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How has the digital revolution impacted upon the film productiion industry, and has it positively afffectd the roles of directors and cinematographers?

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TALK ABOUT THE RISE OF SMARTPHONE AND ON-THE-GO MEDIA
- Apple's vertical cinema marketing push
- the rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime etc enabling people to watch cinema quality content on the go
- streaming platforms releasing feature length films on their platform and cinemas at the same time and sometimes only online - how does this affect the industry?

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Apple have a playlist on Youtube showing customers how to make the most professional content using their mobile devices. Again - is this just a marketing push o are these devices viable for professional use?

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Apple recruited oscar winning director Damien Chazelle to direct this short film in a vertical format. This is an interesting commentary on perhaps the future of mass media and how consumers see their content. Are the traditional widescreen and anamorphic aspect ratios of film amking slowly going out of style? and will we see a world with purely vertical video?

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Shot on iPhone by Damien Chazelle – Vertical Cinema

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Oscar winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot this promo for apple when the Iphone 12 Pro was released. Does recruiting the best filmmakers in the world give mobile film making some sort of credibility? Is it all a big marketing push or can filmmakers really use mobile devices to create meaningful, beautiful, profound work and content?

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Shot on iPhone 12 Pro by Emmanuel Lubezki — Apple

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FILM VS DIGITAL
- The ongoing debate between which medium is better, which workflow works for the digital/modern age of film production.
- use the film vs digital feature length documentary "SIDE BY SIDE"
- weigh up the pros and cons of either side of the debate and assess whether the digital revolution has helped the roles of directors and cinematographers of hindered them.

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This documentary produced by Keanu Reeves delves deep into the deabte between whether shooting on film or digital is best.

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"If I can't shoot on film I'll stop making movies"

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In the wake of Christopher Nolan's wartime epic Dunkirk, which was released in July, the long-simmering debate about the respective merits of film and digital is again coming to the boil.

In interviews, Nolan has wasted no opportunity to proclaim the superiority of film over digital. He lets everyone know that Dunkirk was shot on film, much of it using IMAX cameras. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, strongly tipped for awards nominations for his work on the movie, likewise champions the benefits of old-fashioned film.

In the mad scramble to convert cinemas for digital projection, van Hoytema argues that the industry has been contributing to the "fast decline of a sublime technology a hundred years in the making".

When we go to see a movie at our local cinema, he points out, it is likely to be projected with a 2K resolution

"To put things in perspective: nowadays standard TVs are sold with twice that resolution," van Hoytema notes. By contrast, a Dunkirk analogue IMAX film print is projected with close to 18K resolution. In other words, the gulf in quality is huge.

"You will hear people saying that the layman doesn't know the difference. Truth of the matter is that without pinpointing exactly why, they [spectators] actually do see the difference. And if not now, they will in a few years, as the keen eye of the cinemagoer evolves rapidly. Remember when we thought DVDs looked incredible?" the cinematographer asks. He talks of recently watching David Lean's Ryan's Daughter in a restored 70mm film print and realising that it was "far superior than the best thing that the digital industry is offering up today".

The implication is clear. Throwing out the cans of celluloid, closing the film labs and jettisoning the projectors has been nothing less than an act of cultural vandalism. Audiences have been hoodwinked into accepting films projected digitally that don't have anything like the richness or resolution of old 35mm or 70mm prints.

Of course, the debate isn't that simple at all. To those who remember films catching fire in the projector or watching scratchy old prints of supposedly new movies, digital projection has been a boon. It offers consistently, clarity, a clean image. It is cheaper and easier to shoot on digital too.

Thanks to high-profile directors like Nolan, Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, some titles are still shot and projected on film - but not that many. "If I can't shoot on film, I'll stop making movies," Tarantino recently proclaimed but there is little sign yet that the public shares his enduring passion for photochemical film. Spectators aren't picketing cinemas or demanding that film projectors be reinstalled. The film vs digital debate itself has been running for years and even inspired a movie of its own, Side By Side (2012), produced by Keanu Reeves. This feature documentary, featuring Nolan, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and others, appeared to rehearse every side of the argument at exhaustive length. Nonetheless, five years later, the debate is still rumbling on.

"For me, the means by which the film is being presented to the public is less important than the story that is being told," says Nick Varley, co-ceo of Park Circus, a company that has been highly successful in re-releasing back catalogue classics into cinemas, most of them in digitally restored versions. As Varley points out, if it's a lousy film, the format on which it is shown becomes irrelevant anyway.

Scorsese is one of the great champions of film but when he was interviewed at the BFI earlier this summer, he spoke very movingly and evocatively about the circumstances in which he first saw many of his favourite movies... crouched down in front of the battered old family TV.

No one denies the magic of holding film or of feeding it through a projector. There's little such romance with digital. (You can't hold an electronic file in your hands.) Nonetheless, the digital revolution has made many more classic movies available than ever before. "What digital cinema and digital distribution has allowed us to do, certainly in our business, is to take films and restore them so they look as good as the director intended them to," he says.

