Switching stock (or not) – Kodak 5219 500T

[johandijkstra]

Dear Sir Deakins and team,

I will soon be shooting my first short film on celluloid. I recall reading somewhere in the past that you preferred shooting on Kodak 5219 500T, even when the project included daylight exteriors. Is this correct?

I currently have a package on hold consisting of 500T 5219 400ft, 250D 5207, and 50D 5203. Would it be an option, from a consistency standpoint, to shoot everything on one stock?

We will be primarily shooting daylight exteriors, dusk, and two interior (daylight-lit) scenes.

We are shooting s35 4-perf.

Topic

[dmullenasc]

Roger has switched to slower stocks in day exteriors in the past, like the use of 100T 5248 outside in “No Country for Old Men”.

There are DPs who use 500T for everything — John Seale for example, or Emmanuel Lubezki in “Tree of Life”.

There are arguments both ways. Yes, using 500T for everything in theory is more consistent… but often grain is easier to see in scenes with large areas of midtones (a blue sky for example) and day scenes can have more midtones than night scenes. You can also argue that our eyes perceive daytime exteriors as sharper and more clear, with more depth of field, than we do in interiors and night scenes.

On the other hand, 250D is so similar to 500T in look (and is just slightly finer-grained) that it’s a toss-up whether you need to switch. But I think 50D does tend to stand out when mixed with 500T — it’s SO clean.  200T is somewhere in between as you can imagine.

Just from a stock management angle, I’d try and limit yourself to two stocks though. Unless you really want that 50D look for select scenes.

[johandijkstra]

Mr. Mullen, thank you so much!

Would you then choose to use only tungsten balanced rolls and either filter all of them with an 85B or not at all? Or would you mix daylight and tungsten rolls?

I’ve heard Deakins mention that he doesn’t use an 85B filter in daylight at all.

Or would you prefer using an 81EF pale amber filter to create a mixed light look?

[Roger Deakins]

I prefer tungsten balanced stock as I feel it has less contrast and saturation. I also like to manage the shift in color as the sun sets on a tungsten stock rather than a daylight one. I probably got used to this way of working before daylight balanced stock were introduced and I am comfortable with it.

I see no definitive reason to shoot with one or with multiple stocks. That’s purely a choice based on the project and locations involved. As for the use of a correction filter, I would shoot on tungsten stock with no 85 or 85B when I wanted the shadows to feel cooler, such as on Shawshank. Even when the overall image was ‘corrected’ in the lab it felt to me the shadows stayed colder.

[dmullenasc]

It’s just my opinion, but the early daylight-balanced Kodak EXR stocks (50D and 250D) were definitely higher in contrast than the tungsten-balanced ones, but by the time of Vision-3, Kodak made them all pretty similar (almost too similar).  The main change between Vision-2 and Vision-3 was the introduction of “micro grains” (very slow in speed) which increased detail by 1-stop in the extreme overexposure areas.

I use daylight stocks sometimes but whether I do a show that is, let’s say, 250D and 500T versus 200T and 500T, depends on a number of factors. As Roger says, you can pull the 85 filter on tungsten stocks for cooler shadows or a blue dusk effect, or let the scene itself be timed on the cool side (i.e. only partially correct for the missing 85 filter.)

So I tend to base the decision on whether it’s a movie that will lean cool or lean warm — if I’m doing a wintery movie in the woods, I’m more likely to stick to just tungsten stocks, if I’m doing a summer movie in the desert, I’m more likely to get the daylight stocks partly to avoid the 85 filter.

I worked 2nd Unit on Season 1 of “Westworld” matching footage from the first half of the shoot before they shutdown, and one DP used 50D whenever he could and the other DP shot everything on 500T — I’m not sure viewers saw a big difference…

[johandijkstra]

Thank you so much!
In some way, I like the idea of sticking to one stock, but I’m unsure about the number of filters I’ll need and the risks that come with it when shooting in full sun during the afternoon. For a twilight scene, 500T is the only choice, right? Is it common to shoot twilight without an 85b filter to gain more stops?

[Author]

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