Owen A. Davies

On 6/7/2024 at 8:24 AM, David Mullen ASC said:

You can expose whatever you want to 3383 (16mm) but it was designed to create a projection contrast positive from a negative or dupe negative that has an orange color mask.

So if you exposed a positive 3383 print image onto it, you'd get a high-contrast negative image with no orange color mask. You could print that again to 3383 to reverse it back to a positive image but then it would be very high in contrast, probably with some off colors.

Film copying is always a negative to positive to negative, etc. process unless there is reversal film & processing involved.

You also have to factor in that contact printing is usually emulsion-side to emulsion-side. 

I am aware that often in the 35mm photographic printing process, when the negative in question was too thin to yield a normal contrast print, the operator would use special contrast filters in the printing process as a substitute for what would have essentially been done by having the film pushed. Some people have even told me that certain photographers preferred this method over pushing the film, as whilst the high contrast printing method would not recover the shadow details from a thinner negative, it would in fact yield the desired contrast ratio for a print without the exaggeration in grain, color shift, and loss of resolution found in push processing. 

Do you know of a similar "high contrast printing" method which could be applied to printing motion picture negatives to 2/3383? I think printing something onto 3383 and then printing it an extra two times for an increase of its visual effect is a bit to costly and tedious to peak my interest. 

On 6/1/2024 at 3:40 PM, Gautam Valluri said:

The first thing you have to understand is that photochemical timing works in the subtractive colour space (CMYK) and digital colour grading takes place in additive colour space (RGB et al). In a contact printer, you are basically playing with how much light you're letting through your image negative and onto the positive at a first level and various colour filtrations in a second level.

When I made my first contact prints on the Matipo, we used to make an exposure/ filter band (which is basically a 35mm shaped carboard strip) by punching holes of various diameters (for controlling exposure) and then manually pasting colour filters on to the holes. It was also kind of freakishly counter-intuitive as the print film sees the colours as "opposites". So to take out Cyan from your image, you need to paste a cyan filter on your filter band. You make the filter band in order of various sequences in your image negative and then you make a tiny "notch" on the perf-side of your neg (crazy I know) to trigger the next filter in the band to enter the contact printer.

But of course these Matipos were 1950s tech and labs now have much more advanced ways to do the colour timing. There's some material and manuals on various kinds of contact printers on the filmlabs website:

https://www.filmlabs.org/technical-section/film-printing/

Ultimately, you have to prepare yourself to doing at least 3-4 passes in colour timing to get everything right. To save time and costs, we at L'Abominable do a "bande courte" where we take about 120 frames of each sequence from our final negative (or frames that closely resemble the shots) and put together into a smaller cut negative and colour time it. For my 10-minutes films, I usually ended up with a "bande courte" roll of about 2 minutes that I would contact print several times with various changes to get to the final filter combination, which I will then use on my final edited negative. I'm sure MONO NO AWARE have their own method of going about this. One must adapt to their lab in this case.

Good luck, enjoy the process and share your results with us!

When contact printing onto 3383, does the film that you're printing with HAVE to be a negative, or could I print a positive--or even another print--onto 3383?

On 5/30/2024 at 5:01 AM, Gautam Valluri said:

This test was done in my lab. We get up to a lot of experimentation here.

The look your are seeking will probably need a classical style of lighting with hard tungsten sources.

I would try daylight filming 200T + 85 filter (rated maybe at 50ASA), pushing it a couple of stops and then contact printing it onto 2383 and scanning the positive image. You could do this even with your 2-perf camera as you will only be scanning the 2383 positive. My hypothesis is that the generational loss from contact printing onto the much finer grained 2383 will perhaps reduce the lattitude of the 200T neg and give you that "photochemical dyes" colour palette.

