Nicholas Kinsey

In a couple of weeks I need to shoot a burning car (at night) with a ball of fire around it. The explosion will simply be the reflected light on the actor faces looking at the scene (propane gas ball of fire effect). We have to show the burning car for perhaps 5 seconds so that spectator will think that no one could have approached the vehicle to save the person inside. We shoot on 35mm and then do CGI for these effects. I need to know how much can be done on the original negative before adding the fire effects or smoke or whatever. We have an actor we will put in the front seat behind the wheel with a blackened face and clothes hunched over the wheel. I was thinking of putting smoke inside the vehicle or behind the vehicle and blowing inside the vehicle. Backlight all this so the smoke stands out. What about windows? Would they have blown on the explosion or not? Has anyone done this before and can provide some advice. I am not sure how good fire effects are in CGI. Also the cost of doing everything in CGI might be too much for our budget. Regards, Nicholas

Dear Jason, Thanks for the comments. I have looked at the gate and pressure plate of my Arri BL again and really can't figure out how lateral instability can really occur. You have two claws feeding the film forward and two registration pins locking the film in place before exposure. You have a relatively deep channel on both sides for the claw to operate in, so my idea of a film shavings buildup lifting the side of the film is really not possible. It could be possible in 16mm with only one claw moving the film forward but not in a 35BL. On the 35BL the film is stretched across two registration pins and then is a lot of room for shavings in the channels of the pressure plate (not flat, but with vertical channels). You could have a real dust pile up and it wouldn't affect stability. Your idea of the top loop seems to be quite convincing. I will run some tests over the next few months and and check it out. Thanks for your input. Nicholas

I think this is a very good question. To blow or not to blow windows. This is a very subjective question. I am a DOP with feature experience and I don't think blowing out windows helps the storyline of a movie. I often try to avoid seeing out windows, but if you must, I think it is a far better idea to make the view from the window realistic. In a recent feature, The Backup Man, coming out in the cinemas this year in Canada, we had the principal actors arriving at the police station at dawn (bluish light). Then a day later we are shooting the police station interior in a tiny office with the same actors and with a view out the window. Luckily, we shot this in November when the light was failing outside so I lit the interior so that the exterior was 2 stops under the key lighting in the office. We had about 20 minutes to shoot the wide shot including the window and then move into medium and close-ups all avoiding the window. This is a great example of film realism. It adds a degree of credibility to the scene. The public are constantly second-guessing story elements and lighting is one of them. I personally think that blowing windows looks sloppy. No window looks like that in real life. With film you can still see details even if the incident light outside is 4 stops overexposed. If you've got greenery, it will eat up the light and you can go to 6 stops and still see detail. So why not balance interiors and exteriors. The windows will look more natural.

Thanks Bernie. A good comment. A large number of American independent filmmakers shoot on short ends and the Kodak material is excellent. You can stock it in a freezer for years and take it out and shoot with it, and you won't notice the difference with fresh stock. It is nothing less than amazing how well Kodak stock keeps in a freezer. But most of our material is fresh and coming off American TV series in the spring. We shoot in the summer so we get pretty fresh stock. I don't think perf size on short ends can be the problem. Of course on a low budget feature in 35mm shooting on short ends, you are going to wind up with some 250-300 rolls of film instead of 70-100 rolls if you were shooting 1000 foot loads. This means more buildup of film shavings in the gate and in the mags, because you are changing film more often. Maybe this is the problem, dirt accumulating in the gate. In an Arri 35BL you don't have a side/lateral pressure plate. You have a channel, a pressure plate, and a set of two registration pins. The registration pins are supposed to hold the film steady. I remember on our last shoot towards the end (33 days) when we had shot some 50,000 feet, the first assistant wasn't cleaning the gate all that much and there was an accumulation of fine dust. The film rides on this on its edges and then maybe pushes against the pressure plate from time to time causing registration instability.

