Sin City

[Marty Hamrick]

Just saw a trailer for Sin City.The black and white with added color highlights is quite striking.Anyone know where there are articles about the production and about what was used for that look?

[drew_town]

I don't know a whole lot about this movie, but what I've heard is that it was shot HD and most of the movie was shot in front of green screen. The color scheme can easily be done with secondary color correction, but I'm not positive that's what they did. I'm looking forward to seeing this movie this weekend.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Looking forward to it, but the look of the theatrical trailer seems wildly different to what I've seen on TV. Projected it was bluish and very video-looking with clipped highlights, but it was monochrome on TV.

 

Also it has Clive "Plank-Face" Owen in it. The world's regard for this man continues to astound me.

 

Phil

[Keith Mottram]

It was shot multicam with 950's all against green screen. backgrounds done in Maya and 3d Studio Max. I think the compositing was done in Shake but I'm not sure, Color Correction was pretty straight forward as your dealing with CG elements. Tarantino directed for one day. There is a behind the scenes taster somewhere on the net but cant quite remember where. Try all the normal geek/ comic book sites.

 

Keith

[Seth Slavin]

Just a little trivial piece of information I remember reading on the web. Sin City is one of 4 movies shot entirely on green/blue screen. The other three are:

Immortel (French) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314063/

Casshern (Japanese) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405821/

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (American)

 

I listed them in order from least to worst as well (in my opinion.) If you haven't seen Immortel or Casshern you should check them out. I really liked Immortel although some of the character animation is, to put it bluntly, bad. And Casshern is quite lengthy with the old "technology breeds war" theme, as well as a few open ended plot points, but it has a few great action sequences that use some interesting special effects that definately make it worth the watch.

[Keith Mottram]

Just a little trivial piece of information I remember reading on the web. Sin City is one of 4 movies shot entirely on green/blue screen. The other three are:

Immortel (French) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314063/

Casshern (Japanese) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405821/

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (American)

 

I listed them in order from least to worst as well (in my opinion.) If you haven't seen Immortel or Casshern you should check them out.  I really liked Immortel although some of the character animation is, to put it bluntly, bad. And Casshern is quite lengthy with the old "technology breeds war" theme, as well as a few open ended plot points, but it has a few great action sequences that use some interesting special effects that definately make it worth the watch.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

its interesting that all three of these films are a complete mess. Immortel's cg humans are so bad that it becomes unwatchable, and there are wonderful moments where the tracking is so rubbish that cgi elements litterally are wobbling on their live action hosts. Having been involved in this type of production I know all the pitfalls, but Immortel does take some beating. The skyscapes are great though.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

While we're on the subject of character animation, has anyone seen the Mamoru Oshii movie "Avalon?" It has the most realistic human CG cast I've ever seen, way better than Final Fantasy.

 

Phil

[Mark Allen]

And Casshern is quite lengthy with the old "technology breeds war" theme, as well as a few open ended plot points

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

That seems to be a characterisitc of Japanese science fiction. Ten years ago I was a music video director for Japanese artists who came to the US and learned a lot about the pop art style in the process and one of the things I discovered (which seems to be true still today) is that the audiences for this genre have a high tolerance for the unexplained. The US has an unusually low tolerance for that though tastes change over time. I think the recent interst is Asian Horror cinema is a sign that the US is desiring an expansion of their tastes.

[Tenolian Bell]

Not to sound too boorish.

 

But so far my experience with this type of film the wow factor is over rather quickly.

 

After 10 minutes you've seen all its tricks and you spend the next 100 minutes seeing the same tricks over and over.

 

We shall see.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> I think the recent interst is Asian Horror cinema is a sign that the US is desiring an

> expansion of their tastes.

 

It would be a sign of that if Hollywood didn't keep remaking the damn things. Expanding your taste means exposing yourself to new things, not dragging those things inside your comfort zone.

 

Phil

[Tenolian Bell]

I've just read an article where Rodriguez stated the look of Sin City would have been impossible if he shot it on film.

 

Seeing as Sin City has few greys he could argue film would have been more than he needed.

 

Film scanned at 16 bit has 281 trillion shades of grey.