I think that the info provided in this thread has really yielded me a lot of clarity regarding what exactly it is it is I am after and how exactly I can go about getting it. And I also think that you get the image I have in mind best. A lot of reading I have done this week has led me to conclude that the photochemical look I am after is best achieved photochemically. It is going to be my goal going forward to learn as much as I can and get as much hands-on experience as possible with contact printing, color timing, and dye transfers. I have spent the weekend watching a good number of scans put out by MONO NO AWARE of fully timed color work prints uploaded to their channel and have compiled a brief compilation of some of their work that I think best brushes up with the photochemical look I have been after. Take a quick browse at the footage I have compiled if you have any interest. I think they're pretty close to what I am looking for. 

https://vimeo.com/showcase/11194075

My idea, for now, is to shoot something on VISION3 with my Baltars in 2-perf 35mm, underexpose it by a stop and a half, overdevelop it by two stops, and then have a fully timed color work print contact printed onto Kodak 3383 and scan the resulting reel. I would love to see the resulting image from doing the opposite of a blow-up and having 2-perf 35mm printed onto what is essentially a Super 16 image area. I don't know your level of experience regarding color timing and contact printing, but it is something I intend to seriously pursue going forward. Because at the time of writing this, I am not all too sure what specific aspects of the print film are manipulated by the timing process. Is it just the color of the print, or is it the color, hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, and density? Is there a way that I can do a manual grade myself whilst color timing, or is my resulting image entirely dependent on the skill and creative tendencies of the person who is manually operating the printer themselves? Do I even want to have my footage color timed when printing onto 3383, or would it be better to just have my negative printed with neutral to balanced colors and then color grade my scan from there in DaVinci? What even is 2383/3383's latitude? The point I am making is that I am currently entering a whole new world with this printing thing and I have got a lot to learn for certain. I am hoping that a potential connection with MONO NO AWARE or some other lab that does printing, timing, and dyeing this summer could change that for me a little bit. 

56 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

The older color negative stocks were softer and grainier for their speed than modern stocks, and had less dynamic range. And the print stocks of the day didn't help in that regard.

To some degree, pushing something like 200T one-stop (maybe without underexposing it) would help get closer to the look if combined with softer lenses.  But the problem with replicating 1950's film stocks is that you have no accurate references -- these negatives have either faded a lot, particularly the yellow dye layer (blues), or you're seeing something made from a YCM separation that preserved the color but often at the expense of more contrast and grain. Recent digital restorations have gotten closer, sometimes by combining the cyan and magenta layers from a scan of the original negative with the yellow layer (blue) coming from one of the YCMs.

But many blu-rays are transfers using older interpositives, etc.

At some point, it's more about creating the feeling of these old stocks rather than a technical recreation of them.

Thank you for the input David. I was hoping you’d respond. I don’t know if you skimmed over the section I wrote on the 2383 film, but do you put any stock in that idea, or do you believe much of what can be seen in that short clip is due to the tungsten studio lighting? I don’t know how much knowledge you have regarding 2383’s latitude and application as camera film. 

22 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Watch The Love Witch by our forum member David Mullen. 

Shot on modern negative, but has a very old school look. 

Personally, I feel the look you're after (and many others like you) is mostly; art direction, lensing, filters and lighting. Where it's true, modern stock doesn't have the same color representation or contrast as the older stocks, nobody is going to watch your film on film anyway. Any digital grade would be able to tweak the colors to look a certain way. You can build a look in Resolve very easily and simply apply it once you've achieved the look in camera. 

Remember, all the films you're referencing had lots of light. So much more light than you could ever imagine, it's not even funny. Daylight scenes outdoors with 5 arc lights pointing directly at the cast. Bet if you lit that way even on digital, it would look very similarly to the films your referencing. 

Yep, I've seen Love Witch, and I'm well aware of David Mullen's contributions on this sub. It's certainly a great piece and was able to achieve what many here are constantly trying to emulate. His work and knowledge on this subject is not lost on me.

But it doesn't require a budget, a lighting setup, and a hefty production design to meet the standard either. the screenshot below belongs to Webster Colcord, but he provided me the RAW footage where I gave it a simple color grade out of a strong blue tungsten balance to what you see below. It's 2-perf, shot with the original Baltars, and on VISION2 200T 5217. 

