Jeremy Buttell

Thanks for the information David, that's great to know. I'm not aiming to duplicate an 80s look completely, but I hope a deeper understanding will help me carry over the qualities I subconsciously like, but haven't been able to quantify yet. I can imagine the frustration of cinematographers back then working with film stock, as beautiful they were, with their substantial color characteristics. I doubt many were content with where the technology was then and if they had the choice, many would have probably opted for more precise lenses and photo receptors. Being alive today, I guess its nice I have the luxury to look back on those older technologies and observe them for their beautiful quirks and contribution to cinema. I have a lot of respect for the amount of depth a skill-full DP brings to a film. Unfortunately I get the feeling that skill isn't always appreciated with a lot of contemporary work, instead relying on heavy post color manipulation which sometimes looks stunning, but often times just looks inappropriate and over manipulated.

I've had this bookmarked for about 6 months now, mainly because of David Mullen's highly detailed post regarding specific film stocks used on various films... hopefully this thread still has some life in it ;P Watching older films (particularly 70's and 80's films), I'm always fascinated by the look of the film, the way skin reads, the softness of glare, contamination of the blacks all resulting from a combination of the things mentioned in this thread. I recall reading that (maybe it was this thread, I can't remember) that film stocks were designed to make skin tones read in an ideal way - the flesh tones in films of this era sometimes seem a bit overly (technically) orange to me. With digital post being ubiquitous now, it seems its fair game to sort of do this by keying skin tones and selectively pushing them around, but obviously back in the 80s this wasn't practical and seemed to rely on a great DP who knows how to light their subjects and at the very most, some full frame color timing. I'm sure its quite doable to emulate the look with a careful attention to detail in post, there are some variables I'd love to have more scientific data on. For lack of a better description, the color response curves of the particular film stocks David Mullen mentioned - does such data exist? Were these films exposed to McBeth charts (or something else?) so one can fairly accurately create a color profile that matches these stocks? In the grand scheme of things none of this is extremely important as I believe artistic emulation can fill the gap in most cases, but it would be a great starting point if some of this data exists somewhere.