 

You only need 1 bit to record absolute black and white.

Edited April 1, 2005 by tenobell

[Luke Prendergast]

281 trillion (281 000 000 000 000) shades of grey from 16 bits? Can you explain the math there?

[Luke Prendergast]

3 to the 16th power in trinary? (don't have a calc handy), but I haven't seen a film scanner (or really anything much else) that uses trinary.

[Tenolian Bell]

From what I understand upcoming digital projectors are trinary.

 

I would think the way the Arri scanner works could be considered trinary.

 

As it does take three different pictures of each primary color at different luminance levels for true three color 16 bit.

[Elhanan Matos]

I think that would be 24 bits, 2^16 is sixteen bits.

[Tenolian Bell]

I was a little over zealous in my numbers.

 

I was working from 2 to the 48th power which is all three primary colors.

 

I should have said 94 Trillion shades of grey.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

A 16-bit/channel RGB image can resolve up to 65,536 shades of grey.

 

Phil

[Annie Wengenroth]

I cannot contribute much to this discussion because I was a consistent C student in math...basic math...

 

Anyway I'm going to see it tonight at midnight. So far I've heard, "It sucked, you're wasting your money", and "It was awesome, you'll love it." As you can probably guess, I have no idea what to expect here.

 

I actually wrote something in defense of Rodriguez for the film students who choose to mindlessly bash him, but I think I'll save it for later.

[Tenolian Bell]

OK boy did I get this wrong.

 

While at Cinegear last year I saw some of the guys from the Digital Cinema Initative talking.

 

I took down notes, much of what they said went over my head, but I wrote down the basics.

 

I've had to thouroughly go back through my notes and realized I misread them.

 

They were speaking of all three colors of film being scanned at 16 bit. A digital projector that shows all of that data would equate to 281 trillion color combinations, and not actually 281 trillion descrete levels.

 

Sorry for any confusion.

 

So a 16 bit monochrome scan of film would show up 65,536 shades of grey as Phil stated.

 

Which is still far more than appears to be needed for Sin City.

Edited April 2, 2005 by tenobell

[Mark Allen]

While we're on the subject of character animation, has anyone seen the Mamoru Oshii movie "Avalon?" It has the most realistic human CG cast I've ever seen, way better than Final Fantasy.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

You're kidding, right?

 

I actually rented this movie after you said that. There are zero CG humans in that movie. That movie also is about the best example of a movie that has zero sense of story. Plot is not story. "Do this." "Okay done." "Now do this." "done." Ugh painful.

 

On a cinematography note - looked like the first 70% of the movie was shot on HD. If not, man did they whack out their DI.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> There are zero CG humans in that movie

 

There's a couple. I know this.

 

Yes, she does look like a plastic person, though. Especially with that whacked-out DI.

 

As to plot and storyline... it's an Oshii movie, what d'you want?

 

Phil

[Guest Kai.w]

Sorry for any confusion.

 

So a 16 bit monochrome scan of film would show up 65,536 shades of grey as Phil stated.

 

Which is still far more than appears to be needed for Sin City.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Hmm... the fileformat has 65,536 shades of grey. If the scanner could do this you could scan to some HDR format and in theory have.... aehh... 4,294967e+09 shades of gray. But does the filmmaterial resolve this...?

We had lenghty discussions about pixel res. What about color res?

 

 

 

-k

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

The problem with that sort of discussion is that the standard way of removing banding in low-bit-depth digital imaging is error diffusion, that is, adding noise. Because film is inherently so noisy, sorry, grainy, it tends to hide things that might, for example, be visible on the CRT monitor during colour correction for a DI.

 

That said, the minimum bit depth generally considered adequate for film work is 10-bit logarithmic, this being considered roughly equivalent to 16-bit linear. This is not as difficult to achieve as spatial resolution because it is a function of the ADCs and output amplifiers associated with the CCD or CMOS imager, not the photosensitive device itself (within limits imposed by the noise floor and well capacity of the device).

 

Phil

[Annie Wengenroth]

I'm actually starting to understand this a little better, thank you Phil.

 

Side note, it sold out last night so I have to wait until tomorrow night. Argh!