Doug Gorius

Ok, if I'm about to load the camera and start shooting, could you give me a really detailed walk-thru of what should/shouldn't be done? And what do I do with the undeveloped film when I'm finished?

Bored of video, I'm looking into shooting on film for the first time. I've acquired an old Bell & Howell 240 in nice shape and some rolls of Kodak Plus-X Reversal 16mm B/W film 7276, but I'm not sure what to do since I've never used one of these cameras or any of this film before. Could you help me? Thanx!

Beautiful photography, Anton.

So, if I understand this correctly, they basically take a 35mm interpositive or the negatives, transfer them digitally, and overlay the supers onto the picture?

I know that, I was just making a joke. Oh really? That's a surprise. But how come the frame is so steady (especially during scenes with credits and other titles)? It looks a bit too artificial to look like a film transfer to me.

^All the closest theaters are blu-ray projections, and the DVDs of these films are mastered from 00101100010's, not film prints. I'm not interested enough in the films anyway to drive 20 minutes so I can see something shot on film, converted to 2K (most of the time) and then outputted back to film. Ew.

I apologize for the overly sensational thread title; I wasn't really sure what else to call it. I just don't see why people choose to shoot on film when they can easily make their flat, lifeless, orange and teal dreams come true with a digital camera. Now I don't think Phil's example looks bad at all, I'm talking about this trash: http://tinyurl.com/ybb7kv2 I know what I'm about to say probably doesn't make any sense because I'm inarticulate, but it seems that the idea of the "film look" has become subjective over the years. The "film look" used to be (to me, at least) the look of genuine celluloid untouched by computers. Then, over the years, people decided that untimed film isn't good enough. The "film look" evolved into a stock visual effect and a cliche representative of how other films looked at the time. If other films were shot on 35mm and then color-timed to have less color variation than 2-strip Technicolor, than that is the "film look." If other films were shot digitally with fake film grain added in post and cropped to 2.35:1, then that is the "film look." If a film was shot on 35mm, degrained in post, and then overlaid with fake film grain for absolutely no reason, then that is apparently the "film look." I like to think that years from now people are going to laugh at all these overly touched-up images the way we laugh at overproduced disco music from the late '70s. And yes, I am a fan of gate weave. Not loads of it, mind you, but just enough to give it the look of film being projected. Screw DI for taking that away.

I don't intend to start some sort of flame war, but this is just something that's been on my mind for a while. I've been wondering why people still choose to shoot on film these days. It seems that everything is inevitably converted digitally and processed to the point of not even looking as if it were shot on film in the first place. Of course you could say they shoot on film because it has a really high resolution, but so do the RED cameras, which (I believe) have the same resolution as the highest resolution Digital Intermediates (blech!). And while I'm on the subject of DI's, I would just like to go on a tangent and say how much I hate them. I think they are the main reason most films today look so disgusting and soulless. I have not seen one visually pleasing DI. They all have this overly static, artificial look along with a color scheme consisting only of orange and teal. I know they probably make DI's these days because it's cheaper, but I don't care; that doesn't make me dislike them less. I wish that DI didn't kill the photochemical process, that they could have at least coexisted together. Anyway, what's the point of shooting on film if you're going to make it into a processed digital video at the same resolution as one of the best video cameras out there? I absolutely LOVE pure, unadulterated, analog film, but I really don't like the direction film acquisition has been going since the mid 2000's.

I need to buy one.

I'm looking for an HD telecine machine. Could you tell me the cheapest one available, and where I can find it? Thanx.