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Solving the 16mm Ratio Dilemna on a Budget-Thoughts?


Peter Gilabert

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With the wide-spread adoption of the Lasergraphics scanners, I can finally use my Ultra 16 modified Scoopic to it's fullest potential. Previous scans with Spirits couldn't see between the sprockets.

 

My reaction to the newly found room on the negative? Meh.

 

I actually find it much more useful to have a little latitude reframing up and down from the 4:3 portion to 16:9 than to confine myself to the space between sprocket holes.

 

Super 16 makes sense, I actually can tell a difference in grain between a cropped regular 16 and Super 16. Ultra 16? that's somewhere in between.

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I've noticed 4:3 seems to be making a huge comeback, especially in music videos where it seems to have suddenly become the cool thing.

I think people are slowly starting to be more open minded about aspect ratios because of the wide range of devices that content is delivered on now.

 

Freya

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I enjoyed your thesis film, nice ending.

So was there a particular reason you shot in B&W and color? Was that part of the assignment?

Thanks!

 

I got a box of 20 rolls of Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X 16mm reversal stock when I was a kid at a yard sale. I only had a super 8 camera at the time, so I waited until I started taking college classes and had access to 16mm cameras, before burning through that stock.

 

I would have vastly preferred to shoot everything on color, but when the film gods give you B&W for free, you shoot it.

 

I made two, half-hour movies with my box of stock. A comedy called "The ID Project Revisited" in 1998 and "The Perfect Moment" in 2001.

 

The Perfect Moment was suppose to be a 1 week shoot. We had everything ready to roll, but our lead actor bailed on us the 2nd day of production and I got the flu. So we basically shot a few thousand feet that was worthless. We re-started the production that summer with a new actor and then did another shoot that winter to add a few scenes we thought were necessary.

 

During the re-shoots, my box of stock dwindled and all of a sudden, all of the "premium" Tri-X stock was gone. It was the newest and best looking stock I had. Scrambling to figure out a solution, someone at school offered me a box of 5 400t rolls of 500T color stock for $190 bux! I snatched it up and slowly started shooting scenes with the color stock. I shot the winter re-shoots entirely on color, so quite a bit of the movie you see is actually color stock.

 

Originally I had made the entire thing B&W in post. My thesis film delivery was 100% B&W. However, a new telecine that I did post school, allowed me to re-think the edit. So I actually re-cut the entire movie and in doing so, made that color sequence at the head of the movie out of nothing. It had no audio, it was something we shot "just in case" and it was never included in the original cut. I pulled it out of mothballs, resurrected it from the grave and decided to leave it color. I then book-ended the movie with color as well. The point being, the life of that character before and after he meets the girl is "colorful" but her story is B&W. There are moments of color sprinkled throughout the movie, designed specifically to show the melding between their two stories.

 

In the long run, it was all about money. It cost me $900 to make "The ID Project Revisited" and $1600 to make "The Perfect Moment". That includes stock, processing and transfer. I also made another movie called "Elvis and Me" during the same timeframe 100% on color, that cost around $2k all-in, but was edited on film. So 3, 30 minute movies for around $5k? Not bad... I wish things were that cheap today!

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I've noticed 4:3 seems to be making a huge comeback, especially in music videos where it seems to have suddenly become the cool thing.

I think people are slowly starting to be more open minded about aspect ratios because of the wide range of devices that content is delivered on now.

 

Freya

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Instead of getting too hung up on aspect ratio:

 

What I'm really trying to do, since I have one digital and two 16mm cameras ready, is to buckle down, finish pre-production and actually SET a Shooting start Date that I stick with and make this film!

There's no way I can let silly little things like MONEY and TIME get in my way

Seriously though I'll make it one way or another and I hope it comes out decent!

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