I am entering into knuckled-down pre-production on a new short that we intend to shoot in March. The name of it is “Three Ninety Five”, and as some Californians might wonder, there is a connection to the 395 highway which runs through the Eastern Sierras.
This means that an increasing amount of my mental bandwidth is occupied by questions – ranging from practical (where is there a good concentration of vintage/thrift stores where we can go on a prop/costume shopping expedition?), to the far more abstract (why are we even calling it a film when there is no stage of the process where photochemical film will be involved?)
This project arose out of a ground rule of mine, and a practical reality I was up against. The ground rule is to make sure that there’s something important to do in each project that I’ve never done before, and which terrifies me. And the practical reality is that, with my education being in theater, I have in my filmmaking work heavily relied on the technical knowledge of my collaborators, to the extent of working with the same cinematographer on my last five projects. While it is one of my pillars of makin’ stuff wisdom that you should forge alliances with people who are good at the things you are bad at, I could not count on such an arrangement going on indefinitely, especially at my budget level. So “Three Ninety Five” is, from concept to production scenario on up, designed to force me to act as my own cinematographer for the first time, and do it for a project that is going to DEPEND on visual artistry to succeed.
This means immersing myself deeper than I ever have in questions of camera, lens choice, lighting, image resolution, coloring LUTs, and so much more. It means paying way, way more attention to what gear other filmmakers are using and what motivates their choices. I can’t say I’ll be an pro when this is done but from sheer, adrenalized cramming I am definitely going to learn a thing or eight.
As always, my choices are significantly restricted by my budget, which is larger than my first few shorts but nowhere near what we spent on R&R or Anya (both of which were expensive by my standards but absurdly cheap by most others’.) But it’s cheaper than ever to get not just big-screen quality, but more than you could possibly need. What do I mean by that, exactly?
There’s a lot of talk in the business now about 4K. There was a rush to adopt it as a universal standard but, at least from where I’m standing, I think a lot of people have successfully questioned the necessity of that. This terrific article from IndieWire breaks down the cameras, lens packages, and image resolutions of the features playing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I go into such an article presuming, with good reason, that the directors and cinematographers quoted know way, way, way more about this than I do. And, while the chief takeaway from the article is that the Arri Alexa Mini is cornering the indie feature market, another takeaway is that many of these filmmakers are opting not to even originate their footage in 4K.
There are way more reasons for that than I know, but I can tell you already that the choice undoubtedly saves money and speeds up workflow (speed shortens the road between *spending* money and, hopefully, making money.) 4K footage is chunky stuff and, if you can’t afford to work at a professional editing bay, it might choke off your home computer. And to what end? Several of my shorts were originated in 4K; but we’ve rarely, if ever to my knowledge, screened at that full resolution at any festival. The best screening of R&R we’ve had to date was a 2K ProRes file, and it looked scrumptious when projected. The majority of the festival screenings I’ve participated in projected the 1080p file I keep in my cloud storage; and it’s doubtful the system they were projecting on could have handled more.
I don’t say this to dismiss higher-end quality. I went to The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to watch Lawrence of Arabia (probably still my favorite film of all time) projected in a new 70mm print and I BATHED in that business. I was one of the few people who went to see Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk projected in the format director Ang Lee nicknamed “The Whole Shebang” – 120 frames-per-second, 4K footage in 3D. His The Life of Pi remains one of the most bewitching uses of 3D since Avatar made it hip. And Billy Lynn in that format was a staggering, visceral experience, but that’s a double-edged sword because it raises the question we rarely ask but which underpins everything – what we go to the movies to experience?
This recent article from Popular Mechanics pinged my radar, describing the history of the mostly-forgotten 1980’s sci-fi feature Brainstorm, directed by the pioneering, legendary, not-enough-superlatives Douglas Trumbull. The film concerned characters entering what we would now call Virtual Reality; and to depict the switch, Trumbull experimented with using different film stocks and frame rates. After intensive research and study into the effect of visual stimulus on human brains and nervous systems, he created a process he called Showscan, consisting of 70mm film captured at 60fps, compared with the cinematic standard of 35mm film at 24fps.
“I’ve ridden on roller coasters in real life, and I rode the roller coaster in Showscan,” he (screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin) says. “The memory locked in by the viewing of Showscan was stronger than the memory of actually going on a roller coaster. It registers in a very deep, impactful way.”
This parallels my experience watching Billy Lynn – during a flashback to a fatal military encounter, someone getting shot didn’t feel like a spectacular Hollywood effect, it felt like I had witnessed a murder. It was less glossy, less artful, but registered deep in my brain somewhere outside the usual space that movies land in. That makes for a powerful tool, which means there’s an equally-powerful responsibility to ask – sure, we CAN do this, but why spring that on people who just want to sit in the dark and be taken away by a story for awhile?
