Darren Weckerle

I’m a young aspiring DP who’s never actually seen or touched film, all I know is from what I’ve read or heard. The trouble is that everything I’ve read or heard assumes I know about film from experience, so certain things are never really explained. So, when it comes to a traditional photochemical workflow (no DI), I’m confused about a couple things and curious about another. First, what does correctly exposed negative film actually look like? Okay, I’ve Googled photos of film negative, so I know what it “looks like” in that sense, but what I mean is, if I could hold it up and see it through a positive filter that otherwise applied no other adjustments, what would I see: a positive-color image that looks like a LogC Alexa image, or a positive-color image that looks like a Rec. 709 Alexa image? And depending on the answer to that, does print film apply an S-curve to the flat, log negative image to make it look proper, or does the print film simply increase the saturation and contrast by a bit more to what is otherwise an already colorful and contrasty negative image? Second, what is the effect of the interpositives and internegatives separating the original camera negative and final release print? Compared with creating a release print straight from the original negative, what do the steps in between generally tend to do to the image? Here’s where my confusion comes from: I keep reading about digital cinema cameras recording with Log encoding to mimic what negative film scans look like, making it sound like film negative actually records a flat and washed-out image. But when I first learned about film and how it works, I was led to believe that it responds to light with an S-curve pattern, where the emulsion doesn’t respond very much to low levels of light until a certain threshold of irradiance is reached (the top of the toe), after which it responds fairly linearly (each additional stop of light reaching the film causes the emulsion to become twice as dark), until another threshold is met (the bottom of the shoulder), whereafter each additional stop of light reaching the film causes only a slight increase in exposure. Taken together, this would mean that, apart of inverting the colors and light for dark, negative film has deep, rich blacks and smooth, rolling highlights… the film look. But from my recent reading it seems this is incorrect, and instead, the “film look” is much more to do with the print film, which essentially applies an S-curve to the flat-looking log image of the negative. But which is true? And to confuse matters a bit more, I am aware that film is both a capture medium, recording light, but also the display, showing an image just like a printed picture (which it technically is). So the film could theoretically respond to light in one way (log, linear, or S-curve) but actually display the image it captured in another way entirely, like a display with a different gamma than the image (log, linear, or S-curve). So what is the relationship between how film responds to light compared how it displays that light? Thank you so much for clarifying this and filling the gaps in my knowledge!

Ah, brilliant! I didn't know about that, but it makes sense and it probably helps prevent too much tension on the film too. Thanks.

But it's all a single strip of film, so if it's intermittent at the gate, it's also intermittent after it, no?

Ah, all very interesting! Thanks. But I just realized something I've never thought of before: in a movie theatre projecting a film with an optical soundtrack, the soundtrack is technically offset from the frames it corresponds to, right? But even so, as the film is pulled through the projector by the intermittent mechanism, that means that the film is starting and stopping 24 times a second, rather than moving in one continuous motion. This is obviously necessary to achieve the illusion of motion without having the sequence of frames all blurring together. But what just occurred to me is the fact that, while starting and stopping is necessary to see a moving image, sound is different and if it's not played from a continuous feed we would hear the discontinuities from all the starting and stopping, right? This is obviously not a problem for sound followers and theatres that play the audio off of a separate piece of continuously moving film, tape, disc or hard drive... but how is this problem solved when the audio is played from the same piece of film used to project the image?

In regards to sound though, what's been mentioned makes sense to me. But I guess what I'm also wondering is: how was the sound actually recorded? Now it passes through an ADC and becomes digitized, before that I assume it was all recorded to magnetic tape, but what about before that? Or was sound always recorded to magnetic tape from 1926-2000's? And how did they edit the sound back before computers? For example, how did editors deal with background noise/hiss during takes, the discontinuity that occurs between cuts, and the general sound mixing that's all done through EQ-ing today? Extra thanks!

Thank you so much David for your insightful perspective. I really appreciate it.

Sounds like a good solution! Curious though about what kind of bulb did you use in the china ball and how was it powered (were you on a set or on location)?

Hi guys, Lately I've been trying to learn from the old masters and immersing myself as best I can in classic films from before I was born, but I've noticed a few things that I'm curious about. The biggest difference I've noticed between modern films and older (color) films is not so much the slower pacing, more theatrical acting or the different way the film rendered colors, but the fact that everything was always so clearly "lit" with unmotivated theatrically hard lighting (I think of films like Wizard of Oz, Planet of the Apes, Cleopatra, etc). Why was this the case? Surely DPs understood soft light and recognized that the way color films in the 50's-70's were lit didn't look right. As a clear example, I think of how the first Star Wars was shot in that kind of way, but Empire Strikes Back was shot with much more modern soft lighting and motivated light sources in the frame, and it's instantly much more engaging as a visual experience instead of screaming to the subconscious that what I'm watching is all lit and staged. So unless there was some huge technical hurdle overcome in the time between those two films, Empire shows that there wasn't much of a reason for not being able to pull off that kind of more naturalistic lighting during the previous decades. I'm also curious about how movie sound was recorded, especially when shot outside on location during the early days of sound until modern sound recording? One of the other most noticeable things about older movies shot before I was born is the fact that they sound so different from today. When I listen to them, I can't find any technical flaws in their sound (like I do in so many amateur short films on YouTube), but there's still just something not quite "right" about them. It's just like with the lighting of those films... except I can't quite figure out what it is that made those older films sound "off". Thanks, I appreciate it!

You may find this to be helpful, I did: http://evanerichards.com/2013/2891