Many ads and feature films these days use a process described by industry insiders as "speed ramping" in which onscreen characters and events are shown to suddenly speed up and slow down. It is a "look" which for filmmakers and critics of my generation (over 35) is associated with experimental and avant-garde film, particularly the types of films made with Bolex and Arriflex 16mm cameras which enable real-time shutter speed manipulation while the camera is running. When you film someone at 24 frames per second, and then slow the frame rate down to 12 frames per second while the camera is running, two things happen. 1)The person appears to speed up (fewer frames to cover the same action means that at a constant frame playback rate of 24 fps the action appears faster); and 2) unless the aperture of the camera is altered to keep the exposure consistent with the frame rate, the film gets overexposed, as more light is allowed to land on the slowed down film.
Now computer based non-linear editing and post-production tools are used to manipulate the speed of the images, as well as the other spin-off effects associated with multiple speed coverage of shots. Computers can mimic many of the attributes of traditional film, including the familiar scratching-of-the-emulsion, various dust and light leak effects, when the material has in fact been shot on digital video. I've lost count of students who ask me how to make their miniDV sourced video material look as if it had been filmed on 35mm panavision, with 1:185 aspect ratio.
Here's a Sample
These now commonplace digital techniques are used to connote the "look and feel" of film and have often been developed to help blur the distinction between video and film material, or computer generated film material such as 3D computer graphics. The aim is to create a naturalistic sense that material has been photographed in the most analogue and traditional ways possible. There can almost be said to be a fetishism of the attributes of traditional film, with the details of the passage of film through a gate, sprockets, film grain speckles, flickering image quality and all the other attributes which have lent film its status as the domain of "true professionals". The fetishism of film is to some extent the fetishism of motion picture-making as a profession. 'If only I could make my material look like that of the professionals, then I too might have a chance at mainstream success...' What is seldom questioned however are the assumptions and values which lie behind the mainstream industry-- its use of budgets, its use of labour, and the crippling distribution system which not even the biggest mavericks of the (Hollywood) century have been able to crack, Coppolla, Lucas, Speilberg --none of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment