This guy opened a 400ft roll of 35mm in ambient light and then filmed it

[Gautam Valluri]

Is this for real? Apart from the lightburns on either side, the picture seems largely unaffected.

[Robin Phillips]

its hard to imagine the footage that looks decent was taken with the door open as shown

[Tyler Purcell]

With 35mm (due to how much unused apace there is on the edges) in subdued light, you can achieve this result for sure, but with 16mm and broad daylight, this trick doesn't work. Ask so many people who accidentally flashed their film and processed it. EEEEK. 

[Alexander Boyd]

1 hour ago, Robin Phillips said:

its hard to imagine the footage that looks decent was taken with the door open as shown

footage wasn't shot with the door open, only the loading/threading part. the clickbait-heavy edit made it seem like it was though. 

[Steve Switaj]

Back in the day, there used to be a really nice high speed camera from Photosonics called the 4ML.

It was a 35mm, 4 perf, pin-registered camera that could do 200FPS. Basically, it was a giant version of their famous 16mm ActionMaster. It was very popular with the F/X crowd.

Being based on the ActionMaster - which was a camera that took daylight loasds - the mags worked the same way.

When you opened the mag, on the supply side there were a couple of plates that clamped the supply roll and basically turned it into a big daylight spool.

This part of the magazine you loaded in the dark.

But when you went to put the load up on the camera you would *open the mag up* and finish threading the film. 

In the light.

The actual movement was inside themag, behind the pressure plate, and the only way to thread it correctly was to be able to see what you were doing. 

You could literally look down into the supply side of the mag and see the roll of unexposed film sitting back there. 

It was really weird, but once you got used to it, it made sense. You were renting this camera specifically to run at 200 FPS, and you were going to burn through the first 8 or 10 film wraps just to get to speed, so, like any daylight spool, if you were reasonably careful and didn't load it in direct sunlight you were going to be fine. 

The cool thing was that this was the only 35mm PhotoSonics camera that didn't require a tech to go out with it. You went to the Burbank office for some instruction, and then so long as they were comfortable with you, you could rent it without also hiring a PhotoSonics certified AC. 

This meant you often ended up with a first unit second AC who had never seen the camera before. 

So you'd make a huge show of putting up the mag, casually *POPPING THE LID OPEN* and *THERE WAS THE FILM!*.

If you were a jerk you could slam the lid back down and go "That's OK, nobody will notice", or "Yup, just checking there's a roll in here" and keep going like nothing happened.

Some pictures of the mag are here: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/photo-sonics-400-film-magazine-4ml-ac-475028563 

In the 4th pictue you can see where the supply side is the rear chamber of the mag, and is its own thing.

I couldn't find a good picture of the 35mm 4ML itself, but you can find pictures of the various 16mm ActionMaster version. There are some photos of the 16mm versions on the rental page of the Losito Films website  
https://www.lositointernationalfilms.com/en/losito_international/rental

[Uli Meyer]

A few years ago, on one of my shoots, a young 2nd AC opened the changing tent slightly while trying to remove an exposed 1000-ft roll of 35mm film from the magazine. He had unzipped the tent about 30 centimeters so he could peek inside and see what his hands were doing. Fortunately, the 1st AC caught him.

When he was hired, he had told us he had experience working with film. As it turned out, that experience was limited to changing daylight spools on a Bolex.

The roll ended up with intermittent light streaks at the side of the image throughout. Fortunately, the gaps between them were large enough that I was still able to use the clean takes.

Edited March 12 by Uli Meyer

[Mark Dunn]

Yeah, like, whatever,

"Complete darkness"

complete  adj. to the greatest extent possible; total. 

darkness n.  the partial or total absence of light. We'd better take option (2) there.

The danger is that some twazzock (UK, derog. stupid or annoying person) will take that seriously. Even half-seriously would be enough.

Edited March 12 by Mark Dunn