I think a lot of it is to due to both the strong direct sunlight and the lens choices. I've got a higher quality compilation of the footage stored somewhere on my laptop, but it is probably my favorite footage of anything I've ever graded in DaVinci, and it isn't cause of the color. I especially love the way that white building complex and the hills behind it in the mist were rendered. 

What I'm trying to say is that there's a visual quality to the way film can render lights, shadows, image, and detail that I have found in all my experience in Resolve just cannot be replicated through a digital medium (as I'm sure you already know). Even if what I'm looking for cannot be achieved without a great amount of care into the lighting and production design, I'm sure there is a way to get a few steps closer through the photochemical process alone. 

And yes, I hate Ektachrome. Cause I'm sure the topic of reversal film will come up at some point in this discussion lol. 

I shoot with expired film quite a lot. As a matter of fact, I would say that it's my go to. My favorite stock I've ever shot with is hands down Kodak EXR 5245 50D. I have lately realized, however, that there are a few realities about shooting on expired that I need to come to terms with quickly. It’s unreliable, it’s in short supply, it’s going extinct, and no professional production wants their investment shot on expired film. I need to move on, but frankly, I have always had a visual distaste for VISION3. 

I want to further pursue something I've only ever experimented with but never fully committed to in the past: emulating the photochemical characteristics of older Eastman fine grain film stocks by experimenting with exposure, density, and processing using modern Kodak film. For reference, I most often shoot on 2-Perf Techniscope with the original line of Basuch & Lomb Baltar lenses dated at the 1940s. The two Eastmancolor stocks I am most interested in trying to emulate are ECN 5248 25T (1952-1959) and ECN 5250 50T (1959-1962).

About a year ago I did a short experiment on 35mm with Baltar lenses where I shot a few short reels of footage on VISION3 500T using ND filters in direct sunlight outside and had them exposed and processed in different ways. I then had them scanned in 12-bit HDR and brought them into DaVinci to level out all the footage and see how my end products differed. The four types of footage I got were underexposed one stop and developed at box speed, underexposed two stops and developed at box speed, exposed at box speed and underdeveloped one stop, and exposed at box speed and underdeveloped two stops. After leveling out all my footage in Resolve, I was extremely disappointed in the results. Once normalized with HDR tools in DaVinci, all the underdeveloped footage looked nearly identical to a standard exposure and development. And the underexposed footage just had crushed blacks with very little discernable differences other than that. I considered it a failed endeavor and steered clear of these kinds of experiments again after that. 

Top visual inspirations:

5248:

• Rear Window (1954)
• The Ten Commandments (1956) 
• Vertigo (1958)
• Ben-Hur (1959)
• Rio Bravo (1959)

5250:

• Spartacus (1960)
• The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• West Side Story (1961)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
• It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) 

Assuming that the 4k and 1080p blu-rays of the previous film were scanned from the negatives themselves and not the print, I will take it that what I've seen is a quality representation of the stocks in question. 

My eyes often roll when people talk about footage looking "vintage" "old" or "film-like". Mostly because this could refer to over a dozen different visual aspects in one's footage, and what invokes the feeling of "filmlike" to one person may differ from another. For the sake of this experiment let’s ignore aspects such as lens choice, format size, granularity, lighting contrast, production design, and (for the most part) color scheme. Let’s instead talk about the photochemical qualities of the negative itself. I mostly associate the Eastmancolor look from the mid 50s to the early 60s with neutral to muted highlights, rich and deep blacks, with the density and dynamic range that was available with those stocks at the time. 

I'm young and an amateur in this field, so I don't understand film on a more in-depth level like so many others hear. But firstly, I'm curious to know what the distinction between film density and dynamic range is, cause I can't quite make heads or tails of it. I am hoping someone with lots of (or any) experience with celluloid, the photochemical process, and the visual evolution of film over the decades can chime and and possibly steer my ventures in the right direction. 