The advantages of digital distribution are also self-evident. The same film can be shown at the same time in a cinema in London and one in Orkney. There's no need to pay expensive transport costs for film prints. Everyone knows, too, that celluloid deteriorates. However careful the projectionist is in handling a movie, by the time it has been projected 20 or 30 times, there will be specks of dust and scratches. The digital version, though, should remain unblemished.

Park Circus is partnering with the Prince Charles Cinema in London on Check The Gate, a season of 35mm films, from 22-24 September. The programme includes such titles as Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown and Taxi Driver. Prints for the films aren't all in pristine condition but audiences don't mind. In the same way that a new generation of music lovers are rediscovering vinyl, cinema enthusiasts are discovering, or rediscovering, celluloid.

"If you remove the ability to play 35mm prints, you instantly lose a large part of cinema history," says Paul Vickery, head programmer of The Prince Charles Cinema.

Park Circus represents over 25,000 films from Hollywood and British studios. The company still maintains several thousand 35mm prints. This is a matter of practicality as much as it is a nod to film history; huge numbers of classic old movies still haven't been digitised, they're only available on film.

Special 70mm screenings of popular titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lawrence Of Arabia still sell out. It costs around £25,000 to strike a single new 70mm print of such a title, as opposed to $100 for a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) of the same film. Nonetheless, the box office justifies the extra expense. One of the ironies is that these old classics will be restored digitally even if they are then projected on film. Nonetheless, film has a mystique that digital just can't match and seeing 2001 projected in a cinema is still an event.

"There is grain on film that's not present on digital," Vickery explains the enduring aesthetic and organic appeal of projected film. "[With] a moving film print, every film has a different make-up of grains. It looks like every image is moving within itself because of the grain whereas the digital version is very flat. There is nothing happening beyond the hard lines of the object you're looking at."

The good news for "film" lovers is that the format isn't disappearing. Seasons like Check The Gate and revivals of Lawrence Of Arabia on 70mm suggest that digital hasn't squeezed film entirely out of existence quite yet. Hollywood is bound to notice the hugely enthusiastic response to Dunkirk. At the world's leading archives, even movies shot originally on digital are still preserved on film. Prominent directors and cinematographers continue to proselytise on behalf of film. "I think as filmmakers we can't allow that medium [film] to disappear from our palette," says van Hoytema. "It's far too good and far too beautiful, and there is no valid replacement yet, or perhaps never will be."

Nonetheless, there is no turning back. Film still has its place for historians and cinephiles but it's no longer in the mainstream. The success of Dunkirk won't stem the retreat or dent the dominance of digital in the long run.
The Prince Charles Cinema and Park Circus present Check the Gate, a season dedicated to presenting films on film, from 22-24 September; 'Lawrence Of Arabia' will be re-released on a new 70mm print, from 22 September to 3 October, at the BFI Southbank

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Film vs Digital? In the same way that a new generation of music lovers are rediscovering vinyl, cinema enthusiasts are discovering, or rediscovering, celluloid

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In the wake of Christopher Nolan's wartime epic Dunkirk, which was released in July, the long-simmering debate about the respective merits of film and digital is again coming to the boil. In interviews, Nolan has wasted no opportunity to proclaim the superiority of film over digital.

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TARANTINO AND DEAKINS ON FILM VS DIGITAL

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TARANTINO AND DEAKINS ON FILM VS DIGITAL

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Star Wars has always been at the forefront of movie technology. Back when production of the very first film started in 1975, George Lucas created the company Industrial Light and Magic because there was no special effects firm around capable of creating the visual effects he envisioned for his fantastical sci-fi epic.

Then again in 2002 Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones created movie history by being the first major film shot entirely on digital film.

So why did JJ Abrams announce that he would be shooting the latest film, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, on traditional film stock? Why is the series that has done so much to move the industry forward now taking a technological step backwards? And what is that going to mean for the new movie?

Has the digital revolution died?

George Lucas, had been adamant digital was the future of movie making. In 2002, during his marketing drive for Episode II, he went on record with American Cinematographer about the switch to the new format, saying: "There is so much misinformation being put out there by people who have interests other than the quality of film. They're determined to slow this down or stop it, but they can't. It just won't happen."

"Digital is a much more malleable medium than film, by far; you can make it do whatever you want it to do, and you can design the technology to do whatever you want to do. This whole field is really going to ramp up in the next 10 or 20 years."

But we're now in that 10 to 20 year period, and seeing the release of a new Star Wars film shot entirely on celluloid. The Force Awakens is mostly uses standard 35mm stock, but Abrams has announced his use of 65mm IMAX cameras for a single action sequence set on the desert planet of Jakku.

When Abrams' production company Bad Robot tweeted an image of the IMAX camera on location with the hashtag #bestformatever, it made it clear how Abrams feels about the super-celluloid format.

The decision to shoot on film is in part an effort to recover the feel of the beloved original trilogy, when the prequels have been subjected to a whole lot of hate.

"This was really important, that the movie, in a way, go backwards to go forwards," Abrams told Screenrant. "This was very much about new characters and a new story, and like Star Wars has always been at its best, a generational tale of understanding young people and understanding their place in the world. So these are brand new characters that we're meeting, but I wanted it to look and feel the way the original trilogy did."

