Charlie Productions : 35mm Transfer

Our first experience of transferring video to 35mm film came with Russell Square. We were ushered in to see the technical bods at CFS, who we thought would make us feel very small by going on about gamma curves and the like (something we're still not completely au fait with). Instead, we were told these magic words:

"This won't look like a polished feature film when you print it to film."

"Yes. We weren't expecting that. What will change, what will it really look like then?"

"It'll look like that. But bigger."

"Like that, but bigger?"

"Yes."

"Right."

Apparently since getting the machines they'd always had the problem of people working with video hoping that their project would suddenly change from looking like shaky camcorder footage into Top Gun. They obviously thought we were amateurs. I don't know what gave them that impression. Perhaps the five minutes of credits which would end up costing us £1250 to print to film.

After that we steered well clear of 35mm in any form, because it costs so much.

Until Free Speech, that is, and then we got to see how things had moved on. Molinare did a stand-up job, and actually the print has a look and feel all of its own, which we like very much indeed.

We repeated the process for Death Of The Revolution and have used Molinare for the past four years running to get Somerset House's trailers done for their Summer Screen (which we edit), but now things are moving on another step again - because with more and more digital projectors out there it becomes less and less important to get a film print. And with pretty much everyone shooting digital these days, especially in short films, even places like Bafta no longer have "must have a 35mm print" as one of their qualifiers. But, when all's said and done, there is something rather magic that a 35mm print can bring your film. I often wonder if the DVD versions of big-budget movies have gone through the process of a transfer from a film print to DVD conversion, to give it the film grain and the same feel as the film you saw in the cinema, or if they just skip that step - a thought which niggles away at me, suggesting that that is perhaps why digital fx can sometimes look so ropey on DVD when it looked ok in the cinema... The film grain adds texture, hides the joins, makes it a more pleasant experience. But that's just to my untrained eye. All I know is I've always added 'film grain' to our digital projects, even if that just meant a digital filter in Color on what will remain an online video...

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.

ShareThis | admin | sitemap | fresh look media