THE 2383 QUESTION:

Small update. During my writing of this post a friend of mine found an interesting video and vimeo and shared it with me. He suggested it as a possibility for me to shoot with 2383 in camera with lots of sunlight and that if developed using ECN-2 and given a simple color correction, the end result may be something close to what I am after. It is difficult for me to discern whether what I like so much about this clip is due to the 2383 stock or if it is just the hard tungsten lighting. I don’t currently have the time or funds to properly run a test myself but I’m putting some consideration into shooting some footage with 2383 in camera rated at 6 ASA in the cloudless sunlight and having it cross-processed using ECN-2. I can get a good 12-bit HDR scan and see if what I’m left with retains the photochemical qualities I have in mind. This clip does remind me very much of the 5250 stock—more so than most other emulations of vintage film do. But as I said, it could just be the hard tungsten lighting. I'm not certain. 

People have told me these lenses were produced in just about every major lens mount between the 30s and 50s, but I have honestly never seen any Bausch & Lomb Baltars or Cooke Speed Panchro Series One lenses in an Arriflex Standard mount. Do these even exist? And if so, how rare would they be to come across? 

• (1x) Kodak Vision3 50D 7203 [SOLD]
• (1x) Kodak Vision3 250D 7207 [SOLD]

Hello. I am transitioning towards 35mm and will be selling off a good deal of my excess Kodak 16mm film stock. 

I keep all of my film ziplock sealed and stored carefully in my freezer, away from heat, light, and moisture. Whilst I cannot speak to the condition the film was stored in prior to acquiring it, I can assure you it was kept with extreme care whilst in my possession. All of the film is single-perf other than the 100ft spool of EXR 50D.

All shipping and handling costs are to be covered on the end of the buyer. All sales are final, no returns are accepted. Pictures of the canisters are in the link below. Payment is accepted via PayPal, Venmo, or Cashapp. 

https://imgur.com/a/Tc2zEyN

400ft canisters: $120 per canister 

• (6x) Kodak EXR 50D 7245
• (3x) Kodak EXR 100T 7248
• (3x) Kodak Vision 250D 7246
• (1x) Kodak Vision2 500T 7218

100ft spools: $50 per spool

• (10x) Kodak Vision2 50D 7201
• (1x) Kodak EXR 50D 7245 DOUBLE PERF
• (1x) Kodak Vision3 50D 7203
• (1x) Kodak Vision3 250D 7207

You can either comment on this post or PM me directly if you have any questions, or are interested in buying the entirety of the film altogether. 

13 hours ago, Dom Jaeger said:

Some of the dates in that article, as well as on Cooke’s website, are not correct. After a lot of research I dated the first 18mm Cooke Speed Panchro to 1954, a few years after Angenieux released their 18.5mm in 1951. 

What about the original Bausch & Lomb Baltar 25mm T/2.5? I had thought that that lens was floating around in the early 1930s

In what ways do the Angenieux 18.5mm or the 18mm Cooke S2 differ from each other visually?

On 8/23/2023 at 5:31 PM, Dom Jaeger said:

Up until the 30s, the widest focal length generally available for 35mm movies was 32mm. The more common focal lengths were 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm. In the early 30s Zeiss broke that barrier with a 27mm Tessar, then in the mid 30s a number of companies released 24 and 25mm cinema lenses, the most popular being the Cooke 24mm Speed Panchro. So when Toland filmed Citizen Kane in 1940 it was a relatively new thing to have such a wide angle in movies. Even though its influence was phenomenal, for a number of years after Citizen Kane most films still stuck to longer lenses, only using something as wide as a 24mm for occasional establishing shots. 

In 1951 Angenieux released an 18.5mm which ushered in a period of more wide angle use, followed soon after by the 18mm Speed Panchro released in 1954. Around this time there was also the very wide bug-eye lens made for Cinerama which was the widest angle of view ever seen in movies at that time. The Series III 18mm Speed Panchro released in the early 60s was an improvement on the earlier version, using an aspheric element and finally providing filmmakers with a wide angle lens that had virtually no compromises compared to longer focal lengths.

In the late 60s, the French firm Kinoptik released their 9.8mm Tegea, expanding the view of cinema cameras even further, a lens famously used by Kubrick in films like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.