And many directors feel there is a tangible quality to 35mm film that is impossible to replicate with clean, regimented digital images. There is a randomness to film that it's proved impossible to simulate digitally, because of the inevitably slightly varied chemical composition of celluloid. This can affect colour and clarity, but also gives a definitive look to images captured on film.

Directorial dictatorship

However, It isn't necessarily a case of the franchise completely turning its back on digital as a way to capture the Star Wars universe - it's all about the tastes of the individual directors.

JJ Abrams is very much wedded to the idea of film. Working together with his long-time cinematographer Dan Mindel, it's no surprise the pairing isn't shooting digitally.

Abrams hasn't shot a film digitally in his career to date, so for him to reject film now, for arguably the most important movie he'll ever make, would have been a strange move to say the least.

It has also been announced that Rian Johnson, the director for Star Wars Episode VIII, will be shooting on 35mm film for his stint in the director's chair too. And with Colin Trevorrow, director for Star Wars Episode IX, having already shot Jurassic World on 35mm film, it looks likely the trend will continue.

But the new trilogy isn't the be-all and end-all of the new Star Wars canon. In order to deliver us a new Star Wars film every year, there are the anthology movies appearing during the new trilogy's "off"years.

Next year we'll see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hitting theatres, detailing the story of how plans for the original Death Star were stolen before the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

Gareth Edwards, the director in the chair for Rogue One, is shooting the movie - at least in part - with a large format Alexa 65 digital camera, at a 6K resolution. The ultra-wide digital format has been created to be comparable with the 65mm film used for IMAX capture, which could make Rogue One look spectacular in one of the technology's massive theatres.

So, while the new trilogy might be looking for the same sort of old-school look as the originals - instead of the too-clean, ultra-precise look of Episode II and III - the anthology movies could well have their own distinct look and feel, all provided by their use of new digital formats.

Projection matters

Besides the artistic control George Lucas was so delighted by, one of the biggest benefits of the digital format is the ease and lower cost of distribution. Sending around an encrypted hard drive is a lot easier than transporting and setting up multiple reels of film.

And there's also the fact that many film projectors have been replaced with digital counterparts. So with Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens being shot on 35mm and 65mm film, where are we going to be able to see it?

For the most part, screenings of The Force Awakens will be a digital transfer anyway - even in IMAX theatres. Despite it being hailed as the #bestformatever, only 1% of the theatres in North America will be showing the full IMAX experience and only a reported 15 theatres in the world will have the 70mm IMAX format.

Every other IMAX cinema will be showing the Digital IMAX version, which is barely any larger than standard cinematic widescreen.

Then there's the 3D version. Now, we know that some people still have a hankering for a 3D movie and good luck to them. Where it's specifically shot with 3D cameras from the outset 3D can be acceptable, but because The Force Awakens has been shot entirely on film, the 3D has had to be retro-fitted.

And that's never a good look.

Our advice? Stick to a good 2D presentation and be careful paying over the odds for an IMAX ticket if you're not sure you're going to get the full six-storey IMAX experience.

But if you possibly can, get yourself to a Dolby Vision cinema - in all its bespoke HDR glory, a Dolby Cinema could well be the best place in the galaxy to watch The Force Awakens.

In the end then the Star Wars franchise actually hasn't turned its back on digital film, it's doing exactly what it's always tried to do: use the best of the currently-available technology to get the effect it's after.

They will still be carrying on the classic Star Wars tradition of pushing movie technology forward with their use of both traditional methods for the trilogy and advanced digital movie cameras and techniques for the anthologies.

So, don't worry, the Force is still strong with these ones.

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Why has Star Wars turned its back on digital film?

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Star Wars has always been at the forefront of movie technology. Back when production of the very first film started in 1975, George Lucas created the company Industrial Light and Magic because there was no special effects firm around capable of creating the visual effects he envisioned for his fantastical sci-fi epic.

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George Lucas began his career as an editor and a cinematographer (he was one of several cameramen on the Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter), but his frustration with the tools of his trade, coupled with his desire to tell stories that were galactic in scope, drove him to seek new ways to make films. Today it can be said that few have impacted the craft of filmmaking more than he has. The ultimate noodler who enjoys seeing his films come together in editing, Lucas has transformed the medium into a postproduction fantasia.

Cinema was the art form that helped define the 20th century, and Lucas is passionate in his conviction that its expression in the 21st century will be digital. The latest installment in the Star Wars saga, Episode II-Attack of the Clones, was the first major Hollywood feature to be captured digitally, on 24p high-definition video cameras. But in his determination to push the medium of cinema with new technologies and techniques, Lucas has encountered both support and skepticism. Episode II's extremely high profile situated him at the center of a raging debate over the merits and drawbacks of digital technology, which is seen by some as a viable alternative to traditional film-based methods, and by others as a concept that still requires a great deal of refinement.

Lucas recently discussed his impressions of the evolving technology with Ron Magid, American Cinematographer's visual-effects editor.

American Cinematographer: If there indeed is going to be a digital revolution, what will it look like?

George Lucas: I've always [said], "This is like the film industry in 1902," so the advances are going to be huge, because what we did on Episode II, we did in essence by ourselves. We had to talk Sony into it, [but] they built the cameras and they tried really hard to make this work; we also had to talk Panavision into committing a lot of money to build those lenses. Both companies really went out on a limb. This was a giant experiment for everybody, and nobody knew if it was going to work or if they were pouring money down a rat hole.

