degree of underexposure.  If you ended up printing your footage in the 30s, it was going to look finer-grained than if it printed in the teens.  But you need more light if you are going to be able to expose enough to print night work above the teens in the scale.

So these night scenes usually used fast lenses and additional lighting.

Most people would say that "high-speed" film was introduced in 1981 with a type of Fuji 250T, followed quickly by the first 5293 250T (not the late 90s 5293). You could see the change in the Oscar nominations for 1982 movies for cinematography: Gandhi (all 5247), Sophie's Choice (5247 and fast 5293), Tootsie (fast 5293), E.T. (all 5247), Das Boot (fast Fuji).

[Frank Wylie]

Also, are you watching film prints or digitally corrected "reconstructions" of these titles you quote?

Chances are, you are watching a digital file that has been re-graded and any problematic color balances or even grain could have been subtracted in the remastering process.

Even supervised transfers aren't immune from this misrepresentation;  look at "Repo Man" by Alex Cox or pretty much anything pre-digital by Coppola.  IMHO, Cox ruined "Repo Man" by sticking the midtones down in the mud and killing a lot of the visual humor of the film, but that's just my opinion.

Sorry, looks different and I can't blame the filmmakers for wanting to make changes they might have wanted to or could not in the era in which it was shot.

The whole take-away from this I want to drive home is, you may NOT be looking at a 198X film that retains it's inherent limitations of the era, but a digital re-interpretation of the film that can't be done legitimately in a full photo chemical pipeline.

So, if it turns out the films you quote have been digitally remastered, then you need to add this into your equation for post production.

[Robin Phillips]

Are you having this difficulty exposing on 35mm or 16mm? 

35mm 500T exposes great at night, you can push it 2 stops if needed.

16mm 500T you can really only push 1 stop (and ideally rate at 800) IMO, and even then you probably want to do some denoising or grain reduction. BUT 500T at box speed often works fine at night to pick up areas already illuminated by street lights or whatever. But to do it right, in a controlled way, you're talking about bringing in a good amount of light. 

Im wondering if you are not taking into account the scale of the lighting that was being used on these movies you referenced. Just because it looks like street light doesnt mean it is, not at all. Before we got better films in the 80s (not to mention the introduction of T1.3 lenses), you had to put a lot of effort into lighting. 

Also there were no shutter "speeds" then, only shutter angle. 180 degree is generally the most open you can go on film cameras (I say generally in case there is some weird outlier camera, but 180 degrees is what almost all film cameras need for the movement to do its thing while the mirror is blocking the film gate). 

as for the florescence, we've had kinoflos for decades now that are used to replace actual florescent tubes. They are color balanced and have ballasts that prevent the flicker you get on normal tubes. 

But film night time shoots use to be big. really big. done right these days they still are if you want total control, but again you can get away with a lot on 500T if you're in a city and just want to use available street, sign, and window light. Throw Master Primes in for good measure and you'll have a nice picture.

Also, IMO dont push 500T in 16mm 2 stops. it basically just turns to confetti. In my experience though you can degrain a 1 stop push on 7219 with something like neat video, sharpen it up a bit, then mix the grain back in. But a 2 stop push things go so nuts that its not really salvageable. You are, after all, using only a fraction of the surface area of 35mm.

And as has been pointed out, many transfers have been cleaned up. They can be reflective of how clean the negative was, or they can be artificially cleaned up. The actual film prints were most certainly grainier.  if you check out project 4k 77, an effort to restore the original star wars from located and scanned film prints, you'll get a VERY good sense of what a film print looked like back in the day. 

[Deniz Zagra]

22 hours ago, Frank Wylie said:

Also, are you watching film prints or digitally corrected "reconstructions" of these titles you quote?

That's why I mentioned both of those films, because I watched original prints of those movies. On both of those occasions, I was sitting close to the screen. Never saw Cruising on digital, but both seemed fine grained enough. Same goes for Mulholland Drive.

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I think that perhaps you don't need as much exposure at night as you think you do. At least, if we limit ourselves to urban environments. Firstly, it's not like you're taking a reflected reading off the road surface. Secondly, all those small light sources will provide local illumination. Not to mention lights in buildings.

I am sure that Jan De Bont was interviewed on Indie Film Hustle and he talked about Die Hard. In one scene, he slightly under cranked the camera and maybe increased the shutter angle (not sure about that one). I cannot find that interview now. In any case, that kind of technique isn't necessary.