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The focal length you use also depends on how much of the plate you’ll be cropping into. With car scenes, usually there is a 1:1 ratio because the edges of the screen are mostly blocked by the car body, plus in the days of 35mm 1.85, your plate was probably shot and projected 4-perf 35mm full aperture but your camera’s 1.85 frame lines were slightly cropping in on this. So you’d use the same focal length for the plate and the stage shot. But if you need to crop into the projected image more, you should shoot the plate on a slightly wider focal length.
The thing with dynamic range is that you don’t always need a lot of it… until you do! You may be rolling on a second take when suddenly outside the window the sun comes out and hits a white car parked across the street.
It’s just the nature of additive versus subtractive color — if you want to make a primary color deeper and more saturated in a film print, it needs more dye so it gets denser, letting less light through. You want to make a primary color more more saturated with a digital projector you let more of the pure red, green, or blue light through. You can go even further with RGB lasers as a light source.
He looks lit by a softened HMI coming from the right through another window, but whether the window in the middle of the frame needed ND gel is hard to tell – it looks sort of misty/foggy and overcast out there so maybe no ND gel would be needed. In a location like this, you might have hard acrylic ND gel panels made for each window that can be quickly slapped up — or removed as it gets darker outside.
“Overlight the cafe and bring it down in post” is not how that works, what you are asking is if they lit the interior brightly enough to get closer to the exterior level so there was less of an exposure difference. At that point, they’d stop down the lens and/or use ND filters to expose the shot for the brightness they wanted, they wouldn’t need to bring it down in post. The truth is that if the background is very bright, you’d want to expose to retain some detail — leaving it very bright for post to then darken it back to normal risks having clipping (though this movie was shot in film, which has more latitude for overexposure.)
It’s an age-old question, how to retain details in a bright background through a window. Do you do it by bringing up the interior? Do you do it by adding ND gel to the windows? (You’d still need to add some interior light because if the room is mainly lit by window light and you darken all of them with ND gel, then the interior gets darker too, it’s just that because it’s darkened with ND gel, it takes less light level to bring up the interior, i.e. small LEDs rather than bigger HMIs.) Do you wait for a less bright time of day or weather condition rather than use ND gels?
Now if the actor is very close to the windows and thus receiving a lot of light from them, then the difference in brightness from exterior to interior might not be as bad you think, some white cards reflecting some of the sunlight back at the actor or minimal LED lighting might be enough to add some detail to the shadows.
If you shoot raw, then color temperature is usually just metadata. If you record log, then probably it would be best to shoot at whatever the color temperature of your primary light sources are for a somewhat neutral color image.
I would consider the tonal scale value of whatever colors you use for sets and costumes — it’s one reason why old b&w movies used to dress people in browns and grays, it was just easier to judge contrast by eye that way.
Over the century there has been all sorts of lighting styles for b&w, from the classic noir-ish era of the 1940s that most people think of, to the softer tones of 1930s films, and the more natural look of 1960s movies from Europe. I don’t think there is a right or wrong approach, it’s just that you want to think in terms of grayscale because sometimes a low-contrast image looks nice in color but too washed-out in b&w unless there are some tones in the subject that add contrast back in (for example, think of a foggy day with a man in a dark coat, which can look nice.) It can also be harder to direct the eye to the actors and separate them from the background which is why you want to think of tones and how that face is framed against the background. You don’t have to resort to backlighting, simply putting a dark edge of the subject against a highlight or vice-versa might be enough.
If you’re going for a cool look by pulling the 85 filter on tungsten film in daylight, then you aren’t really correcting back to neutral, you may be just correcting part of the blue out.
In terms of using daylight film in tungsten or mixed sources, that’s been done many times. Both “Emma” (1996 version) and “Backdraft” used 250D daylight film for interiors to make candleflames and fire look more orange, mixed with some daylight-balanced light. Robert Richardson used 250D daylight stock for a tungsten-lit night exterior in “Born on the 4th of July” for a warm look. In fact, 3-strip Technicolor was daylight-balanced from 1935 to 1952, and sometimes tungsten lamps were used for orange lighting effects (like firelight, etc.). But in all of these cases, the image was not corrected back from orange to neutral.