Now that the whole medium is opening up, there are lots of lens manufacturers out there building lenses and lots of other camera people building cameras, so you've got competition. And once you've got competition, you're going to get a lot of people making vast improvements on the system. They've already got a 10-million-pixel camera, and that's just happened in the last year, so [the potential has] gone from 2 million to 10 million – and that's much, much higher quality than film. Any other issues out there will eventually be addressed, because a lot of cameramen are going to use the technology [and] say, 'I want it to do this or that.'

There is so much misinformation being put out there by people who have interests other than the quality of film. They're determined to slow this down or stop it, but they can't. It just won't happen. It was the same with digital editing – for the seven years that we had Editdroid [almost] nobody would use it, and even after we sold the company to Avid another two or three years passed before they got anybody to use it. All [digital technology] does is give you more to work with. It's a much more malleable medium than film, by far; you can make it do whatever you want it to do, and you can design the technology to do whatever you want to do. This whole field is really going to ramp up in the next 10 or 20 years.

Many filmmakers have a wait-and-see attitude, which is to be expected. Some early filmmakers resented sound, and Orson Welles insisted till his dying day that a good color movie had never been made.

Lucas: And those criticisms are valid. There is the very real issue that you are going from a photographic medium to a painterly medium, and for those who are really wedded to the photographic process, that's going to be a tough thing to get around. It's very much like going from frescoes to oils – one is very rigid, very disciplined, very definite about the way it works, and the other is much more open, offers you more options and enables you to manipulate the pictures more, and I think that bothers people. But audiences can't tell the difference. We knew that right from the beginning because we shot [parts of] Phantom Menace digitally, and nobody could tell which shots were digital and which weren't.

As Episode II unfolds, it seems as though a new style of filmmaking is evolving, particularly in terms of the stunt and effects sequences, which felt more believable because there was less cutting around to hide the tricks. Have digital tools allowed you to develop a different style?

Lucas: The reality of how you're shooting and the limitations of what you have to work with sometimes determine how you shoot a scene, and now that's less of a factor with stunts. I don't know if it's a different style, but it's a very different process now. I've refined the process of working more visually; I shoot for a period of time, about 60 days or so, and then I stop and work on the film for a while. Then I come back and shoot for another 10 days or so, and then I stop and go back and work on the film, rewrite and change things, and then I come back and shoot for another week. I do it in pieces rather than in one long shoot. That way I can actually look at what I'm doing, cut it and study it. The previsualization process [allows me to] put scenes together without having to shoot them, see how they fit in the movie and then, if they work, I can cut them in and actually go out and shoot them. There's a lot of freedom and malleability that didn't exist before. It's easy to move things around in the frame, to change various visual aspects of the film, which just wasn't possible before. It's the same kind of thing that you find in still photography if you use Photoshop.

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American Cinematographer: George Lucas Interview

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George Lucas began his career as an editor and a cinematographer (he was one of several cameramen on the Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter), but his frustration with the tools of his trade, coupled with his desire to tell stories that were galactic in scope, drove him to seek new ways to make films. Today it can be said that few have impacted the craft of filmmaking more than he has.

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Envision flying around with a jet pack creating massive film sets like you are a cinematography superhero. Cinetracer is a realistic cinematography simulator where you play a Director, and your quest is to make an epic movie. The real purpose of this program is to create beautiful storyboards for pitching.

You should know Matt Workman from his YouTube channel Cinematography Database. His channel is a wealth of information about high-end cinematography. In the past, he has posted twitch style YouTube content breaking down blockbuster movies and music videos. But all of his newest material is focused around his new creation Cinetracer.

The concept was initially called Cine Designer and started out as a plug-in for Cinema 4D and Maya. But for non-3D designers, these programs have a steep learning curve. In September 2018, I reached out to Matt, asking him about system requirements for Cine Designer. He suggested I check out the new gaming version of Cine Designer instead. This new game is being built on the game design platform, Unreal Engine. At this point, the game was not available on a mac, so I was unable to try into out. But in January they released the game for Mac on the popular gaming distribution platform Steam.

My Experience

The game is currently in early release. I started by watching tutorials and playing in 30 minutes increments. I am 20 hours into the game and playing with purpose. It can be buggy at times, but this is because I am working off a Mac Book Pro, with an inferior graphics card. If you plan on using Cinetracer as a tool, I would recommend getting a gaming laptop. I will cover why later.

You start by picking your Map from the following three categories; Low-Performance, Medium-Performance, and High-Performance. Each Map has different properties, like the ability to change the environment's lighting or not. The next page is Characters. The three characters you get to choose from looking like that come straight out of Blade Runner. The last step before you play is creating your project name and selecting a save folder. Make sure you save to a location you have access to.

The game is a single player "Open World / Sandbox" experience. The first thing you need to do is to find your location. When scouting, I prefer to fly around in "jet pack" mode, which allows me to view the game from a birds-eye and move quickly to where I want to go. Once I find my location, I start by building, placing props, cameras, effects, and actors.The "Department Menu" is essentially your backpack and is how you import items into the world.

