FEATURE
Is Digital Cinema?
REJECTION STREET director speaks out on why digital
will never really look like film, and why it doesn't matter.
by S G Collins
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FEATURE |
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Is Digital Cinema? by S G Collins |
A lot of talk about digital filmmaking comes from raving converts or diehard detractors. I'm neither. I wanna look at the pros and cons from a more nonchalant perspective. We made REJECTION STREET on digital beta widescreen – because we could. It wasn't because we wanted to be digital, innovative, edgy, or even lightweight. It was because we were so unkown that without millionaire uncles, we could never have made that movie any other way. And in the end, it is better to make movies than not to. What drives the film-or-digital discussion is, ultimately, cash. So let's talk first about the economies, real and imagined. Shooting 35mm film is wicked expensive, and it's not just because of the film. You're shooting 35 on location. Each time you roll, you're throwing $20 bills on the fire. It's exhiliarating to bleed so profusely. There's an adrenaline rush to get it right already. But the wind, traffic, actor miscues and universal entropy conspire to make this a bad day – so bad, you shoot 33 minutes to get one keeper. If you'd shot digital, you could just recycle that wasted first cassette. Instead you've burnt seven rolls, forever and for naught. Shooting 35 makes a bad day into a worse day. Film, processing, shipping, and dailies all cost money. But the cost of 35 is also measured in parking spots, vehicles, day rates, lunches, and the extra time it takes to set up and shoot anything.
It's like this. You're a dragon. Dragons have tails. You shoot digital and walk around with a little tail. Shoot 35 and you have a big tail. Everywhere you go, you're wagging that tail around behind you. It's harder to get from place to place, and impossible to get in and out quick. Ah, but the cost of your tail is justified by the beauty of your film image. Right? Let's hope. I'm not trying to talk you out of 35. I'd like to shoot everything on 35. But film is a gatekeeper technology. Most filmmakers can't own their own lab or telecine. Those things must be bought and maintained corporately. To go through the gate, you gotta pay somebody. Video used to be like that too. But in the last decade technology for making video has been digitized and democratized. Its cost has fallen just within the grasp of an ordinary person in western civilization. I think that's why they invented HD.
You see, over time, digital video technology has surmounted one filmmakerly objection after another. We objected to clumsy linear video editing, so they made it nonlinear. We objected to tubes comet-tailing, so they made chip cameras. We objected to low-res video, so they made high-res video. But by far the filmmaker's toughest objection to video was its motion delivery. Now they've licked that one too, with something called "24P." Ever since grandma was a girl, film has run at 24 frames per second. Film stocks changed, running speed didn't. It became part of what makes film "look like film." But making it look like film was the last thing on the minds of the National Television Standards Committee. They gave us 30 frames, in two fields of scanlines. Yuck. Some digital techniques can help soften this motion delivery problem. On Rejection Street we used a Flame deinterlace. But these methods are all compromises. HD 24 progressive is high-res digital video running at 24 frames per second, with no interlacing. Its aspect ratio is almost identical to the 1.85 of non-anamorphic 35mm. That's why 24P is heralded as the high-quality, low cost alternative to film shooting. Against the logistical nightmare of 35, some economies of 24P are real. The camera isn't much bigger than what news photographers use. And the tape is cheaper. There's only one fly in this ointment, and it's called penetration. With 24P, if anybody besides the shooter wants to watch (like the director maybe?), you need an HD monitor. To see rushes next day, you need an HD deck. But these gadgets are expensive. One option is to send your HD tapes to be down-converted, so you can view and digitize them anywhere – just as you'd send your film for process and transfer. For this, you need an HD post facility. HD is the new gatekeeper technology. Few people have it, and those people charge big bucks. So for now, part of the savings of shooting 24P is eaten up by the cost of seeing it. 24P will get cheaper, like everything else. But don't hold your breath for real-time hi-def editing on your iMac. The technical obstacles are formidable, and there's no huge consumer market to motivate democratization. By now many of the filmmakerly objections to digital video have been licked. Assume that the best possible digital video, transferred to a 35 print, is cheaper than shooting 35 in the first place. We're now down to arguing subtleties. Some folks talk about the chemistry of the film, the innate subjective depth of the image, blah blah. I'll leave that for kids with lattés and earrings. But there are still a few real differences we ought to contemplate, because they lead to the ultimate question. Digital video runs at a specific frame rate. You can't shoot 120 FPS to get slow motion. Plus, current digital video cameras have the same aesthetic problem as their low-res predecessors: the target is too small. Since 35mm is bigger, it uses longer lenses to get the same field of view. Longer lenses have less depth of field – and that's part of the look. HD will never look like 35 until digital cameras have 35mm chips. Finally, a digital image is, by nature, a grid of pixels. Increase resolution all you want – you cannot make pixels random. And random is what film grain is. So any kind of sampled rectilinear image will always behave differently from a film image. Which leads us to the ultimate question. Who cares? Cinema is not what you shoot on. It's not the picture's resolution, or even the picture itself. Cinema is the act of capturing moving images, and colliding them in a way that makes new meaning. Our mastery of the techniques for doing this, to the point of comfortably violating them, makes the artform evolve.
The best advice for new filmmakers is still to get out and do it, shoot it, cut it, learn from your mistakes. Put your hands on it. Do what you can with what you have in your hands. But take a moment and stare into the furnace of why you do this. People shouldn't make movies because they want to be filmmakers. People should make movies because they are filmmakers, and can't escape. If you're like that, you should make movies any way you can. Any way. Even the wrong way. With REJECTION STREET, getting money to do it the "right" way would mean converting it into a harmless work-made-for-hire. Instead, we flew below radar and did it. For me, the meaning of digital cinema lies right there – at the bottom. It allows cool things to happen which otherwise might not have happened. Sure there will be rubbish in with the gems. Let's leave that for digital archeologists to sort out. For now, it's better to make movies than not to. S G Collins is filmmaker living in Allston, MA. His movie THE SAME SIDE OF REJECTION STREET will screen in February 2001 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See www.sgcollins.com .
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