Aesthetics & Style

“Of course there are a number of postproduction filters that can emulate every film emulsion ever made. The Panasonic D5 machine has a little switch that processes in a number of the most popular flavors of film on the fly. So the way it seems to me is that you can get HD to look like film, but you can’t get film to look like HD.” - Scott Billups

Director, Geoffrey Wright, in an interview with the AFC said this about shooting on High-Definition: “HD can mimic film, but left alone it has its own beautiful aesthetic, which can be massaged almost infinitely in post-production.”[1]

There are two major schools of thought regarding shooting on digital – one is to oppose traditional film, and the other is to mimic it. Dogme 95 was a movement that wanted to oppose the French New Wave, and Hollywood and create a more democratized "authentic" filmmaking. Although they initially stated that all Dogme 95 type films were to be shot on 35mm film, the advent of miniDV and digital technology changed that idea - because the very ideology of such cheap digital filmmaking matches that of Dogme 95 - the first Dogme 95 film was shot on miniDV. The fact that they could shoot longer could possibly mean that they would receive less forced performances (more authentic).

Source: Willis, Holly. New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image. Wallflower Press, London: 2005.

The other school of thought, is to make HD look as much like film as possible, which is what seems to be occurring the majority of the time. As Scott Billups suggests, in his book which is in honor of making digital appear to be cinematic, this idea to make HD (or any digital for that matter) look like cinema is because otherwise it looks too much like television and "video" (say it with a condescending tone) which often has connotations of "unprofessional".

It takes a lot more work to make HD look cinematic – in other words, look like what we’re used to seeing, which is film.

Some of the RMIT graduates I interviewed, Christopher Grose and Julia Morris - though used to smaller budgets in the industry, still choose film over HD for movies which aren’t meant to be shot in a semi-documentary style. Julia, one example, said that film simply has a more romantic look, with far more colour than HD, and that the depth of field of HD is just unnatural. She brings up a couple of important things, one is the colour, film is capable of capturing up to 48 colours per colour that HD can muster[2] – this is one of the major reasons for the ‘cinema’ look many filmmakers talk about. The other point is depth of field. HD captures an unrealistic clarity of everything in view[3], that the human eye cannot produce and often tends to leave images seeming very cold. The shots below are from Collateral, 2004 (top) where outdoor shots were on HD - even in the dark, the houses in the back are in focus - and the second image is from As Good As it Gets, 1997 (bottom) which was shot on film. The depth of focus looks to be more natural; more like the human eye.

The new Superman Returns movie was shot on HD, and one problem they had was getting that cinematic depth of field – they had to go to huge, and expensive measures, to get the look they desired by employing many more lights than required on a usual film set so that they could manipulate the camera and have a shallow depth of field. Their efforts were so large that many things on set began to melt, and the actors wouldn’t stop sweating, because of the hot lights[4] – so to combat this, a makeshift cooling system was created – all this to have that cinematic depth of field. But as difficult as it was, this shows that HD can actually mimic film even in this regard.

On the other hand, a film like, “Wolf Creek”, made use of HD’s depth of field, by often having most things which were in frame, in focus. This worked because the outback, which was often in the background, was a large “character”[5] that added to the terror the film created, and such extreme depth of field was a reminder of the harshness and isolation present in the Australian outback.

“Wolf Creek” also makes use of the exposure latitude of HD, where unlike film, dark and light spots dip to black and white very early – this also works very well with the style of the film, since things often just seem to appear out of nowhere as they move from the invisible dark spots on screen, to the harshly bright, lit spots.

Above is a shot from Wolf Creek, lots of harsh blacks and bright whites on part of her top. Below illustrates the contrast ratio of film, where there is a larger latitude.

Sin City also seems to use this characteristic of HD, since the harsh blacks, and harsh whites are quite a characteristic of the graphic novel that the filmmaker was trying to reproduce.

[1] McKimmie, Jackie. “Geoffrey Wright on the power of HD”, AFC website, 2006, http://www.afc.gov.au/newsandevents/afcnews/converse/wri/newspage_285.aspx, viewed June 2006.

[2] Billips, Scott. Digital Moviemaking (2^nd edition). Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, CA, USA: 2003.

[3] Holben, Jay. “Hell on Wheels: Paul Cameron and Dion Beebe, ACS push hi-def video to its limits for Collateral, which chronicles a hit man’s nocturnal killing spree.” 2004.

[4] Story from Karen Liebau

[5] Kasch, Andrew. Wolf Creek, The Horror Channel. November 14, 2005. http://www.horrorchannel.com/index.php?name=Reviews&req=showcontent&id=644, viewed May 20, 2006.

DigiFilm