Manu Delpech

Christian Sprenger did it on Guava Island (shooting on the Alexa LF, there's an article on Filmmaker Magazine about it), the FUBU episode of Atlanta as well (where he shot in Super 16 mode on an Amira and then printed to film, scanned it). It looks unlike any digital film or footage that I've ever seen that tried somehow to make it look like film in post by adding grain or anything else. And it's not subtle at all, the results are really impressive. It obviously still looks different than something actually shot on film, but it's as close as it gets.

Phenomenal work by Zack who shot it too. He shot practically the entire film on his Canon Dream Lens (50mm, 0.95). He said it was much more in focus than he expected. Also, another cool technical tidbit: Tig Notaro was not on set with any of the actors during principal photography. Another actor played the role and they ended up replacing him completely with Notaro who was shot separately against green screen over two weeks after the film was complete. Seamless. For people "complaining", it's such a different look than what we're used to and absolutely on purpose.

For those who have an account over there, here's the teaser in QT 1080p and Pro Res quality ! https://www.movie-list.com/forum/showthread.php?36012-West-Side-Story-(2021)

It's Spielberg, it's been his dream project for decades. It will be far more than "decent", lol.

Effin GLORIOUS

The film's amazing. Very pleasantly surprised to see many casual fans and non fans actually loving it too. Obviously, this is a completely different film, it's also broken down into chapters, so you can easily pause at one point and come back to it later but most people who don't plan to watch it in one full sitting end up watching it entirely. The 4 hours fly by. WB look like fools right now for butchering it in 2016. The 1.37 ratio works beautifully. I wasn't sure about it but yeah, it just works. Fabian Wagner's work is superb, Zack's eye remains one of the best out there. By the way, a little fun fact: the final two scenes were shot by Zack himself during additional photography. The first one he shot using his Red Monstro (which he used for Army of The Dead) and supposedly the Canon Dream Lens that has insane flares and shallow DOF (used on AOTD once again). He did a great job matching it to the 35mm film for the film itself.

Yeah, I assumed that was the case earlier, no idea why considering McQuarrie clearly prefers film. Logistically simpler considering they"re shooting all over the globe?

It might get an IMAX limited run, Zack has posted images of it being shown in IMAX where it of course looks massive and it's been teased. It's his choice, that's it. I would have chosen 1.66 or 1.85 for home video but he knows what he's doing.

Indeed ^^ Nice

Just so we're clear, the theatrical cut of Justice League in 2017 contains practically none of Zack's original footage. It's that simple. This, as if the trailer released yesterday wasn't clear enough, is a COMPLETELY different film. And Tyler, Zack lost his daughter just when he was working on his cut back in the day. Warner Bros was of course meddling in the process as they often do these days, and he couldn't stay on, he had no energy left for the fight as he put it, and then WB brought in hack/predator Joss Whedon for "minimal reshoots" is what they called it back then and ended up reshooting most of it and throwing away all that delicious footage. So this is Zack's original vision fully restored, no compromises, and it's unprecedented. AT&T & Warner Media wanted the film to happen, so they made it happen.

Yeah, it's what Zack wanted, it takes some getting used to. He posted some images of it being projected on a 1.43 IMAX screen and I imagine it's insane seen like that. I wish he had gone for 1.66 (back in March 2020, he said it would be 1.66, so he must have changed his mind) for the home video version, some folks won't understand why it's not filling their screens ^^ Millions of people are waiting for this and will gladly sit through a 4 hour film, the film will also have chapters like on a DVD or a Blu Ray, I guess to be able to watch a chunk of it and going back to it later if you need to. Looks incredible, cannot wait.

Crap, I thought I had edited MI7 out. Yeah, it seems it's all digital for some reason.

Film will be just fine. Killers of The Flower Moon is starting next month for a seven month shoot, David O.Russell's next one is shooting right now (probably on film). Paul Thomas Anderson shot his latest film a few months ago on 35mm as always. Patty Jenkins only shoots on film and she's got three huge films lined up: Rogue Squadron, Wonder Woman 3 and Cleopatra. I'm guessing/hoping that Indy 5 (directed by James Mangold) will be film too. No Time To Die is releasing (probably pushed back to Fall 2021), A Quiet Place Part 2 as well (film), Shyamalan's Old (he actually paid the extra himself to go back to film on this one), Death On The Nile, Last Night in Soho, Mission Impossible 7, The French Dispatch, West Side Story and so on. There are also obviously other films shooting that we don't know of, then all the directors currently shooting on film are going to continue to shoot on film.

Miguel WON !

@Uli Meyer Others were mentioning the plasticity (?) so to speak. Though as much as I love Fincher's digital work, I do miss the Seven days with that grit. About Fincher's preference for darker material, Benjamin Button is a very beautiful and touching film. And yes, there's a coldness to many of his films, he's very cerebral and that's just the way he is, and that's okay.

Awesome to hear, can't wait for it Jarin. Those false positives, how do you make sure of those? Jurassic World Dominion shut down close to the end because of supposed false positives but I'm curious how you find out. Some tests are a bit shifty sometimes.

Absolutely Stuart. A little info on Erik's process on the film: "The original cinematographer for “Citizen Kane,” Gregg Toland, “is incredibly influential,” said Messerschmidt. “Obviously we looked at ‘Citizen Kane’ and looked at his work.” “Mank” pays homage to his signature techniques – “deep focus, relatively low camera angles, limited focal length,” said Messerschmidt. “We limited ourselves to just a few lenses.” At the same time, he said, the filming needed to serve the story rather than draw attention to itself. “We wanted people to get really sucked into the time period, to really feel like they were there and not get distracted too much by the photography but to feel like they were watching a movie of the period and help them connect to the story in that way.” Borrowing from Toland’s now famous shots, which reveal whole worlds in the background, was key. “‘Citizen Kane’ was shot at very deep F-stops for deep focus. We aimed to do the same for most of the film. I shot in anywhere between an 8 and an 11 the entire movie, for the most part.” But Welles’ classic aside, Messerschmidt added, “David and I felt black and white just looks better that way anyway. That’s referential of early black and white still photography – Ansel Adams…we wanted the film to have that feel for sure.” To achieve the look with modern cameras was not as simple as some might expect. “We did lots of testing,” he added, trying out lenses, color grading techniques and “figuring out what the right recipe was for that.” Messerschmidt ended up shooting on a Red 8K Helium monochrome sensor camera, which the company put together just for “Mank.” “We did test color cameras – we considered it as an option in the very beginning. We shot a series of tests. It took all of 30 seconds, I think, for us to decide, ‘No, we wanted to shoot black and white for black and white. It just looks so much better for us and what we were going for.” The range of looks in black and white film is more vast than many realize, Messerschmidt pointed out, noting that even film noir classics weren’t necessarily definitive. Messerschmidt added that a busy production schedule in Africa forced him to launch into “Mank” with less prep time than he would have liked, but he still managed to put together a look book for the team to go over that contained everything from fine art work to street photography – “just inspirational images – it wasn’t anything specific.” Fincher’s feedback on the looks was crucial. “He’s so reflexive when you ask him questions,” Messerschmidt said. “You get an immediate answer. Immediately he’s like ‘This works. I don’t want to do this.’ ” When he arrived in L.A., Messerschmidt’s first stop was Burt’s office to look over his plans for the sets. “A lot of the decisions cinematographers are confronted with are kind of practical considerations – what we have to accomplish, where physics limits us. Where we can put the camera, where we can put lighting equipment.” Already in synch and working on a unified vision, he said, “Mank” was off to the races. “We didn’t really storyboard much – but I think that’s because of the way we work and communicate. We’re not doing these elaborate action sequences. It’s for the most part pretty straightforward.” "I think that what we ended up with was a little bit of a mix of style and technique and that was not by accident, it was by intent. Part of it is the recollection of what black-and-white films are and what they think they should be. To some degree, filmmakers fall into that trap as well, categorizing what style to embrace. It’s a little bit like trying to figure out what style of color photography to embrace when you’re making a color film. But unfortunately, because of the way we view black-and-white films as these things of historical record, we automatically assume that oh, okay, they’re making a black-and-white film, so either it’s a noir film, or it’s a 1930s glamour film, or it’s a Jean-Luc Godard black-and-white handheld film. In reality, with all of those movies, their technique was developed through an artistic process, and other movies around there that influenced it—we all make movies based on the influences we look at. In the specific case of Mank, we made a strong effort to know that we’re making a film in black-and-white of a specific era, and to try to make choices that were based on the story and scene that we were shooting in the moment, with the context of the greater film. The reason I’m articulating it this way is because I don’t think of Mank as a noir film, for example, or a ’30s glamour film, although it probably has more in common with that than it does with noir. There are elements of noir when we thought it appropriate to go there and lean into those visuals. The hope is that people get sucked into it and believe that yes, this movie tumbled out of a film vault at MGM and people feel it. But of course there are lighting techniques in it that are relatively modern, and there are some that are classical from the period. My hope is never that people would ever be fooled that they’re seeing a movie that was made in 1935, but that they feel immersed enough in the experience to forget that they’re watching a movie in 2020." Sorry for the huge brick, more here: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/curating-reality-cinematographer-erik-messerschmidt-and-mank Fincher's films looking plasticky I've never heard before though?

