As one of the main experiments for this project I will be pairing different film stocks with different types of lighting to test how colours and skin tone change, as well as testing the general ambience and feel of different stocks and lighting.
In this blog I will start by laying out some general information and queries that I have about film stocks.
The most simple place to start when discussing film stocks is the film’s speed. A film’s speed refers to its sensitivity to light. The first time I ever heard somebody talk about a film’s speed I was confused by this meaning due to the fact that it was in relation to motion picture stock and I assumed film speed would have something to do with the rate at which it travelled through the camera. In the days of digital photography, when many of us are becoming interested in celluloid film through an interest in motion picture rather than still photography, this is an easy mistake to make and using the term film speed to refer to sensitivity can seem confusing as in a film the speed of the shutter will usually be dictated by other factors.
The term film speed comes from still photography where it is possible to expose a less sensitive film stock with the same level of light simply by opening the shutter for longer. If the level of light is not changed, a less sensitive film will take longer to expose and is therefore referred to as a slower film. A film that is more sensitive to light will take less time to expose under the same level of light and is therefore referred to as a faster film. Due to shutter speed having to be dictated by other factors in motion picture, it is not possible to change the speed without noticeable differences to the movement of the image, therefore in order to expose films at different speeds when using motion picture you usually have no option other than to change the lighting.
In the experiments that I wish to carry out I will be using still photography for budget reasons, however the experiment is intended to give me knowledge to help my understanding of motion picture and therefore I intend to keep the shutter at the same speed it would be at on a motion picture camera for each shot taken. I believe this speed would be a speed which would allow the shutter to open roughly 50 times in one second to allow two exposures on each frame of film that is travelling through a camera at 25 frames per second. Therefore the shutter speed I will use will be about one fiftieth of a second.
Film Speeds in more detail
50D, 64D and other similar speeds
One of the main types of stock which people use is stock with and ISO of 50 that has been designed for daylight use. This is due to it being one of the types of film available in the Kodak Vision 3 range (or the older Vision 2 range). This stock is available in Super 8, 16mm, 35 mm and even 65mm.
Side note: 65/70mm films (generally shot in 65mm to be developed onto 70mm) were most often used in the 1960s when films such as Ben-Hur (1959 almost the sixties), The Sound of Music (1965) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) among others were shot in this format. These films were often screened at big cinemas with curved wrap around screens. Recently there has been a slight resurgence of interest in the format due to Quentin Tarantino shooting The Hateful Eight on the format. Another film format that is technically 65mm is Imax, however the frame area of Imax is much larger due to it being a format which travels through the camera sideways. This means that Imax uses much more celluloid to shoot a specified length of time than other 65mm formats and is therefore much more expensive. Imax is too large to fit compactly onto a roll and therefore the cameras use specially designed magazines in which the film is carefully folded. No feature films have been shot entirely on Imax, but 50 minutes of Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film Dark Knight Rises was shot using the format.
Another stock of a similar speed that I have encountered is daylight film at 65 ISO made by Fuji. This was a type of stock that I managed to buy on the cheap from a secondary seller, when making a film called Maniaframe in my second year of university. I never used a single foot of it however, due to being advised of how difficult it would be to use such a slow stock by everyone I talked to about it. I instead bought a cheap roll of the much faster Fuji 500T from a seller on Ebay and used that as my second roll of colour negative. For this reason I still have an untouched 400 foot roll of 64D Fujifilm in my fridge. I hope that I will get the opportunity to use it before it goes out of date.
The theory that most of the people giving me advice at the time were working on is that, because of how slow the 64D was, it would require bright sunny clear skies in order to use and therefore is not practical to use in the Northeast of England where the weather is not as consistent as it is in California. Upon taking my light meter out with me a few times and taking readings out and about at 64D, I realised that I was managing to get useable levels of exposure in many places in overcast conditions, but upon telling people about this I was told that even if I get useable levels of exposure in these conditions the developed rushes would still look dull and not very nice. One of the things I will find out in this project is how correct these people were in this assumption.
A serious advantage of 50D, 64D and other slow films is that the slower a film’s speed, the less grain there will be and the higher clarity the image will have. This is probably the main reason that slower films are popular despite faster films being available. Another potential advantage may be being able to use less filters in extremely bright conditions and being able to have shallower depths of field in bright conditions as a result of lower F stops.