How perfect is too perfect? And is imperfection necessary or just something we’re used to? As a measurement of the depths of my nerdhood, I’ve been tracking the progress of Project 4K77 – one of multiple fan efforts to create a projectable, UHD version of the “unaltered” original Star Wars based on a hodgepodge of sources; effectively undoing everything Lucasfilm has done in the creation of various Special Editions over the years. As a ride-or-die Han-shot-first-er, I respect the effort.
We now have a generation come of age for whom digital media and digital filmmaking tools have simply always been in the toolbox. And it’s fascinating to watch as, in going back into film history to do this project justice, the Project 4K77 team has had to re-learn and explain for their followers just how “messy” the entire analog filmmaking process was for the first century-ish of the art form.
They have catalogued the four different film stocks used to shoot the original film, researched the ad hoc solutions the Star Wars crew came up with day after day shooting in a hostile desert, tracked how the multiple generations of optical printing for effects would have altered the color and grain level from shot to shot. What we would now consider a distracting inconsistency was so unavoidable that no one at the time would think to demand better.
And – what was sort of an obvious fact then which was beneath consideration but which shows just how different filmmaking has become – they have outlined for observers how, due to the photochemical bath used to produce prints, there would be minute differences between every single film print of Star Wars ever made.
All of this taken together means that there is no end of the rainbow in the search for the “real” Star Wars. At some point, you just have to stop and agree that it’s as real as life allows. And that, just like how your Machu Picchu experience may vary depending on what month or time of day you visit Machu Picchu, there are some variables you will simply never be able to wrangle in making the experience of an artistic work universally repeatable and universally consistent from person to person.
As much as people may have roasted Lucas for claiming that the Special Edition represented things he always wanted to do but couldn’t with 1977 technology; for certain things, he was right. A microbudget indie film has better tools available now than he ever did for consistent coloring and grain, and anyone of professional seriousness uses them. It’s just become automatic.
And while we’re talking about grain, the current version of Project 4K77 has been split into two parts, one with as “clean” an image as could be produced using the latest in DNR (Digital Noise Reduction) tools, the other without said tools. And that’s because for some people, a movie without grain looks “wrong”, and Star Wars without grain looks especially wrong. But younger viewers raised on a diet of “cleaner” imagery don’t see a problem at all.
Film grain was an inevitable outcome of the process at the time. Doing without it was, for decades, not even really an option. So we owe it to ourselves to ask: does that sense of “texture” actually positively contribute to the experience of watching the film? Or is it, at this point, a nostalgic trigger programmed by however many thousands of movies we have watched in our lives? I know that I “like” the 24fps experience of watching a movie over the 30fps that was the TV/Video standard for a long time; as a crowdsourced audience standard it was a definite improvement over the 18fps that often came from silent film. But did the progress actually peak there? Was further experimentation just too expensive and exhausting? Or were the results, like that Whole Shebang, so intense to the senses that it took the experience past positive? What do we go to movies for?
Going further down the rabbit hole – say you like the sound of this Project 4K77 file, and you download it. Well, how are you going to watch it? Are you going to strike a 35mm print from it and run it on a vintage projector? Or are you going to watch it on a UHD digital television? Or, hell, your phone? Again, we arrive at the conclusion that there is no singular, virgin-pure Star Wars. The work is aging in a way unique to its medium. But go through a museum and ask yourself how many brushstrokes on a painting are the artist’s, and how many are a restorer’s, and you’ll see this is not a unique problem.
Well, we’ve traveled far on this, haven’t we? It’s going to sound foolhardy, but despite all of these considerations, I’ve made the choice to shoot “Three Ninety Five” in 4K. Whether it’s artistically “necessary” or not, I’ve found a cost-effective camera package rental I can do it with, and knowing that it’s increasingly common at the Hollywood level, I’d like to at least test whether I can manage the workflow from within my present resources. Call it gaining a professional credential.
Will it ever result in any viewer having an aesthetically “better” experience with the film? Honestly, I doubt it – there are so many elements: story, acting, direction, editing, lighting, music, which, if they aren’t up to snuff, resolution isn’t going to mean tiddlywinks.
But I wouldn’t have known to look at it that way last month. I might have let myself walk 100% into membership with the cult of 4K. Last year I acted in a feature film that was shooting at *8*K; so I’m sure not the only one hearing that siren song. I’ll let you know if they ever finish post-production.
I had plenty to dwell on already when it comes to theme, to plotting, to the eternal dance of how much information to provide the audience, how much to withhold. I could spend six professional lifetimes immersing myself in this stuff and still wouldn’t know a “best” way to cinematically render any idea I have. It will always be a combination of resources, conditions, and whatever planning I can manage. But the unifying thoughts that can help us choose from within those restrictions can only come by asking a few big, airy questions once in awhile.
Now – on to that thrift store shopping.