Private Ryan -a filter effect?

[Adam Thompson]

When the sissy soldier character "Opum" (spelling?) finally gets the balls to shoot the Nazi they earlier spared, near the end, the highlights smear upward on his shot. I was wondering if anyone knows if this was a filter or was it a post effect. I've seen a plug-in for FCP that will do it but is it mimicing a real filter?

[Kevin Zanit]

Do a search, been discussed a ton before (as have many of the other techniques used in SPR). It is from throwing the camera's movement out of phase with the shutter so that the camera is pulling down a new frame while the shutter is still partially open. The camera pulls the film down vertically, and thus the streaks are vertical as well.

[David Mullen ASC]

It's due to a deliberately mistimed shutter in the camera. Normally, the shutter is supposed to close over the gate before the movement advances the film to the next frame, to then be exposed when the shutter moves again to uncover the gate. But if the shutter is mistimed, the movement starts to advance to the next frame while the shutter is still moving to cover the gate, so the last percentage of the exposure on the frame is streaked. Since only the brightest objects in the frame have time to register in this brief moment, what you see are bright highlights streaking upwards vertically.

 

There are supposedly some post filters that simulate this effect.

[Jamey Johnson]

The new Magic Bullet Looks has a "shutter streak" preset that is pretty close to the effect.

[Brad Grimmett]

Anyone know if Kaminski compensated for the slight exposure difference when shooting the mistimed shutter stuff? Is there even enough difference to bother compensating, or does it depend on just how far out of sync the shutter is?

[Matt Kelly]

oh yeah I bet someone has done that math.. always worth testing yourself tho. You can take the shutter completely out of a Mitchell.... kind of extreme, but nifty.