I have heard of scenes shot on daylight film in daylight corrected from neutral to cool though — for example, the WW2 flashbacks in the first “X-Men” movie was shot on 50D with a bleach-bypass process and then timed cool.
So unless a warm tone is desired by not correcting in post, I can’t imagine the reason for shooting 250D all under tungsten but correcting it back to neutral unless it was simply a stock emergency on location and no tungsten stock was available.
“a movie that goes through a D.I. that is intended for both digital projection and a DCP” — I meant a movie intended for both digital projection (DCP) and a film-out for print projection.
“Dunkirk” is a separate issue, it’s not a re-release of an old movie — in this case, as with most Nolan films (except “Tenet” for some reason, I think he had to use a D.I. to make the release date) he doesn’t go through a D.I. because he wants to be able to contact print the 15-perf 65mm IMAX footage and show that print in IMAX film theaters. This meant that the 5-perf 65mm footage in “Dunkirk” was optically blown-up to 15-perf 65mm so it could be cut into the IMAX negative. So if you see the 15-perf 70mm print of “Dunkirk” you are seeing it as Nolan intended. Yes, film prints have more contrast to them, giving them rich blacks but less shadow detail, which you can see happening in the film prints of “Oppenheimer”. To talk about color depth in this case is a bit misleading — a film print uses subtractive color (YCM) and a digital projector uses additive color (RGB) so a digital projector can increase saturation without decreasing brightness. But in terms of the color depth, a movie that goes through a D.I. that is intended for both digital projection and a DCP uses a Kodak Vision print emulation LUT in the D.I. session in order to not create colors outside the range that can be shown in a film-out that is printed on Vision print stock.
Now as for old digitally-restored movies, yes, you can wonder what the point of a film-out would be other than the fact that unless the digital theater has laser projection, a film print has better blacks and contrast. But laser projection is taking over so that soon won’t be an issue. If one was a purist, I could see making an effort to see film prints made from film masters, but to insist on seeing a film print of a film-out from a digital file seems a bit pointless. In general I prefer digital projection of film restorations done digitally; however I do like seeing prints of film masters, like new 70mm prints of old 65mm movies that haven’t been digitally restored, or archival 35mm Technicolor dye transfer prints, which I feel have their own unique look — the print itself is part of the experience, especially if the movie was shot in 3-strip Technicolor.
Color-wise, you have to remember that color with a digital projector is additive, not subtractive as with a film print.
The 4K restoration likely did a scan of the negative (often a 6K scan on an Arriscanner immediately downsampled to 4K). A film scan would naturally be in Cineon log gamma, or it would be in ACES, 16-bit linear. Either way, all resolution and dynamic range available would be captured.
Raw refers to an image from a Bayer-filtered camera sensor before conversion to RGB. A film scanner just makes separate passes for RGB.
20 years ago, a new print of an old color movie probably came from a dupe negative made from a color interpositive (or b&w separations) made from the negative.
When I moved to Los Angeles at the age of 22, I used to go to the libraries at UCLA, USC, AFI, and AMPAS and spend hours reading cinematography books and magazines. I read every issue of American Cinematographer going back to 1920, I read every issue of International Photographer (later ICG Magazine) and every issue of the SMPTE Journal going back to the 1950s, I read three decades of British Cinematographer magazine, a decade of Super8 Filmmaker, years of Film & Video Magazine, Lighting Dimensions, and many short-lived magazines. And I read books, lots of books. I even read PhD dissertations on shelves if they were related to cinematography. Of course I don’t remember now a lot of what I read…
I can’t imagine a Civil War history fan only reading a few books on the topic, nor a baseball history fan who has avoided most of the player biographies out there, and yet I run into cinematography students who just want to read one or two books on filmmaking, a subject that they are dedicating their life to. Absorb information wherever you can find it; what matters will stick to you.
I love filmmaking books — I have two tall bookshelves full of them! It’s just knowledge that you can choose to use or not use, but I don’t see any reason to avoid reading books. One of my favorites was written in the early 1970s about British cinematography practices and probably most of the information is outdated and yet it’s a window on a period of filmmaking that I love.