Camera

This department consists of a Techno Crane, Fisher Dolly, Shoulder-Mounted camera, and a Tripod-Mounted camera. But my favorite is the free-floating camera which allows you to place the camera anywhere in your world. Each rig has constraints that force you to mimic actual cinema shots.

Lighting

Similar to the camera department, the lights mimic commonly used film fixtures like Arri Skypanle S60s. Lighting is broken up into the following sub-departments; Film Lights, Event Lights, Practicals, Grip, and Electric. Currently, their perimeters don't accurately translate to actual real-world light output. From what I can tell they are laying the ground work for these metrics.

Building

If you are a gamer, you may recognize this department. They borrowed the Building component of the game directly from Fortnite. There is a quick and easy way to make a custom cyc wall, paper rolls, and blocks that can be turned into set walls or built into a house.

Props

You can find a lot of commonly used film props in this department, including home decor and a few cars. But this is also where you can find one of my favorite items, the particulate emitters Snow, Smoke, and rain. These effects are essential for creating a unique visual look.

Actors

Currently, the actor menu is broken into three sections. Stand-ins are the best-looking actors with the most realistic features. CC actors and simple actors have motion capture settings that give the characters actions, like breakdance or talk.

Shooting

After the set is created, I enter the camera to view my image. There are three different camera modes. The first mode locks you into the camera and allows you to move it like a character. Press V to toggle between the shooting modes. In the second mode, you can view the set and a monitor with the camera's point of view. The third mode is a full-screen mode that displays your camera settings. You can change the aperture, ISO, and focal length, and aspect ratio allowing you to create your cinematic look. By pressing enter/return, you can take screenshots. The B key will take you to a storyboard screen where you can organize your boards. Images are also saved out as raw screenshots that are full raster and do not have your chosen aspect ratio.

To my eye, the quality of the screen capture is outstanding, or at least good enough. But as the game develops this part, will get better and better. In the last update, they introduced Ray Trace Lighting, a feature that takes the game's lighting and reflections and makes them ultra-realistic, giving you the ability to see ambient, bounced light and more realistic shadows. But this feature comes with a hefty price, your computer must have an RTX graphics card currently produced by Nvidia. These GPUs are not available on any Apple computers. If your goal is to use Cinetracer for professional previsualization, I would recommend purchasing a gaming laptop like the Razor Blade or an equivalent system so you can take advantage of the newest update.

What I Like

The gameplay is easy to learn.

Updates come regularly and bring rich new features.

The graphics look beautiful, even without RTX.

Matt Workman is crowd sourcing player feedback and has set up lines of communication via email, direct message, and the steam community forum to answer questions and take suggestions.

The game is based around tools the film and video industry actually use.

There is no rendering.

What Needs Work

The actors are limited. I would like to see more variety in age, height, and weight. Or the ability to change these attributes.

I would also like to see more locations. It's great that you can essentially build a house, but a lot of common shoot locations have yet to make it into the game.

Like locations, I feel the props are still limited. We have bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and office props but very limited living room props. I would like to see some more vehicles. For professional use, the ability to add your own 3D objects would be amazing.

The lighting controls don't translate real-world metrics.

Maneuvering from your camera view to the lighting controls can be a long process. It would be great to be able to change the lighting parameters like you are talking to a gaffer on set.

There is no back button or Command Z.

The game crashes a lot. Make sure you save regularly.

Final Thoughts

If you are still wondering why I would write about a cinematography computer game on a photography blog, you have to understand this is all about building your fundamental photography skills. For a novice filmmaker/photographer, this is similar to a flight simulator, but you are on a film set. If your skill level is intermediate, this game can push you to try bigger and bolder visual concepts with no risk or cost. If you are a practicing professional, it will give you the tools you need to sell your ideas at a high level. That is why I will continue to play for a long time.

Matt has been teasing actor blocking features on his Instagram, so the next update is highly anticipated. Cinetracer is available for $89.99 on Steam.

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Fstoppers Reviews Cinetracer: Learn Cinematography by Gaming

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Envision flying around with a jet pack creating massive film sets like you are a cinematography superhero. Cinetracer is a realistic cinematography simulator where you play a Director, and your quest is to make an epic movie. The real purpose of this program is to create beautiful storyboards for pitching.

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GEORGE LUCAS AND THE RETURN OF THE CELLULOID

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GEORGE LUCAS AND THE RETURN OF THE CELLULOID

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George Lucas fought tooth and nail to kill off film so he could shoot the prequel trilogies, only for the latest trilogy of star wars movies to be shot on 35mm celluloid film.

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It was George Lucas who led Hollywood's move to digital, pushing for its use in everything from shooting and editing to projection and special effects. His second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones, was the first major film to be shot on high-definition digital cameras instead of photographic film in 2002-the biggest change to the medium and methodology of filmmaking since the 1880s. He said at the time of shooting digitally:

It's very much like going from frescoes to oils - one is very rigid, very disciplined, very definite about the way it works, and the other is much more open, offers you more options and enables you to manipulate the pictures more, and I think that bothers people. But audiences can't tell the difference.

