Repost: The Effect of The Shutter Open on a Frame

Marc_Abernathy · September 20, 2004

I posted this just prior to the hack but wanted to see if i can get more posts...

anyway, you guys know when the camera stops and the shutter stays open, it just blows out the frame...

you have seen this countless times when viewing a piece of film in which the camera slows down after stopping and the frames get progressively brighter and brighter until the frame is just blown out..

thats just the nature of the film camera but we see this all the time in commercials, films, videos, etc etc..

so my question is, is there now a name[/] for this effect and do you guys get direction to make these shots in camera deliberately OR in post?

thanks for any replies....

btw, i LOVE that look!!

David Mullen ASC · September 20, 2004

Well, it's called a "flash frame" or a "pop" sometimes -- comes from the camera not coming up to speed immediately and thus the first frames are getting a longer exposure time. Sometimes people used to exaggerate it by opening the camera door!

Helps to use an older camera that takes longer to come up to speed. Also helps to set the camera to slow-motion (high-speed) so it takes even longer to come up to speed.

Marc_Abernathy · September 20, 2004

Helps to use an older camera that takes longer to come up to speed. Also helps to set the camera to slow-motion (high-speed) so it takes even longer to come up to speed.

thanks for the post.

yes this is evident with older camers, especially at faster speed. as they slow down the action in the frame gets faster and the image gets brighter.. its something about that that i like. :P

you are more of a camera man in the traditional sense than i am, so have you ever done this on purpose to acheive this particular phoenomenon?

anyone?

David Mullen ASC · September 21, 2004

On features, I only did it once for a straight-to-video movie called various things, "Teacher's Pet II" or "Devil in the Flesh 2", starring Jodi Lynn O'Keefe. I had a montage scene where a teacher reads poetry to the class and I shot it with a tilt-focus lens on an Arri-III, stopping and starting the camera to create a lot of flash frames.

A recent feature that uses this technique (with a hand-cranked camera!) is "Man on Fire".

Marc_Abernathy · September 21, 2004

A recent feature that uses this technique (with a hand-cranked camera!) is "Man on Fire".

thanks for sharing that.

loved this movie , re: man on fire! i do rememeber those shots and thats exactly what im talking about.

do you know any more info on this camera they used on this film to acheive those shots?

again, thanks for your input david!

Laurent Andrieux · September 21, 2004

With the 535 arri camera you can play with speed and camera aperture and compute parameters, change these parameters along the shot... Think that you also can do so with the arricam (not the moviflex (joke))