Thanks for the comment. We don't use 5245 stock, mainly 5217, 5218, 5279, 5277, etc. The shots that are giving me trouble in post are 5217 Kodak stock. So I am sure whether this explains anything. Generally our short ends are all fresh Kodak stock that have been in a freezer for while. We never have problems with this material. Luckily with short ends is that you are constantly changing mags so there may be problems that you are not going to see because you are only printing good takes. I remember we shot some 10 takes one time of a 3 minute scene (270 feet). We ended up throwing out the first 8 takes (we didn't even develop the stuff) and only printing 3 takes. As I said, we are talking about maybe 2-3% of our material. We used to think it was a mag problem, but we seem to get the same problems with different mags. Basically, in a feature you have the neg scanned at places like Cinebyte in Toronto. They scan it 2k and then use a stabilizer software program which stabilizes the whole sequence and then outputs back to 35mm negative. 2k is fine for medium shots and close-ups, but not good enough for a wide shot with no movement. And 4k isn't cheap. The only other way is the old optical printer.

I am a Canadian DOP and we have shot two 35mm feature films with an Arri 35BLII rebuilt by Visual Products. The mags are like new and were taken apart and the clutches were changed. The camera is in very good shape and I have had technicians check it out regularly. On each feature we have had image stability problems. We shoot a total of about 65,000 feet of short ends, all Kodak stock, for each film. There are always a couple of scenes where the stability is unacceptable (probably less than 2% of the footage) The problem doesn't seem to come from a single mag (1000 and 400 footers). One day you are using a mag and everything's fine, then the next day the mag is producing jerky pictures. The pictures seem to shake from left to right, not so much vertically. Perhaps someone out there is familiar with these older cameras and can explain to me and to my assistant how to avoid this kind of problem. Maybe it has to do with the loop which is too tight or something about using short ends. We have been obliged to scan these jerky images and to stabilize them digitally frame by frame, then return them to 35mm negative film. The result is very clean, but expensive and a pain in the ass.

Thank you Oleg and Steve. Very interesting. The listed specs seem to be quite adequate, at least as good as the Cooke lens specs. So as with all older lenses, the only thing to do is run resolution tests. Steve's comment about the look of a picture transferred to HD is not really relevant since HD resolution is far inferior to the good old 35mm 4K image. His lenses might be perfect for HD, but truly inferior for 35mm projection. I am interested in Steve's lens. Are these the famous Loma lenses or Electra lenses that Oleg mentions?

Thanks Oleg. We know about lens resolution here because we are always running tests for the production insurance companies (resolution and stability tests). And the first thing I will do when I get a new lens is to test it. If it doesn't meet the 42 lines per mm minimum (center of lens at 1 stop down from wide open), we will throw it out. I looked at the resolution specs on your site for various lenses. They indicate a spread (for instance 65/35 lines per mm). Does this mean 65 lines in the middle and 35mm in the corners of the picture or does it refer to stopping down? 65 lines at F8 and 35 lines wide open at F2? How close are the Russian primes you mentioned to their listed specifications?

I am a Canadian Dop with 25 years of experience in 35mm and 16mm feature production. In recent years we have been using lots of old Cooke and Arri primes in standard Arri mounts on an Arriflex 35BLII for low budget feature productions. Lens tests prove their excellent resolution. Most of these lenses give 42 lines per mm wide-open or when you stop down a bit. The only problem with older lenses seems to be reflections since the coating weren't so great in the 1970s and 1980s. I am a fan of the old technology and still enjoy shooting with the old cameras. Our features look just as good as features shot with Panavision cameras and primes, and a hell of a lot better than HD. With regard to lenses I will always refuse to use any lens that gives me a 29 lines per mm reading because you can see how soft it is on the big screen. I am thinking of buying a second camera, either a Cameflex or a Konvas 35mm camera, and was wondering what level of resolution you can get with the OCT lens mount and the Russian primes that go with Konvas cameras, etc. Is there anyone out there who has done lens tests with Russians primes using this lens mount?