Well, maybe they can-and they're using Lucas's own baby to prove it. J.J. Abrams's new Star Wars movie, the first of the Skywalker sagas to be made without its creator, was shot with actual film; the behind-the-scenes footage plays up the fact that the filmmakers lugged unwieldy 70mm IMAX cameras into the Arabian desert to achieve some of their shots (around the one-minute mark):

The Force Awakens has now become the fastest movie to gross $1 billion ever and has nearly universal positive reviews. The look and feel of the movie is a huge part of why. "[Abrams's] visual wit may not be, as it is for Spielberg, a near-magical reflex, but nor is Abrams suckered into bombast by technological zeal, as Lucas has been, and the new movie, as an act of pure storytelling, streams by with fluency and zip," the New Yorker's film critic Anthony Lane said.

"I would argue film sets the standard and once it's no longer available, the ability to shoot the benchmark goes away," Abrams said of his decision (paywall) to shoot Star Wars the way Lucas did in 1977. "Suddenly you're left with what is, in many cases, perfectly good but not necessarily the best, the warmest, the most rich and detailed images."

The next Star Wars sequel will also be shot on film.

This year's awards darling, Carol, was also shot on Super 16mm film. (The number refers to the size of the actual frame; the larger the frame, the more detail it can hold.) Quentin Tarantino's latest film, The Hateful Eight, was shot on 70mm film and, at 100 cinemas across the United States, it is being shown on old projectors designed to show off that ultra-wide frame-making how the film was made a selling point in and of itself. Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson (who shot The Master on 70mm) recently sat down to discuss the joys of working with film:

Tarantino, who bought a cinema in Los Angeles that only shows and projects film prints, says the 70mm format could be "film's last stand." Both he and Anderson credit Interstellar director Christopher Nolan for helping to keep film alive by refusing to shoot in 3D or on digital for his blockbusters. It was recently revealed that Nolan's next project, a World War II film called Dunkirk, will be shot entirely in 70mm.

It caps a remarkable comeback for the medium of film, one worthy of Hollywood itself. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Earlier in 2015, it reached a deal with the biggest film studios to continue to supply them with film stock as directors like Nolan, Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg all committed to using film for the next few years. Kodak recently said its film division will actually be profitable in 2016.

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George Lucas tried to kill off film for digital, but the new Star Wars is helping to revive it

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It was George Lucas who led Hollywood's move to digital, pushing for its use in everything from shooting and editing to projection and special effects. His second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones, was the first major film to be shot on high-definition digital cameras instead of photographic film in 2002-the biggest change to the medium and methodology of filmmaking since the 1880s.

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ARTICLE ON CINETRACER ON UNREAL ENGINE WEBSITE

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ARTICLE ON CINETRACER ON UNREAL ENGINE WEBSITE

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Matt Workman is part cinematographer, part game developer, part previs expert, and one-hundred-percent creative. After getting started working on music videos, he honed his camera craft in New York City where he shot commercials and content for clients like BMW, L'Oreal, Google, and Facebook, before turning his hand to software development. He's the founder of Cinematography Database, a cinematography media and education company, and the creator of Cine Designer for Cinema 4D, a product for visualizing real-world camera work and lighting in 3D.

In this podcast hosted by fxguide's Co-Founder Mike Seymour, Workman talks about his innovative new Unreal Engine-based product Cine Tracer. He discusses how he's designed the realistic cinematography simulator to be accessible to non-3D users, what it brings to virtual production workflows, and how he sees it developing in the future as hardware and engine technology evolve. You can listen to the full podcast below, or read on for an overview.

Although Workman's first software product Cine Designer was for users of 3D content creation program Cinema 4D, with Cine Tracer he's designing a solution for people who don't have the time or inclination to learn a 3D program. He sometimes describes it as a game, drawing parallels with Fortnite Creative, which helps to make it seem more accessible and less intimidating to non-3D people. The fact that the Early Access version of Cine Tracer is only available on Steam reinforces this positioning.

At its most basic, Cine Tracer enables you to quickly and easily build, populate, and light a set, select a camera from a range of real-world replicas, look through the camera to position it, and take a picture, which then goes to a storyboard. What makes it special, however, is that the output from Cine Tracer is remarkably accurate. The built-in intelligence limits you to doing things that are replicable in real life. So, for example, the virtual tripod heads only move in a way that real tripods would do; a camera on a dolly track stays at a fixed height as you move it forward or backward; lenses have finite zoom ranges; and so on.

Bringing believability to scenes with ray tracing
With the advent of real-time ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4.22, the accuracy of the lighting is even more impressive, and that's something filmmakers value particularly highly because it contributes so much to the believability of the scene.

"Cinematographers use light to shape the emotion," explains Workman. "Now that light behaves like it does in the real world, or much closer to it, you can actually believe the scene a little bit more and it can actually feel like something."

Conversely, when the lighting is wrong in the previs, the cinematographers can't engage with it.

