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Dunkirk 70mm


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I too would have liked more soldiers on the beach. There seemed to be some digital stuff going on in the background ? Not too convincing because of the huge screen. Maybe adding some dummies would've helped :D as in Gone with the wind.

He used cardboard cutouts like John says. I don't believe there were any 'digital soldiers' as pretty much everything was done in camera.

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That's interesting, so you mean they were full-size cut-outs of people put behind the real people ? Or was there anything done on glass close to the camera. On one shot of the beach I did sense something in the distance which didn't quite look convincing on the huge screen. I'd assumed it was digital because I believe there were some digital artists working on the movie.

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Just saw this projected in 70mm at the Odeon Leicester Square.

 

I fell decidedly into the "meh" camp. It's just a depiction of events. It's very well done, but it doesn't particularly move me.

 

Strikes me as a rather strange choice to make such a big deal out of a catastrophic military defeat, too.

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Just saw this projected in 70mm at the Odeon Leicester Square.

 

I fell decidedly into the "meh" camp. It's just a depiction of events. It's very well done, but it doesn't particularly move me.

 

Strikes me as a rather strange choice to make such a big deal out of a catastrophic military defeat, too.

 

 

Phil .. this was in fact a glorious victory over the Bosch .. setting the stage for equally outstanding 1966 world cup triumph ..

 

Two world wars and one world cup... as the song goes..

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Just saw this projected in 70mm at the Odeon Leicester Square.

 

I fell decidedly into the "meh" camp. It's just a depiction of events. It's very well done, but it doesn't particularly move me.

 

Strikes me as a rather strange choice to make such a big deal out of a catastrophic military defeat, too.

I'd like to see the 5/70 version.

Did you see the cutouts ? Or is it just our friend 15/70 acting too hard on these kind of effects.

 

But at least many survived, so not so catastrophic.

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What did you think of the format?

 

Looked pretty good to me (I assume the Odeon Leicester Square is 5/70.) Bright, sharp, stable, fractionally flickery but not to the point of being objectionable.

 

Looked like very good film, as it should.

 

Didn't make any real difference to the storytelling, though.

 

P

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I saw this digitally projected at the IMAX theater. Too bad no 15-perf 70mm prints have been released in Spain.

 

The overall look of the presentation is great. Very, very sharp, clean and organic. In a way it's the perfect mix between the look of digital and the look of film adquisition. The use of 5-perf 65mm (Super Panavision) for dialogue scenes is a huge improvement over the 35mm anamorphic that Nolan has been using with IMAX since "The Dark Knight", but there's still a drop in quality because the frame is 1/3 of that of the IMAX. I could also see some very bad skin-tones during the Mark Rylance / Cillian Murphy section of the film, and I also find the lack of enough depth a huge distraction during IMAX night scenes.

 

Too bad the effort to make the film look so good wasn't spent in making the storytelling intelligible too!

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I never noticed any of these 'digital soldiers' at the 15/70mm projection. In fact I never noticed the cardboard ones - which seems to be the point. They are so small and so far in the distance that you're not meant to notice them. But that was just me, maybe other people were able to notice them.

 

With the 5/70mm scenes, I only noticed it once as I happened to be paying attention to a certain part of the screen and I saw it had cropped off. But the 15/70mm projection was so big that you'd have to be paying a lot of attention to the edge of the screen to notice the change in ratio.

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With the 5/70mm scenes, I only noticed it once as I happened to be paying attention to a certain part of the screen and I saw it had cropped off. But the 15/70mm projection was so big that you'd have to be paying a lot of attention to the edge of the screen to notice the change in ratio.

For me it was still rather annoying and took me out of the picture. The pilot closeups were in full Imax because their mouths weren't seen and easily dubbed ! And effective. I can see that sometimes the Imax squarish ratio is not good for 2-shots, but in this case you could add some out-of-focus boat details at the bottom of the frame. There was lots of soft stuff around the faces in the interiors and it looked OK in Imax. The strength of 15/70 is its great height.

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What do you guys think accounts for the look of the 5/70 footage? I thought it was really inconsistent, some exteriors looked really rough, but when the men were hiding out in the boat waiting for the tide to come in it looked crisp and clean. But surely they were on a faster stock inside?

 

I can't figure out why 5/70 would look like that. Were my expectations just too high for the format?

Edited by Justin Skrundz
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What do you guys think accounts for the look of the 5/70 footage? I thought it was really inconsistent, some exteriors looked really rough, but when the men were hiding out in the boat waiting for the tide to come in it looked crisp and clean. But surely they were on a faster stock inside?

