I Love the Look of Video

I LOVE the look of video, I love the aesthetic of the electronic image. I see chemical image of film and it just seems soft and dull and lifeless to me. I see the razor sharpness and the infinite flexibility of video, its density and dynamism and vibrancy and I think nothing but film is dead.

Now there’s a statement to draw the ire of the purists and the technologically insecure. Should I go further…?

The film look is bullshit; a product of marketing representation and the digestible distillation of an association with a particular mode of viewing. The ‘film look’ is a cultural rather than aesthetic understanding; one drawn from our legacy of personal cinematic experiences in the movie theatre from a projected image. Thus, when it comes to making ‘films’ in the digital age for ourselves we innately want our films to evoke those same nostalgic memory associations we have with celluloid. This we translate as the aesthetic of film, the ‘film look’, but in truth it’s more about cultural and personal association.

Certainly there is a ‘film look’, a set of visual characteristics derived from a medium made of celluloid and silver emulsion, but specifically seeking or choosing this ‘look’ because of a perception that it ‘looks better’ or is somehow visually superior is an argument very difficult to sustain on a technical or scientific level.

Film looks like Film, no doubt. The organic nature of its grain and distinct visual imperfections delivers a particular characteristic. But it would be a fundamental misnomer to then surmise that in the same vein Digital looks like Digital. Digital is not a medium in possession of innate characteristics as celluloid is. Digital is just Binary; representations, in Zeros and Ones, of visual information. Digital looks like whatever you want it to look like, so long as you know what youre doing and understand how to manipulate the Zeros and Ones.

So what really is the process of crafting the ‘film look’ in digital? It is an elusive thing. Strangely the ‘film look’ is often referred to as a specific technical element but that technical element is very difficult to qualify.

The simple truth is that any camera image source will, first and foremost, look like the quality of the camera lens. Shallow depth of field is often cited as key to the ‘film look’ but DOF is purely a product of lens and aperture exposure. Put a good fast lens with wide aperture on a digital camera and you can have every bit as much DOF control as a film camera. Defining the ‘film look’ by shallow DOF is technically bunk since DOF has nothing to do with recording medium.

The second element, much associated with the ‘film look’, is the cadence of its progressive movement; its visual rhythm. With digital and electronic video originally rooted in TV there was a long association with interlaced imagery. Interlaced images, by the nature of how they’re assembled (as 50 or 60 fields rather than 25 or 30 frames) creates a distinctly smoother moving image lacking the slight staccato feel of film flicker.

Stu Maschwitz, one of the founders of The Orphanage, developer of Magic Bullet and author of Pro Lost (one of the most information rich blogs on the net) wrote this about the relationship between Human beings, Flicker and Storytelling.

Video’s frame rate being as close to reality as we can discern jibes with our ingrained perception of how video is traditionally used: to document real-life events. The TV news, reality TV shows, and our own home movies have a documentary quality to them that subconsciously suggests to the viewer that they are seeing actual events. Even sitcoms and soap operas are less like movies than they are like simulations of being in a studio audience watching a live performance. Video clues us in that we are watching reality, and by showing us everything, it invites us to passively absorb it. : OVERVIEW Movies are anything but reality. Ironically, by showing the audience less (40% of the temporal information of NTSC video), they trigger a part of our brains that works to fill in the missing information. In this way film creates a more participatory experience and at the same time informs its audience that what they are viewing is an authored, narrative work. This is backed up by our historical associations as well we have learned to associate film’s flicker with storytelling and video’s unflinching detail with reality.

Since before history mankind has sat around campfires and told stories, and there are those who suggest that this association with narrative and the flickering image is so deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious that it in part explains our love for movies. Whether this is true or not, applying Magic Bullet to your video instantly transforms it from feeling like just another bit of DV camcorder footage to something more.


But following Stu’s argument, this association of the flickering image is a purely cultural one rather than one drawn on the basis of ‘quality’ which is so often cited with film. Similarly, and by contrast, the ‘undesirable’ smoothness of video is not a product of digital/electronic means itself but rather of the Electrical Power and Broadcasting infrastructure that traditionally supported it. US NTSC uses 60 fields per second for no other reason than US power grids use 60hz oscillations. Most of the rest of the world on PAL uses 50 fields because the power grids are at 50hz oscillations.

