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Harris Savides and baking film


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Guest Stephen Murphy

I asked him about this a few years ago; he chuckled and said that he'd only ever done that on 2 projects; the closer video and the flash backs for "the game".

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  • 2 months later...

i heard this rumor as well and since i could not get anyone to confirm or deny it. i tried it myself with 35mm still cartridges, but then went a step further, here is my recipe.

 

baked-coffee retention process®

4-previously exposed 35mm color film cartridges

2-cups of Vanilla Nut Don Francisco Coffee

 

preheat the oven at 350.

put the film cartridges in the oven for 5min.

fill a mason jar with the coffee and completely soak the cartridges for 24hrs. (make sure you see the bubbles come out, that will that the coffee gets in there)

after 24hrs soak the cartridges in water for 48hrs to wash out the coffee, make sure you shake the jar from time to time.

after two days take the cartridges out and put them outside in the shade so they get some heat but no directly sunlight, shake them from time to time to get the water out.

take to your local lab and process. warning: they will hate you after this, but the results are worth it.

check the results at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eduardomayen/page8/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eduardomayen/page9/

i posted a total of 6 images they are the three last ones on page 8 and the first three on 9. enjoy.

Edited by Eduardo Mayen
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  • Premium Member
I heard this rumor as well and since i could not get anyone to confirm or deny it.

 

 

It's not a rumor. Here's an excerpt from the interview I posted in the original CML thread.

 

 

 

Anyway, back to your film. It had the marked appearance of a period piece.

 

JG: There's a variety of reasons for that. I was after a very painterly look and so with the stocks today feeling like they are in constant combat with video, they've done everything they can to make the stocks look better - the blackest blacks, the deepest colours etc. They are trying to differentiate stock from video - which is fine but what I learnt as a painter is that you never squeeze black paint out of the tube and brush it straight onto the canvas. You don't do that because that doesn't exist in real life, you always have to mix it with a brown or a blue because black absorbs light. It doesn't exist in real life unless you are sitting in a dark room with the door closed, that isn't a painting. So, in order to get that painterly look we had to break the back of the film. We did a lot of screwy things, we baked the film at 110 degrees for 15 minutes which broke down the film's ability to form the sharpest picture. It gave it almost a period look because the stock looks more like it used to look, it looks older.

 

Who's idea was that?

 

JG:That was Harris' [savides] idea from music video, it's a very iffy thing to do but we did loads of tests and we wound up with a look that I was very happy with, we'd beaten up the film so much that it has a painterly quality. It looks period but what you don't realise is that there are whole colour schemes that become dated. You don't think of colours as having a certain period value but when you eliminate blue from the palette you get a colour scheme that looks as period as when Gordon Willis and Vittorio Storara were doing it in the early 1970's. If you look at The Conformist that's clearly the strategy they use so all of a sudden it started to look like an early 70's movie.

 

 

Link to the rest of the Netribution interview with Director James Gray about his film "The Yards"

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