They took the cut 5/65 negative, blew it up to 15/65 which made an IP then they struck an IN and that's what they cut into the 15/65 negative. So the 5/65 stuff was 4th generation by the time it hit the screen, where the 15/65 stuff was 2nd generation because they struck all the prints off the camera negative.

 

It was a stupid decision to do this workflow and I hope they don't do it again.

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They took the cut 5/65 negative, blew it up to 15/65 which made an IP then they struck an IN and that's what they cut into the 15/65 negative. So the 5/65 stuff was 4th generation by the time it hit the screen, where the 15/65 stuff was 2nd generation because they struck all the prints off the camera negative.

 

It was a stupid decision to do this workflow and I hope they don't do it again.

If thats the result of the NEG>IP>IN>Print process for 5/70 35mm with the same process must look like sandpaper? I guess it doesn't go through a blow up...

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If thats the result of the NEG>IP>IN>Print process for 5/70 35mm with the same process must look like sandpaper? I guess it doesn't go through a blow up...

I know right? The 35mm process would be the same honestly.

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They took the cut 5/65 negative, blew it up to 15/65 which made an IP then they struck an IN and that's what they cut into the 15/65 negative. So the 5/65 stuff was 4th generation by the time it hit the screen, where the 15/65 stuff was 2nd generation because they struck all the prints off the camera negative.

 

It was a stupid decision to do this workflow and I hope they don't do it again.

For the 15/70 release, but not the 5/70:

We made an optical-reduction interpositive right from the original camera negative for all 15-perf shots, resulting in a 5-perf duplicate negative, which could then be cut together with the 5-perf original negative to make a complete printed 5-perf negative.

I don't see how they could have done otherwise for the 15/70.

Edited by Mark Dunn
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For the 15/70 release, but not the 5/70:

We made an optical-reduction interpositive right from the original camera negative for all 15-perf shots, resulting in a 5-perf duplicate negative, which could then be cut together with the 5-perf original negative to make a complete printed 5-perf negative.

I don't see how they could have done otherwise for the 15/70.

It's the same process... OCN>IP>IN and cut into OCN of the alternative format. You can't "print" from an IP as it IS the positive element in the chain. So you have to make another "negative" element from that positive. It always goes; negative (ocn) to positive (interpositive) to negative (internegative) to positive (release print).

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  • 3 weeks later...

I found it quite emotional because I know the HISTORY behind it. My mother was a war bride from Liverpool and met my dad while in London as a member of the WAC. (They first met on an open air double decker bus) So if operation "Dynamo" had not been a success, Britain would most likely have been invaded. The fact that it was so successful (300k soldiers repatriated) was crucial to the outcome of WWII. Probably also to my very existence. The rest of you might be speaking German and Goose-stepping.

 

As a film student of the 1970's I have always sought out 70mm films on the largest screen available. I am lucky enough to live in MPLS/St Paul where the Zoo Imax still has 70/15 projection. I found the film very engaging and had to go back again to evaluate all the technical issues in producing the film. I did not find the ratio changes or focus issues at all distracting and experienced the same emotions the second time around. I'm definitely going back for a 3rd viewing before it ends this weekend.

 

On another note: I have a 40" Sony HD 4/3 and 16/9 combo tube type TV and would love to see an Imax non-windowboxed Blu Ray

Edited by John Poore
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  • 5 months later...
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Resurrecting an old thread, but I saw the blu-ray of "Dunkirk" last night and the 5/65 shots really look great, much closer in quality to the 15/65 shots than they did in the film IMAX print. Of course, one reason is that everything has been brought down to 1080P...

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Resurrecting an old thread, but I saw the blu-ray of "Dunkirk" last night and the 5/65 shots really look great, much closer in quality to the 15/65 shots than they did in the film IMAX print. Of course, one reason is that everything has been brought down to 1080P...

 

The 5 perf print of Dunkirk looked fine, it was only the IMAX print that was mucked up sadly. :(

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The 5 perf print of Dunkirk looked fine, it was only the IMAX print that was mucked up sadly. :(

I don't think people really noticed the difference in quality at the 15/70 showing in London. The reduced height of the 5-perf was the letdown. And disappointing to see the final shot like this, if I remember correctly.

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The height changes are less noticeable on blu-ray because it is only switching from 1.78 (full-frame HD) for IMAX to letterboxed 2.20 for the 5-perf shots, and since the quality matches much better, there isn't a jump in graininess either.

I'm surprised they bothered to make the blu-ray at full-frame HD. I would have thought a wholly 2.2:1 version like the 5/70 film would look better for most viewers, avoiding the height changes, if slightly less jarring as you say ( I missed the 5/70 film so can't comment on this.)

Still, the 15/70 screenings looked far superior to Interstellar with its 35mm inserts.

Edited by Doug Palmer
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