100D - 200T
Another popular Kodak stock is Vision 3 200T, which is also available in Super 8, 16mm, 35mm and 65mm. I shot a test roll of this stock in the summer of 2015 to test a Super 8 camera that I had been bought a few years before by my then girlfriend as a christmas present. I found this stock very easy to expose using 50 watt halogen work lamps indoors and I also tested it outdoors without filters just for the sake of it and got varying results (I wrote a blog about that last year).
Other stocks I have encountered are a Fuji 160T which I used when shooting Maniaframe. I found this a little bit more difficult to expose indoors than the 250D and 200T stocks I had used up until that point, but it was still very useable. I used the Fuji 160T in a scene shot in a forest and I did not have any problems exposing it in the shade of this environment. I also used it in the studio under the fresnel and flood lights. In this environment it was slightly less useable and I did find it slightly harder to get the specific lighting effect I wanted as a result, but I still managed to get the effect I wanted in a slightly different way.
A stock that was popular a few years ago, but is not sold anymore is Ektacrome 100D reversal film. This used to be available in Super 8 and 16mm. I am interested in reversal film and intend to talk more about it in future blogs.
250D
After 200 ISO the grain on film becomes more noticeable, but I didn’t notice it much when using 250D. I have used 250D without filters in dull November daylight in two Kodak awards shoots and had no trouble exposing it in either. I also did not notice much grain on the developed rushes except when it had been exposed or focused incorrectly. I have also used it on two indoor shoots. One indoor shoot using redheads, a blonde and a cool light, in which we used blue gels to cover the Tungsten lights. These blue gels appropriately changed the blonde to be the correct colour temperature for daylight film, but the effect on the redheads was too intense and this lead to there being a blue tint to some of the lighting when it was developed. This may have been due to corrections made during the telecine to other people’s work on the same roll however (people who had forgot to gel the lights). For the other indoor shoot in which I used 250D, I used a 50 watt halogen work lamp without gels or filters. I did not have any problem exposing in this circumstance. The rushes showed that the lighting had also shown as the correct colour, but once again this may have been due to corrections made during the telecine.
500T
500T is the fastest speed of motion picture film produced by Kodak. The grain is very noticeable on this stock. I have experience using a 16mm Fuji 500T stock, a Kodak 500T Vision 3 Super 8 stock and a 7 year old Kodak Vision 2 500T 16mm stock that, judging by the severely grainy underexposed rushes, seemed to have gotten much slower with age.
I used the Fuji stock in a variety of conditions. I used it on two shoots outdoors with an 85 filter, and on two shoots in indoor locations that had sunlight coming through windows. On one of these shoots we were shooting through a window with one character inside lit by a redhead and a household light bulb and the other outside lit with sunlight. For this shot I did not use the 85 filter, but the mixture of colour temperatures was okay. The person outside the window did not look too blue. It was a dull day and the camera was facing down away from the sky and, as I found out on my test roll of 200T Super 8, tungsten film seems to cope okay with this less intense kinds of sunlight. In the other indoor shoot I did on this stock, there was also a mixture of colour temperatures, due to us being in an environment with lots of sunlight coming in from the windows. Because of the speed of 500T, it was possible to shoot this scene without any additional lights being placed. Therefore the lights we used were the lights that were already in the corridor and the sunlight coming in through the windows. On most of the shots we used no filter, as the sunlight was not direct and as much light was being provided by the indoor lighting. This produce a fairly realistic colour across the rushes. On one shot the daylight seemed to be providing more light than the indoor lighting and we decided that we should use the 85 filter to be on the safe side. This provided good results as well.
The Kodak Vision 2 16mm roll was used under studio lights and also in daylight with a filter. All of these shots turned out very grainy especially the studio shoot. This is most likely due to the age of the film. I believe that the film had slowed with age and was therefore underexposed when shot as a 500T stock.
The Kodak Vision 3 Super 8 stock was used on one shoot only. The lighting on this shoot was mainly provided by two 10 watt work lights. These work lights were not producing enough light to expose properly and therefore I had no other choice but to underexpose. For this reason I had the film over processed by one stop. However, it had not been underexposed by this much and therefore came back very bright. The brightness was reduced digitally on the edit suite by lowering the gamma. The footage produced that day looks very grainy and bizarre.
If I ended up with an image like this one then, (where the grass is still green and the fence is still woody, but just in a different fashion to what it would be in reality and the sky is a dull rusty orange) I would consider it a successful photo. However…
...if my image ended up like this (where everything has become a trippy colour) I would consider it a failure. I want to achieve a subtle surreality, not an extreme surreality. For this reason I think a stock which promises a detachment from reality already, or a, “Retro-effect,” as they describe it, might not be the right stock because it may produce results that are too extreme. 