I certainly didn't expect that amount of criticism. Fincher is one of the only directors actually doing great work with digital, he surely has a style and feel to his films that not everyone is down with I guess. Zodiac is incredible. Love Mank but it's REALLY not a film for everyone. It's very dense, a lot of inside baseball stuff that one has to know about, otherwise they might be lost. You can appreciate it on a surface level but there's a whole political slant to it, many references, a lot of context that might discourage some people. But it's great, got me to research some of it to fully understand the piece and it's definitely going to be a film one has to watch multiple times. It is however NOT a film about Citizen Kane's making, but rather as the following article says: "That’s a lot of background just to understand a movie like Mank. But it also suggests something important: Mank is not really a movie about who really wrote Citizen Kane. Nobody suggests that Mankiewicz doesn’t deserve his writing credit, not even Welles. And since Mank skips right over the actual production of Citizen Kane, it’s not super interested in the film itself. Rather, Mank is a movie about a man who left a career in journalism and the theater to write for Hollywood, and found it to be almost stupidly easy. He develops drinking and gambling habits, and he makes friends in high places who love his keen wit. But then he falls out of their good graces and starts to feel uncomfortable with Hollywood hypocrisy, including his own. He catapults his own life into ruin, and he knows it. So he makes good the only way he knows how: by refusing to be deterred from writing a movie about the man, his former friend, whom he believes harbors a pathos more pathetic than his own." https://www.vox.com/culture/21618200/mank-citizen-kane-netflix-kael-auteur-welles-hearst Messerschmidt's work is superb, crazy to think this is his first feature, and as always with Fincher, it's going to be very exacting and precise. Granted, it would have looked better actually shot on film but it did feel to me, whether visually, sonically (simulating a mono sound) like a film from the 30s. There's compression (and perhaps it'll be more obvious on the inevitable Criterion disc) but I would have liked more grain there. A cool touch was the grain increasing as it transitioned from scene to scene. There are several really arresting scenes visually where it's especially moody.

Yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ! Congrats and I hope you win this ?

Budget per season is 100 million (I guess perhaps higher now)

If you want to see the best super 16 you'll ever see, watch One Tree Hill. Not only a glorious show, but it's insane how great it looks, really sharp, tight grain, impressive.

First season was excellent, but this takes it a step further. Don't forget the directors involved, though Jon is the showrunner. Baz Idoine really came into his own after shooting 2nd unit for Fraser for so long. Matthew Jensen (Wonder Woman) also putting in some excellent work. There's also an amazing moment in the first episode that screams IMAX but it's best not to spoil it for those who haven't watched it yet. Wish it was shot on film but I feel the Alexa LF + Ultra Vista combo works beautifully here and although it doesn't look that far removed from Rogue One, I prefer the look here. It's insane to see the production values you get on shows like this, or See (Apple TV, a must see), etc.

About The Crown, I do believe it but I always cringe at period stuff especially shot digitally.

Bit of a useless bump perhaps, a bit of a bummer to see this devolve into technical territory but I've just started watching this and I'm impressed by how good the F55 looks. It's always looked very videoey for me, except maybe with Vinyl, but that was heavily treated in post to make it "look" like film so to speak.

Damien Chazelle an Linus Sandgren shot a good chunk of First Man on 2 perf too. On The Road is 2 perf, The Place Beyond The Pines and I Know This Much Is True (with some 3 perf for VFX) are 2 perf. Such a great format.