See this post for more details about the history of wide angle lenses in cinema:

 

To my knowledge (and I may very well be wrong) there was both a 25mm Bausch and Lomb Baltar as well as an 18mm Taylor Hobson Cooke Speed Panchro that existed and was being used in the 1930s. 

FOR SALE: ~ Arriflex 16M Filmmaking Bundle: ~ Price: $799 ~Payment accepted via PayPal, Venmo, or Cashapp ~ Location: Winchester, MA 01890 ~Insurance, customs, and shipping costs are all to be handled on the buyers end ~All sales are final This bundle includes a fully functional and tested Arriflex 16M motion picture camera for shooting 16mm as well as an accompanying carrying case and a number of other shooting accessories. Cosmetic condition is good, though there is one snag. As pictured in the imigur link, there is a mark on one of the two shutter mirrors on the camera, meaning the image in the viewfinder will be partially obscured. This has no effect on the actual captured image however. Message me if interested. Thank you. Items Included: ~Arriflex 16M Camera Body ~ One 500ft magazine ~ Arriflex Motor ~ Carrying Case ~Offical Arriflex Handle with Camera Activation switch ~ 3x Camera Lens Mount Caps ~Lens Hood. A link which provides images of the listing is provided below.

https://imgur.com/a/kzqGjzU

FOR SALE: ~ Kowa Prominar Anamorphic with Amber 16H and Purple 8Z Projection Lenses ~ PRICE: $1,799 ~ PAYMENT METHOD: Paypal, Venmo, or Cashapp ~ STRETCH: 2x ~ FOCUS: Double Focus ~ CONDITION: Very subtle marks on one of the Kowa 8Z lenses. Has zero bearing on image quality. Lenses are all in all in fantastic condition. ~ LOCATION: Winchester, MA 01890. USA ~ SHIPPING: Will ship internationally, though all shipping costs, insurance, and customs payments are all responsibilities of the buyer ~ CLAMPS: Comes with Redstan clamp ~ All sales are final This is an accumulation of glass and accessories which a friend of mine used to shoot anamorphic over the years which I’m now gonna be selling off. Included are two Kowa Prominar 2x anamorphic projection lenses (one 16H with amber flares and one 8Z lens with the much rarer purple flares), both in fantastic cosmetic and practical condition with no scratches, fungus, or separation. In terms of visual quality from anamorphic projection lenses, this is the best you can get. All sharp as can be. Dually included is one set of Redstan clamps for mounting diopters or etc to the projector. Images are provided via the imigur link below. 

https://imgur.com/a/evWuFVZ

This is not referring to aspects such as white balance or decade produced. I’m referring to aspects more along the lines of sharpness, dynamic range, color, color separation, highlights, halation, shadow details, and resolution. Are there any explicit differences between stocks caused by the differences in film speed?

I have access to a set of Mitchell Standard Mount lenses which I am currently attempting to use with a 2-Perf Techniscope 35mm camera (I do not own this camera yet, nor have I chosen one at this time). The three most common mounts for 2-Perf Techniscopes cameras on the market are Arriflex Standard Mitchell BNC, and Mitchell BNCR. I have spoken to a camera technician who has made it clear to me that it is impossible to simply "adapt” any Mitchell Standard lens to fit an Arriflex BNC, or BNCR mount without a complete rehousing of the entire lens itself. 

So my question is this: which of these two options would cheaper/more feasible for achieving what I want? Converting a Mitchell Standard mount 4-Perf 35mm camera to 2-Perf Techniscope (if that’s even possible)? Or conversely rehousing this set of Mitchell Standard mount lenses in order to be able to fit either an Arriflex Standard, Mitchell BNC, or Mitchell BNCR mount? Thank you, and I look forward to hearing your insight as always. 

So I'm aware that the K-3 takes 3/8" screw sizes, but the hole you would use on the K-3 to screw the tripod into is very shallow, and often leaves to the camera sticking upward with half of the screw left still available. This leads to the camera feeling pretty insecure and wobbly. Has anyone had a particular amount of success pairing a specific tripod (cinema tripod obviously) with the K-3?