"One of the big things is light coming through windows into a room; it's like the aperture of the world," says Workman. "You're in an interior, the windows are what bring the light in, and so much tone is set by that. If the shadows aren't correct-coming through the window, and coming through trees, and hitting the wall-the whole thing falls apart. If you showed a cinematographer virtual light like that, instantly they wouldn't like it. When you turn this [ray tracing] on, the light coming into the room just feels amazing."
Populating the scene with props and characters
When it comes to populating the scene, Workman provides a large library of assets, drawing from 3D stock sites like Unreal Engine Marketplace, and building specialized items himself. Everything is to scale, and materials react correctly to light, making it as easy as possible for users to assemble their sets. There's also intelligent placement built in so that chairs will sit on the ground, for example, and object manipulation is very simple.

In the future, Workman wants to either offer a bridge to a tool like SketchUp, or provide simple modeling tools himself, so that art departments can also use Cine Tracer for set dressing.

Characters are another story. Workman uses static 3D scans of people, including himself, and draws from widely available resources on the internet. He's also used assets from Unreal Engine, including the Paragon collection, which Epic made freely available to developers, combined with eyes from Seymour's own digital human project, Meet Mike. Further characters come from Reallusion Character Creator; these come with an IK rig, which Workman suggests can be animated using Moka Studio.

IK rigs also enable users to custom-pose the characters. Workman has put effort into simplifying this process, which can be quite complex for non-animators. He intends to continue to focus on improving usability in this area in the future. He's also interested in improving the facial posing capabilities with tools like Apple's ARKit.
Supporting cinematographers' platform of choice
Speaking of Apple, Workman has early access to the new Mac Pro, coming this fall, and is seriously impressed. While the computer doesn't currently support RTX graphics cards with real-time ray tracing capabilities, it is significantly more powerful than existing Mac OS offerings, able to handle many more lights, larger textures, much higher-resolution meshes, and so on. And since-according to Workman-95% of directors, DPs, and art departments are Mac users, having a sufficiently performant Mac OS workstation that Cine Tracer can run to full capacity on is critical.

When it comes to hardware, another factor of interest is the controller. As well as working with a mouse and keyboard, Cine Tracer enables you to plug in a game controller such as an Xbox or PS4 one. This makes it much easier for non-3D users to animate cameras, as Workman explains.

"Animating cameras is pretty hard in general," he says. "There's a lot of nuance in understanding how to animate rotations. What's very easy and intuitive for most people is flying a drone and understanding how to get a certain path, or playing Fortnite, which is a strafe-based movement system where the left stick is movement and the right stick is turning. That's pretty intuitive to most people."

By supporting this kind of camera control in Cine Tracer, any director, creative director, or whoever wants to try moving the camera around is able to learn very quickly how to do it, encouraging collaboration during the previs process.
Looking to the future
So what excites Workman about the road ahead for real-time technology? With the new Chaos physics and destruction engine coming soon to Unreal Engine, users will be able to add even more realism to their scenes, something he is looking forward to.

"I just have to kind of get the serious stuff out of the way and then we'll be able to smash cars through walls," he says. "That'll be fun!"

As far as frame rates, Workman already has more performance than he needs for his purposes. Unlike VR applications that require up to 90 fps, Cine Tracer only requires 24 or 30 fps, and Workman is looking to add a mode to cap rates. In fact, for final-quality stills, the frame rate is almost irrelevant. Users frame their scene with ray tracing and other high-quality settings turned off, then turn everything on and take a still, which may take a few seconds. This approach is blisteringly fast compared to offline rendering, and doesn't hamper the workflow.

Workman has a history of providing educational content on Cinematography Database, and envisions using Cine Tracer to produce more content in the future. It's an area he's had to put on hold while he's been working full-time on the product. Once Cine Tracer is more mature, and RTX graphics more accessible, he looks forward to getting back into that side of things.

"There is no better tool to illustrate onset work, regarding lighting, because lighting is so hard to teach," he says. "Even if you're on set in reality, showing people how to light, sometimes you need to be 30 feet above to really see what's happening. So it's really the perfect illustration and teaching tool."

Focusing on performance and narrative
Seymour wraps things up with a summary of what tools like Cine Tracer can bring to the film production process, especially for live-action projects-by getting the technicalities out of the way before actual shooting begins, filmmakers can focus on getting the best performance from the actors, and on ensuring the story comes through.

"That whole point of the communication of the story is why we go to films, why we see movies, why we play the games," he says. "It's the narrative arc that we care about. But you're not doing the narrative arc justice if you film it poorly, if you stage it badly, and so you need to be able to do both. By doing something like Cine Tracer, you can have that experimentation time, you can really do whatever it is in your process to get the shots that you want."

This podcast interview with Matt Workman is part of our Visual Disruptors series. Visit our Virtual Production hub for more podcasts, videos, articles, and insights.

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Cine Tracer delivers easy-to-use realistic cinematography simulation

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Matt Workman is part cinematographer, part game developer, part previs expert, and one-hundred-percent creative. After getting started working on music videos, he honed his camera craft in New York City where he shot commercials and content for clients like BMW, L'Oreal, Google, and Facebook, before turning his hand to software development.

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PRE PRODUCTION - HOW HAS THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION BENEFITTED THE ROLES OF DIRECTORS AND CINEMATOGRAPHERS?
- There are now many different pre-production programs available to directors and cinematographers so that they can visualise storyboards, shotlists, and pre-pre-light sets too through the use of specific programs.
- some of these programs include artemis pro, shot designer, cinetracer, and storyboarder.

