watch "As the Clock Ticks" - Experimental black-and-white test

Hi all!

So over the last couple of days I decided to try my hand at emulating the look of early 1950s film, and made it in black-and-white for good measure.

I'll just post the description from my Vimeo account here:

This is just a really simple test video edited in FCP X 10.1.1 and Motion 5.

I wanted to emulate the look of early 1950s-style cinema, so I ran the footage through Motion and decreased some of the contrast, added film grain, added spots, and then gave it the Projector effect inside of FCP to give it that "jitter" effect. Back in Motion, I applied a 2.35 letterbox for a reference guide. Then in FCP X, I changed the size of the project to 1920x816, and then scaled the imported clip from Motion so that the first pixel of the letterbox only showed occasionally, thanks to the jitter effect from the Projector preset.

The result is the look of this video - which, is itself, a test for a new film I'm writing that will begin production just as soon as I can afford it!

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As said above, this is a test video for a very spoof-tastic film I'm writing, much in the style of Mel Brooks. I'm quite pleased with the results, now I just need to figure out how to make the audio sound a lot better and more... well, '50s-ish, I guess!

Anyway, here's the actual video!

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BSGPI-3BA

Vimeo

So let me know what you think? Is it convincing? Without the handheld look, would it look better? Does it need more film grain added? And also, what does Maris Crane look like?!?!

Just let me know what you think, please! Any opinions are welcome!

I think that it's pretty convincing. However, I can clearly see that this is a modern camera because of the clear look (ya know, the pixels and stuff like that). Next time, probrably...... use a crappier camera! (Lol I don't know). But good job

DaRuler0000 said:

I think that it's pretty convincing. However, I can clearly see that this is a modern camera because of the clear look (ya know, the pixels and stuff like that). Next time, probrably...... use a crappier camera! (Lol I don't know). But good job

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Hmm, not sure what you mean by clear and the pixels. Is it too sharp, did it need to be in softer focus? That probably would've helped, but at the time of shooting I didn't really think it through - I wanted to see what all could be done in post! And by George, it's actually pretty easy to achieve this effect, as long as lighting plays nicely with you!

One thing I learned - DO NOT CRUSH THE BLACKS FOR THIS TYPE OF VIDEO! Film never really had the ability to crush the blacks, so nothing produced before the late '90s looked as dark or as crisp as they do now. So I shot this with the TechniColor CineStyle preset I installed on my T3i, and then lowered the contrast a bit more in post, in order to make it look a bit more native to its era. Just thought I'd share that bit, too!

Thanks for the feedback!

The compression messed it up a bit, but it looked good overall.

If you use a couple of fresnels to light it up that will help to shape the look. And if you shoot it on film that would be perfect.

ChimpPhobiaFilms said:

The compression messed it up a bit, but it looked good overall.

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Yeah, both YouTube and Vimeo compressed it quite heavily, so I'll have to see if there's a way to fix that.

baoliun said:

If you use a couple of fresnels to light it up that will help to shape the look. And if you shoot it on film that would be perfect.

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Indeed, shooting it on film would be perfect, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of this test, not to mention that I can't afford a film camera and film itself! But someday I'd love to shoot on actual film.