Comment by atoav
3 years ago
As a former freelance DOP for cinema productions:
Movies have dark scenes nowadays mainly because it is a trend. On top of that dark scenes can have practical advantages (set building, VFX, lighting, etc. can be reduced or become much simpler to do which directly translates into money saved during shooting).
If I had to guess, the trend of dark scenes are a direct result of the fact that in the past two decades we our digital sensors got good enough to actually shoot in such low-light environments.
Before that film crews were typically shooting day-for-night which meant waiting for a set of specific weather conditions and then hoping that grading things blue-ish would sell the thing as being shot in the night.
Another aspect is the much higher brightness and contrast (=dynamic range) of today's displays and projectors. Back in the day you had to literally use the whitest white and the darkest dark available to create a readable picture (and you had to do a ton of lighting to squash the extreme dynamic range of a real world environment into the small dynamic range of your target medium). As this dynamic range became bigger it became possible to not use the whole range and still have good looking results. So in that line of thinking pictures became darker because they can be.
Not that I defend the whole thing, sometimes dark pictures with a high contrast can be good and very readable, sometimes it is used as an excuse to not do the propper work.
The old school scenes were sometimes more incorrect, but less wrong than modern dark scenes.
Thing is, the eye adapts to dim light very well. So an old school scene "night" scene may actually better represent what it feels like being there.
While a modern "night" scene might look what a dim area looks like the first 10 seconds before your eyes adapt: dim, gray-ish.
Curve-ball:
what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
> what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
Depends what you're after and what digital camera you are using (and even which ISO you are using on that specific camera). But more broadly IMO digital has reached dynamic ranges that are "good enough" so you don't have to worry about it in most situations. And if shot correctly digital can look exactly like film.
The major difference for me is the way you work with the material. Actors and everybody else tends to be a tad bit more concentrated when the know how many €/s is running through that camera unless you have an infinite amount of film stock and the funds to develope and digitize them.
But whether that is truly worth the stress of changing a roll of exposed film in the wild during bad weather and praying the material survives is another question.
>what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
You should actually overexpose digital (without blowing any highlights) to maximize dynamic range.
Our eyes perceive brightness logarithmically — given something emitting P photons perceived as brightness B, something emitting 2P photons will be perceived as brightness B+1, while something emitting 0.5P photons will be perceived as brightness B-1.
Image sensors are linear and discrete. So going from R,G,B=1,1,1 to 2,2,2 represents a doubling of photons captured, and thus be perceived by the eye as going from B to B+1. But 2,2,2->4,4,4 will go to B+2, 4,4,4->8,8,8 to B+3, etc.
Thus, there is only one bit of dynamic range going from B to B+1, 2 bits of dynamic range from B+1 to B+2, 3 bits from B+2 to B+3, and 2^N bits from B+N-1 to B+N. That’s why you want as much brightness information as possible close to saturating the sensor, since that’s where the most bits of dynamic range are.
This is called “exposing to the right” [0].
[0] https://digital-photography-school.com/exposing-to-the-right...
While it’s true you should in theory expose to the right, it’s realistically a little riskier unless your environment is well controlled or you’re willing to potentially clip some highlights. So for landscapes that you spend a while composing and metering, it makes sense, but for street photography or something where there’s a ton of contrast, I wouldn’t recommend it because you’ll overexpose more often than not and unlike with film, it’s harder (and maybe impossible) to recover detail from highlights.
Since storage is cheap, I’d rather just bracket my shots that need it than expose to the right, reducing the potential of losing a good shot by losing some highlight detail.
> While a modern "night" scene might look what a dim area looks like the first 10 seconds before your eyes adapt: dim, gray-ish.
And that's if you're watching it in a theater-like setting. If you're in a living room with any lights on, the screen is so dark that little comes through but the reflection of the room. After all these years I still do not understand why glossy screens are so popular.
> glossy screens
if its glossy, you can move so the reflection is completely out of the screen
if it's matte, it'll always look a little frosty, right?
reasonable tradeoff either way, but for home theater, i can see why sleek black sells (not to mention how garbage matte would look in a bright store)
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So the same reason basically as for the blue LEDs on every new device since 2010? Something that used to be prohibitively expensive before, and so now communicates high value (until people get tired of it eventually).
I got tired of it the first time I got one, yet these hell devices are still everywhere.
I must be the only one who likes blue LEDs.
I have no proof, but this is my feeling yes
Isn't it a problem when technique and budget are the main drive in production ? It kinda fades off the story, acting, magic of a movie.
Sure. But that is a result of capitalism and the modern "3 simple steps to make a good movie"-approach.
In my experience the best movies are made from people with passion. But those cannot be made if these people don't get the money or have to bend over backwards and betray their ideals to do so.
If it were just about making money I would expect film-makers to go the way of least resistance. What perplexes me is that often viewer-hostile decisions get made despite being more work.
For example in movie adaptations of known franchises changes are made just for change sake so that the writers can show off how smart they are. It would be LESS work to just follow the source material. To be clear: I am NOT talking about changes to better fit a specific medium. I am talking about "look how smart I am, you couldn't predict this twist"-kind of writing that does not improve the story. Still, ego-driven writing seems to be very much accepted?
Same with lighting. No viewer has ever complained about unnatural lighting. This stuff is only made to impress peers.
Why is this kind of behavior so common the industry?
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I understand there are trivial financial factors such as the one you mentions but it seems it's now become a shortsighted single spot.
Is it also possibly a bit of protest against people watching movies at home on a television? That's assuming the dark scenes are easier to see in a theater.
This insufferable trend is popular in made-for-netflix shows. If that's a protest against the medium, it's a weird one.
Yeah, just wondering. I know another trend, indecipherable sound, is also odd. Because, for example, I had to walk out of "Public Enemy" in a theater...I couldn't hear the dialogue. But it was watchable at home where I could mess with settings until I could hear.
Which is so word since the compression there leads to pretty heavy banding there, despite pretty heroic work on the part of Netflix's tech staff.
I'd rather watch dark scenes at home on the OLED than on a projector with blacks that look grey.
Thanks for reminding me of the "full moon in a forest" style night scenes :)
In France we call this "American night"
Danny Boyle's commentary on The Beach specifically includes a discussion of the technique mentioned by OP of shooting in high light and playing with it later. So much to learn from him, Cameron, heck, Bad Santa pointed out that the Coen Brothers were extensively involved early on. Everything from Thurman Merman now, to me, sounds like a Coen Brothers character. I kinda think he is.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure film has a higher dynamic range than digital SDR video? From a quick google search, 13 stops for film vs 6 stops for SDR. Obviously the stock that was used for final delivery to theaters was much worse than the stock that movies were shot on, but still.
I was mostly talking about display and projection technology.
That aside: Any commonly used digital cinema camera today has 13+ stops of dynamic range without even considering any special HDR modes.
They were talking about display tech
And here I thought it might be global warming. Thanks.
What would global warming have to do with it?
Global increase in pessimism (bleak view of the future), existential dread, and dystopic narratives -> darker imagery.
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