Slumdog Millionaire
Monday, February 23, 2009 at 11:10PM Slumdog Millionaire winning the Oscar for Cinematography last night is meaningful to me in two nerdy ways.
First, Slumdog was partly shot with a digital cinema camera—the SI 2K Mini from Silicon Imaging. No, not just the game show footage, also some of the wild chases through the slums of Mumbai.
But mostly what I love about Slumdog winning is the clips played all throughout the Academy Awards ceremonies. Of course the awards show highlights only the most emotionally resonant moments of the film (there are so many to choose from, it is a magnificent movie). And those emotional moments, almost without exception, featured key shots captured at 12 frames per second (or less) and double-printed for a staccato, dreamy feel.
That's right, in order to enhance the emotion, director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle showed less. They showed less and communicated more.
This is a scary time for people who love the way movies look. Technicians are proposing all kinds of ways to shore up what they see as film's deficiencies; 8K cameras, 48 and even 60 fps acquisition, 270 degree shutters, and 120Hz motion smoothing in televisions. People who should know better are being led to believe that more resolution, more funny glasses, and more frames-per-second will make movies better.
Any TV you buy today will probably have that infernal motion smoothing turned on by default, so that you can enjoy your favorite films re-imaged as if they were PBS specials from 1983. Nobody seems to remember that audiences wouldn't accept video frame rates in dramatic narrative entertainment. We didn't want our cinema to look like soap operas before 24p HD cameras, and we don't now.
I've avoided blogging about this issue mostly because I just have so damn much to say about it that I don't know where to start. But Slumdog gave me a simple way in by showing that, in the hands of a gifted filmmaker, half as many frames-per-second can mean double the emotional impact.
Not will, just can. You must have the story to tell, of course. And if you do, guess what the audience doesn't care about? "Judder," flicker, and wagon-wheels going backward. But strangely, they do seem to care that their movies look like movies, not plays.
So television engineers and home theater nerds with nothing better to do, please stop trying to find ways to make movies more like reality. As you can see from this year's cinematography Oscar winner, film is at its best when it is unmistakeably unreal.
Reader Comments (58)
Well you guys are right, they don't say anything along the lines of "we held shutter at 172 the whole film."
That said, I see the picture, and I know the F900. At +12dB you don't need long shutter to expose a face to 20 to 30IRE.
Its really an educated guess. Basically I can't see the need for a long shutter to achieve exposure.
The F900 at +12dB is about equivalent to ISO 1600 IIRC. For 50 IRE exposure of 18% gray at T2.8 you need a mere 6 footcandles. They were aiming for half that... 25-30IRE. You only need 3fc.
You could have lit the thing with a cell phone and gotten 3fc! OK that's a bit of hyperbole... its still not a lot of light. A MiniFlo, a teensy 9" at that, can throw that at 5 feet!
Of course I find noise levels objectionable at +12dB, so using the F900 that way was a bold choice from my perspective.
Me? I would have just brought in a bit more light.
In fact, I can think of several ways to light the interior of a car to around 45fc, especially at a feature budget, at which point the F900 could shoot it without touching the gain control at all (180 shutter at f2.8, rating the F900 at 200).
"Less is more. 24fps is the magic rate between seamless motion and stillness."
When he said 'magic rate', I don't think he meant 'magical' but more of a 'sweet spot'. I guess it could've been 25, 27, or even 30fps (all with 180 deg shutter).
When I think of cinema, or 24fps format, it is more like a hybrid between watching a photo slideshow and fluid motion. Fluid motion is reality that I see with my eyes, photo is a captured moment with camera, and the two invokes different types of perception of reality and even different emotions.
24fps provides a good balance between the two, and with it we watch motion and slice of motion at the same time. I think that gives us the 'magic' of cinema that many of us don't want to depart from.
Expectations and familiarity may be part of that attachment, but that alone couldn't have sustained it for 100 years when all other aspect of cinema accepted 'more'. I think people still want to see both photograph and reality, and not just reality.
whoa this thread seems to getting as long as the cat that's pushing the ball of wool.
I think, just like with film which had its pioneers trying to push the medium to where it is currently sitting.
People before have also experimented with higher frm rates, hand held and projection scale.
Doug Trumbull with his showscan technology shooting at higher rates like 72frms with 65mm film etc, etc.
Lazlo Kovacs with his handheld effort and many others brought about a change that made cinema where it stands today.