Does anyone know if the T stops were ever measured for the Krasnogorsk's primary lens, the Zenit Meteor 17-69mm. For the sake of metering, I'd love to know how much actual light the lens lets through. I haven't seen any info on this posted anywhere. Thanks. 

Let’s say that I’m shooting a project on 2-perf Techniscope and I’m limited to the use of three prime lenses. If I wanted a wide, medium, and a closeup, which three focal lengths would you recommend? I’m leaning toward 25mm for my wide angle seeing as it’s the wisest lens I can use out of my selection. If I were to use a 25mm for my wide, which focal lengths would you recommend for my medium and my closeup? The focal lengths at my disposal are 25mm, 30mm, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm, 100mm and 150mm.

What are the key differences that can be found in overexposing a faster film stock vs simply shooting a slower film stock. Let’s say I have a roll of 200T and a roll of 50D. I shoot the 50D at box speed, but with the 200T I overexpose by two stops. To state the obvious, of course I will have a brighter, more blown out, and overexposed image for the 200T. But if I were to bring the footage into DaVinci and correct the scan to resemble a standard exposure, what kind of visual difference between the 50D and 200T can I expect?

So I'm well aware that the general rule of thumb is to overexpose expired film about one stop per decade it's been expired. But in my experience shooting film the last two years, that rule is only about half of the truth. While how the film was stored also has a big say, generally I've found that the stock's ASA has a bit more influence on how the film should be exposed as opposed to just the age. Kodak EXR's stock is roughly 25-30 years expired now, but if anyone in these forums has worked with the stock in the past five years, I'd love to hear how you went about exposing each speed of film and the results you got. Do you think EXR 5293 200T could hold up with 2 stops of overexposure? Do you think EXR 5245 50D could hold up with 1 stop of overexposure? Let me know what results you guys have gotten and maybe some video links. Thanks.

I realize that many experienced cinematographers may view this is a somewhat redundant or pointless question (though in my view this forum is best for getting great answers to these kinds of questions), but what would you say the visual, technical, financial, and practical differences would be between shooting something anamorphic on 16mm as opposed to on Techniscope. The difference in frame size would be (17.976mm x 7.49mm) vs (22mm x 9.166mm), and I'm also wondering how much or how little such a change in negative area would affect the image. Thanks. 

I rewatched both Pulp Fiction (1994) and The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) recently and picked up on something that's got me really stumped. Both films were shot using Kodak EXR film, with Pulp Fiction being on 5245 (EXR 50D) and LOTR being on 5293 (EXR 200T). Additionally, Pulp Fiction was shot 3-Perf anamorphic whereas LOTR was 4-Perf and cropped to 2.39 widescreen (24.89mm x 10.41mm). This in turn should've significantly reduced the image quality for LOTR seeing how it was also on a faster speed film. Yet Pulp Fiction, being both shot with Super 35 anamorphic and a very slow film speed, looks as if it was released 20 years prior to LOTR. You can see this in the overall color and detail present in the film stock. It just looks rougher and more harsh, as if it were from the early 80s. Why is this? I've included a dropbox link below with some visual comparisons. 

https://www.dropbox.com/t/RuRflbIZyvFlrdfW

If anyone has any visual examples of the product of pushing film a stop or two in the development process I'd love to see it. Can't find a lot of examples online regarding motion pictures and I would like to see the effect it has on the image. From what I hear it is more contrast, more grain, more saturation, darker darks, and lighter lights. I would prefer clips or screenshots of film exposed at box speed and then pushed in development on top of that, but beggars can't be choosers. I'm wondering if the pushed film look could achieve an image that resembles what a lot of the stock in 60s and 70s films looked like. Rich blacks and, rough detail, and a nice contrast. I'm also wondering if pushing film in development has the potential to make a 35mm film stock resemble more of what 16mm would look like with its roughness and character. Let me know, thanks.