Again, digital images, of themselves, theoretically have no innate ‘look’, they are just data manipulated and its the manipulation that defines a ‘look’. As the old infrastructures, that have traditionally defined much of the aesthetic, dissipate the manipulation of digital data is left more to the filmmaker than the infrastructure of electricity and broadcasting. Hence we have the dramatic shift in recent years to Progressive Scan cameras, 24p, 25p and 30p shooting as well as the very ‘filmic’ technique of over and under cranking of frame rates.

From there the rest of what defines a ‘film look’ to the common observer is the colour and tone of the image; how the media is treated, processed and manipulated in post-production.

In the long history of celluloid production this processing of colour and tone was a photo chemical process; a manipulation of the visual information by means of chemistry. But in truth such processes where not particularly common with the tone of an image being largely pre-defined by type of film stock selected and the manipulations of exposure in-camera during shooting.

Whilst there is indeed a long history of such manipulations in cinema, the process of colour grading (or colour timing) as a common, widespread and accepted part of post production is a relatively recent development - a shift that has seen the practice move from the fringes of experimentation and special effects to simple mainstream commonality.

Arguably one of the preeminent focuses of colour grading processes in the digital age has been on getting digital to emulate the visual characteristics of celluloid. Such choices impose on digital cinema two categories of manipulations; the recognisable characteristics of film which are otherwise absent (namely grain and flicker), and particular colour tonnings for style and mood (tone, colour wash, contrast and so on). All these are focused in popular perception on the ‘film look’ and ‘better’ visual quality.

Yet there are distinct conundrums and contradictions here. The artificial insertion of celluloid artefacts of grain, organic emulsion, removal of frames to force 24p, jitter and flicker are all acts of deliberate degradation. Any way you slice it, putting such elements into an image where they don’t previously exist is an act of degrading and lowering the visual quality of the image. An overtly strange act when the intention is to get the ‘film look’ because it looks ‘better’…

The second set of process actions associated with colour and tone are those often designed to emulate the particular chromatic properties of specific film stocks. But this is really just a process of using a film stock as a reference point. The digital colour manipulations in grading processes far exceed what is possible from film stock itself. Digital image data is simply that, data. It’s an almost infinitely flexible set of data waiting to be given a ‘look’; a concept fundamentally divorced from film stock which has an inherent ‘look’ based on brand, type and chemical make up.

At the risk of public lynching from the film purists I’d argue that in the digital age, film as a medium is a distinctly anti-creative format. By its very nature shooting on film limits, restricts or cuts off the filmmaker from a host options creative options that would otherwise be open to them. Celluloid is not a blank canvas, not an open slate onto which to paint with all the available colours. Digital, by its technical make up, a blank and unformed ball of clay that can be shaped into any conceivable form.

I cannot help but be confronted by the irony that as we, creative cinema makers, are handed the most flexible form we have ever know, one unrestricted and infinitely open, our first overriding instinct is to degrade it, limit it, deform it to enforce upon it the restrictions of its predecessor.

Perhaps this is simply a techno-aesthetic derivation of Bolter and Grusin’s theories of ‘Remediation’ where by new media begin life by replicating the tenets of old media before finally breaking free to find unique properties. Photography remediated painting until it found its unique paths; Cinema remediated Theatre until it forged new languages; it seems digital media as a production format is destined to remediate celluloid media until filmmakers embrace and/or discover the unique properties and possibilities of digital as its own platform - one that has shaken off the shackles of celluloid limitations.

Until then a Google search will continue to reveal the term ‘film look’ as one of the most common discussion topics amongst filmmakers.

I may well be the only one but I can’t wait for the day we all ‘get over it’ and stop seeking to limit and curtail the evolution of the moving image and focus on exploiting its new properties. Colour, style, form, look, visual delight are what we should be aiming for, . the ‘Film Look’ for it’s own sake is bullshit.