How was this shot?

Jaime Marin III · December 28, 2015

Hey everyone I thought It would be interesting to breakdown this scene completely in terms of how you believe it was shot, type of stabilization used, lighting, lighting set up, etc. Here is a dialogue scene from the movie Collateral. I like this scene because it has some motivated camera movement from the car and in a way emulates a "bumpy" car ride in the city.

here is the clip

My first guess is that it was shot in some sort of studio environment in order to get all the different angles and the "shakey" camera movement

Jeff L'Heureux · December 28, 2015

No studio. It was all shot on the real streets, using differently configured tow rigs with different parts of the taxi cut out for the camera crew, depending on the angle. The bumps are real because the camera crew is along for the ride as well. Look around the 5:00 mark of this video.

Carl Looper · December 30, 2015

So it was shot in a studio environment, but where the studio environment was attached to the car.

C

Bill DiPietra · December 30, 2015

My first guess is that it was shot in some sort of studio environment in order to get all the different angles and the "shakey" camera movement

Jeff is correct, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing that makes you think it was shot in a studio...

Bill DiPietra · December 30, 2015

Here is a link to the American Cinematographer article on Collateral. It's very insightful in lot of different ways, especially in the sense that this was kind of the dawn of digital. Dion Beebe & Paul Cameron both talk about the sensitivity of the HD cameras and how they were relying on the monitor to tweak the image - something a lot of camera crews weren't used to back in 2004.

They specifically state that the majority of static-interiors were shot on Vision2 5279 & 5218 (now 5219) and that most of the action scenes were shot on two HD cameras - the Sony/Panavision F900 and the Viper Filmstream. So I'm sure the portability of both cameras was a big consideration in pre-production. Beebe states that they sometimes wound up pushing the gain on both cameras to the max to achieve the look Michael Mann wanted: the F900 to +12db & the Viper to +6db. In order to match the grainy look on film, they pushed the 5218 1 or 2 stops.

Amazing how far digital film-making has come in only 11 years.

Freya Black · December 30, 2015

I rememeber watching it when it came out and not really being able to understand why they had shot the night exteriors on digital and made it look so nasty.

It does detract heavily from what is perhaps Michael Mann's best movie.

Freya

Bill DiPietra · December 30, 2015

I remember seeing it in the theater and I liked the grainy, night look, but that's just me. I've always preferred to actually see the grain/noise on-screen and it was clearly enhanced for this film because that's the look Michael Mann wanted.

Freya Black · December 30, 2015

I remember seeing it in the theater and I liked the grainy, night look, but that's just me. I've always preferred to actually see the grain/noise on-screen and it was clearly enhanced for this film because that's the look Michael Mann wanted.

It could easily look better in the theatre I guess. I saw it when it came out of DVD and I was shooting night time stuff on Mini-DV that looked better back then so I didn't quite get it. Especially the nasty colour and chromatic abberation everywhere too.

I don't mind a bit of video noise but I felt this didn't work.

Quite liked the movie tho oddly.

Freya

Edited December 30, 2015 by Freya Black

Carl Looper · December 30, 2015

From what I understand the digital was being used in a way that would make a virtue of what digital could do differently from film, and part of that was the way in which digital rendered night scapes.

C

David Mullen ASC · December 30, 2015

Pushed digital has more open shadows than pushed film, which gets more contrasty. Also, the Viper has 2/3" sensors so there is more depth of field than with 35mm, so for night photography being shot wide-open, it's unusual to see deeper focus images since most movies are or were shot on 35mm film. So the effect in some ways is more like how we see at night (ignoring the noise) rather than how urban nightscapes usually are rendered in traditional 35mm movies.

Ravi Kiran · December 31, 2015

For the Blu-Ray, were the video scenes taken from the original video footage or from the film-out?

David Mullen ASC · December 31, 2015

I suspect that for a movie released in 2004 with a mix of HD and 35mm, the home video masters (HD and SD) were made from a telecine of the film-out, but I could be wrong. It would be the easiest way to get it into an HD master for home video back then. Now if the movie had been even more popular, there might have been a push to re-do the video master by putting the whole movie through a new 2K D.I. and make the HD version from that, but I don't see that happening.

I could be wrong, maybe the home video master is made directly from whatever digital master they created for the film-out.

Remember that they mixed some Sony F900 into the Viper footage, and the Viper used that odd 2.40 digital anamorphic process that allowed you to use all 1080 lines for a 2.40 image, whereas the Sony F900 footage had to be cropped to 2.40.