There will always be people to come that will push digital too.
Unfortunately digital still does not have the same latitude as film and is unforgiving with all the luts and 10 bit info in fast pans and so forth, but that will evolve and so too the cameras.
Slum dog reminds me of Lazlo shooting from a top of a car for easy rider, which was never done before then. So too with 12frms a sec fast and incognito methodology was called for by the story to be unobtrusive from its local surroundings. That boldness and innovation is what has been lauded today and not mere technology and where it fits.
The brain still dictate the body much as the story still holds for cinema.
I'm going to have to actually agree with Stu here . . . I believe a very relevant theory that can be applied to this debate is one formulated by Marshall Mcluhen on "hot" vs. "cold" mediums, and it directly ties into his premise about the "medium being the message".
He described TV as a "cold" medium, while cinema (at 24fps), was a "hot" medium. These descriptors were formulated on the basis that the mind engages in ellipses, meaning where there are "gaps" in information, the human mind, in order to create the illusion of reality, must "fill-in" those gaps, and that process in-turn creates an "active state" in areas of the brain that would not be stimulated otherwise. The perception of "reality" formed by the persistence of vision provided by a 60fps frame-rate does not create "gaps" in perception, and therefore creates a passive state in the human mind . . . rather than active cognition, you have passive absortion. Information is still being transmitted and interpreted, but it is not being processed in the same manner.
Returning to the idea of "the medium is the message", a "hot" medium, that requires the active participation of the human mind to create the persistence of vision needed for reality-like perception, is more akin to the "dream state" that many film theorists have likened film to (Lacan, Metz, etc.). Television on the other hand, being a "cold" medium due to it's persistence of vision frame-rate that induces a passively absorbent perception mode in the human mind, does not induce the "dream-state". So when we view television, we percieve it like reality, not like visions from our imagination which is the entire point of watching fictional stories. Viewing fictional content at frame-rates that causes passive absorption of information by the brain, rather than at slower frame-rates that induce active participation of the mind to complete the persistence of vision process, robs us of the experience of creating the illusion of reality in our minds, and instead forces onto us the perception of reality. Rather than a heighted sense of reality, we would end up getting reality itself . . . when I hear most people talk about faster frame-rates, it's typically because they are expecting that creating imagery closer to the persistence of vision threshold will induce a heighted sense of reality because the imagery is closer to how we perceive reality, but I believe for fictional content, we would actually be working in a counter-intuitive manner, because art is not the act of replicating reality, but is the act of creating a higher form of reality. The creative process that defines the meaning we extract from art requires the abstraction and distillation of reality into its true essence not unedited documentation. Shooting at 24fps is but one method of distilling the essence of reality . . . it's fast enough to create the illusion of motion, but omits enough information to induce an active creative process in the mind that we can perceive in a dream-like fashion rather than simply assimilating the chaotic noise of reality.
VERY sorry . . . I had to remove some double-posts . . . blogger kept giving me an error message, and the popped up a bunch of the same post at once.
One of the most elegant descriptions of the difference between 60i and 24P (in agreement with what Jason said above) is that "TV (60i) is present-tense, while film (24P) is past tense."
The vast majority of novels are written in third-person omnipresent past tense.
I think it's just the way most of us like to absorb our stories. We see/hear/read them in past tense, so they come into our heads already in the language of a memory.
Hello Stu,
My first comment here on this great blog which I read most of the time. (Am a newbie to this great world of Films!!! Just born with a Canon HF10 and pressed the record button).
I was wondering if you would be kind enough to let me know the timecode in the Slumdog Movie where your comments below apply.
"....And those emotional moments, almost without exception, featured key shots captured at 12 frames per second (or less) and double-printed for a staccato, dreamy feel."
Just wanted to see, feel and taste the difference in frame rates. Thankx if you could point me to the timcode.
PS 1: I searched entire India for the Rebel Guide but to no avail. Come on Stu, send some to India.
PS 2: Eugenia/Alex, please continue your discussion, it is awesome to read and so helpful and educational.
PS 3: Stu, you are becoming my Hero.
Well I must say, I too will be sick to my stomach if things progress along these lines. The 160hz TVs look horrible. Even reality doesn't look that "real". There is still some kind of motion blur going on in real life if you take the time to notice. Take a pen between two fingers and flip it quickly. It does not look sharp like 60 frames per second...it actually blurs!