When making digital content would you ever add dirt and scratches to it to pretend it is film?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

I see a lot of it on YouTube. It is not only a thing with trying to make footage shot digitally look like old film. They use it in animations and all sort of things that are not meant to try and fool people that they are old. 

Here is an example where they use scratches in in modern animation as well as digital video content. The animation is probably AI. I didn't watch the whole thing, but the effect seems to be throughout, and you can speed up to see it.

It is kinda irritating to me. The same way filmmakers use music or sound effects in the background that distracts from understanding the voice audio. It is not like I'm some film purest and offended, I feel it is just unneeded and distracting. Do you like this type of effect? When making digital content would you ever add dirt and scratches to it to pretend it is film? 

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[Tyler Purcell]

Yea I don't get it at all. 

[Jeff Bernstein]

12 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea I don't get it at all. 

Me either. ¶ Though . . . as I type this . . . I remember three uses which may justify the effect : 

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Zelig (1983)

[Robin Phillips]

a classmate in grad school once took some clear film leader, tied it to his bike, road around the campus to mess it up, scanned it (really a super cheap video camera telecine the animation school had), and applied it to a short that was shot on video. granted, he made it in black and white, but the effect was surprisingly effective. 

[Aapo Lettinen]

I often use fake film grain on digitally shot and composited vfx scenes to make them look less artificial and to blend matte edge details nicely. But it is just grain, never adding scratches or dust or edge flashing or fake gate hair or fake gate mask edges to pretend it is a real film frame. I think they are 4th wall breaking cheap video effects if used for decoration like that and they don't even look anywhere near real, it is like throwing the contents of one's garbage bin over the image and pretend it is artsy😂

[Aapo Lettinen]

1 minute ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

I often use fake film grain on digitally shot and composited vfx scenes to make them look less artificial and to blend matte edge details nicely. But it is just grain, never adding scratches or dust or edge flashing or fake gate hair or fake gate mask edges to pretend it is a real film frame. I think they are 4th wall breaking cheap video effects if used for decoration like that and they don't even look anywhere near real, it is like throwing the contents of one's garbage bin over the image and pretend it is artsy😂

Real messed up film looks really different from cheap-ass post effects. One example from last year's shoot on ACL, I left the gate intentionally dirty and used expired N75 which had pumping base grain. The tiny base scratches on the fresh foma are real too

 

[Aapo Lettinen]

6 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

I often use fake film grain on digitally shot and composited vfx scenes to make them look less artificial and to blend matte edge details nicely. But it is just grain, never adding scratches or dust or edge flashing or fake gate hair or fake gate mask edges to pretend it is a real film frame. I think they are 4th wall breaking cheap video effects if used for decoration like that and they don't even look anywhere near real, it is like throwing the contents of one's garbage bin over the image and pretend it is artsy😂

example on work-in-progress project. Will see the final fake grain level but generally it is pretty useful way to smooth out overly sharp digital footage with slightly imperfect matte edges and crazy sharp vfx elements

 

[Don H Marks]

I consider those added effects to be part contemporary visual language and probably won't go away any time soon. I don't care for it much myself, but I see it as analogous to the dual vignette used to indicate someone is looking through binoculars. They are both cheap effects but they do convey a certain meaning that everyone understands. 

Edited August 11 by Don H Marks

[David Mullen ASC]

To me, adding scratches, dirt, and obvious jitter and gate weave only makes sense if you are specifically trying to fake the look of an old print for a story reason. They don't make sense as just a textural "film look" approach unlike adding grain -- grain is inherent to how film creates an image, but scratches, dirt, etc. are just external damages. It would be like adding dead pixels or corrupted file artifacts to a digital image -- that only makes sense if it is a story point.