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INTERVIEW WITH CREATOR OF CINETRACER MATT WORKMAN

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INTERVIEW WITH CREATOR OF CINETRACER MATT WORKMAN

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Get in there and visualize real-world filmmaking now.

There's a lot of buzz about virtual production and real-time game engines right now. These tools and techniques are being directly used on television, commercials, and films - the best tools replicate the real-world cinematography experience.

That's what Matt Workman, the founder of Cinematography Database, has also done with Cine Tracer, a real-time cinematography simulator made in Unreal Engine and available on Steam.

Here Matt outlines exactly what Cine Tracer is, why he built it, and why the 'game' is already being utilized for actual production planning.
b&a: Why did you make Cine Tracer? What was it in your previous work or wish list for a game that made you jump into it?
Matt Workman: I worked as a commercial cinematographer in NYC for 10 years and by the end, I was working a lot VFX heavy projects. One day I decided that I wanted to be able to my own 'Production Previs' and I started to work in SketchUp and Maya. Five years ago I stared a company called Cinematography Database and sold a Cinema 4D previs plug-in called Cine Designer. It did really well, for a very niche market, but the high prices of the DCC kept it from being main stream.

About a year and a half ago Epic Games approached me and asked if I would be interested in porting Cine Designer into Unreal Engine. After a few weeks of tinkering I was hooked with being able to work in real time and I spent the last year of my life dedicated to building what is now Cine Tracer.
b&a: Can you describe, from an overall point of view, how a player plays Cine Tracer? What things did you keep considering, as you've been developing it, to make sure it stayed fun, and like a game?
Matt Workman: My main goal with Cine Tracer is to make it simple to learn and fun to use/play. While it is technically a game made with Unreal Engine and sold on Steam, it is really an app that uses familiar 'game mechanics.'

I've used almost every 3D animation program for previs and all of them have a steep learning curve. The simple task of moving a 3D camera around a viewport is not immediately intuitive. In video games you use WASD and the Mouse or a Game Pad (we support both) and most children can figure it out in seconds. So we use that for moving around.

The fun part is that I can combine the best of video games like Minecraft Creative and Fortnite Creative with the 3D applications like SketchUp, Cinema 4D, etc.

b&a: What were some of the very specific challenges of implementing different 'systems'? For example, how do you implement a dolly with track to make it act like that, or how do you incorporate the realistic lights?
Matt Workman: The first challenge was learning how a game engine works. I had been developing plugins for Maya and Cinema 4D, but Unreal Engine is a completely different animal. Epic Games gave me some private one on one tutoring to get me going and my first project was to make a camera dolly that you could 'drive.' I also had a 3D scan of myself and I wanted to me a playable character. Once I figured those two things out, the rest was just a matter of grinding.

The videos I posted of the pre-alpha game went viral, so I knew we had something that was at least novel.

b&a: This game is made with Unreal Engine - what things in Unreal were particularly beneficial to you in making it? Were you and are players taking advantage of particular lighting setups and abilities in Unreal to simulate cinematography?
Matt Workman: Unreal Engine has a visual scripting language called Blueprints. It's very similar to Resolve Nodes and Cinema 4D Xpresso. That language makes programming so fast and even fun, that I was able to go from 0 knowledge of the engine to shipping a commercial early release build in less than a year.

As we are a little further along now, we are about to release our first build with RTX Real Time Ray Tracing technology. So we have the ability to turn on ray traced shadows, reflections, AO, translucency, and global illumination. It's very early days, but we have a lot of excited users willing to be at the front lines.

RTX makes all of the lighting more accurate and that is what my core user is looking for. They want to be able to express lighting and framing in pre production.
b&a: To me it feels like this could of course also totally become a way of producing storyboards/previs for an actual project. Do you see it that way at all? Are any users already doing that? What would it take to make it more of a virtual filmmaking tool, if you wanted to go down that path?
Matt Workman: Cine Tracer has been embraced by the filmmaking community and it's being used to plan feature films, television shows, and commercials around the world. I believe that for the production world, it will be the standard in a few years.

Earlier this year I was invited to Cupertino to work with Apple on the 'new' Mac Pro. Apple has doubled down on making hardware for professional filmmakers and they saw Cine Tracer as an important part of that eco system. You can read my 'Pro App Developer' quote on the Mac Pro press room post.

My vision for Cine Tracer includes 'indie virtual production' but that term is still pretty foreign to most filmmakers. I think that introducing it as a planning game/tool, helps people be less intimidated by it. I plan to incorporate Apple's ARKit to do live facial motion capture and now pose estimation for an indie live mocap setup later this year. Once people see that they can 'puppet' 3D humans live, I think a light bulb will go off in their heads that this is possibly more than just a planning tool.
Check out more new VFX tools in our #vfxtoolsweek series.
Buy issue #2 of the magazine

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Cine Tracer: A Tool for Real-Time Cinematography Simulation

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Get in there and visualize real-world filmmaking now. There's a lot of buzz about virtual production and real-time game engines right now. These tools and techniques are being directly used on television, commercials, and films - the best tools replicate the real-world cinematography experience.