DPR Article with Emmanuel Lubeszki: Film vs. Dgitial

[drd1135]

Emmanuel Lubezki: 'Digital gave me something I could never have done on film'

On Feb. 28 Emmanuel Lubezki won his third consecutive Oscar for Best Cinematography for The Revenant. Lubezki, known for creating immersive cinematic experiences, joined DPReview editors Dale Baskin and Rishi Sanyal to discuss a variety of photographic topics ranging from the artistic to the technical. Read more

www.dpreview.com

Lubeski talks about the tradeoffs between digital and film for cinema. not knowing much about this, I found it fascinating.

 

[agentlossing]

I remember admiring the way The Revenant was filmed. Typically I really like the color and grain of movies filmed on actual film, and I don't like when digitally filmed movies are given a filter to look like film. But Lubezki's filming looked crisp and clean like digital should look, but consistently nuanced and low-light. It really worked for the immersive wilderness shots. It was beautiful to watch on the big screen.

 

[tilman]

Two things I feel like pointing out:
1) the article is from 2016 (no idea why dpreview all of a sudden re-posts all these old articles on the front page )
Which doesn't necessarily make the article less interesting - it just helps to know for context...
(eg the quantum film stuff? I haven't heard much of that in a long time )

2) as someone who works in visual effects it bugged me a bit at the time (well it still bugs me clearly ) that they made such a big deal about the "filmed in available light" thing - without mentioning the considerable amount of work that happened in color grading during post-production... where lots of highly detailed, hand-animated mattes were created in order to color-correct the footage of the entire film...

The only source mentioning this is a case study published by the postproduction facility (to showcase their invisible work).
This case study is not online anymore - but archive.org/wayback machine to the rescue

Wayback Machine

"a team of 10 visual effects artists under Spilatro’s supervision worked to hand-animate mattes and use them to perform roto work on faces, bodies, and other elements photographed by Lubezki in order to assure that directional key light, backlight, or shadows were hitting exactly where Lubezki wanted them to hit, and moving correctly with corresponding body parts or elements in a natural way so that viewers would be unable to detect any manipulation had ever occurred."

The result of course is still a beautiful achievement! I don't want to take away any of Lubezki's skill or artistry.
I just get slightly disappointed when filmmakers don't admit to doing visual effects or post-production work (like if that was a bad thing)...

 

[drd1135]

Since I know nothing about cinematography, seven-years-old is new for me. I never gave much thought to how much of movie-making is film or digital. Wasn’t the cinema one of the last big customers for film? Evidently, Quantumfilm was bought by Apple.

 

[tilman]

as I said - I'm just pointing that out for context (since I was surprised by their praise for the Nikon D810 as having the highest dynamic range of any camera they ever tested )

Doesn't make the article less interesting