So I've finished work for the year which means I'm free to do what I want until January, so a few weeks ago I used some of my free time to shoot a music video for one of my friend's band. They pretty much gave me the freedom to do what I wanted and the budget was pretty decent so I thought I'd take the plunge and shoot it on Super 16mm film to achieve the moody and edgy vibe that the band wanted.
So at the start of the week I went to my local rental house and had a look about at some of the cameras and just spent hours there geeking out like I usually do. I have a pretty good relationship with the owner because I'm there renting stuff for work on a weekly basis pretty much, but 99% of the time I'm leaving there with the Arri Alexa and don't really pay too much attention to much of the other cameras. So Leon the owner was excited to hear I was looking for a Super 16mm film camera to use on this project.
Leon was a documentary filmmaker like me when he was younger, and before I'd even finished my sentence he was already digging through to the deepest corners of his warehouse. And like Obi Wan Kenobi handing over a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker, Leon handed me this dusty old camera that had been buried in the depths of the rental house for years. An Aaton XTR Prod and I was so hyped.
Like always Leon started telling me stories about the camera and the history of it. Leon had used this camera pretty much through entirely through the later half of the 90s and into the 2000s, taking it all around the world to places including Bosnia, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Burma. So this camera's shutter has really seen some sights, and I felt blessed that Leon was letting me use it for free.
It was also pretty cool finding out that some of my favourite films were shot on this camera, including City of God, Pi, Enter the Void, The Hurt Locker, Captain Philips and even parts of the new Jason Bourne movie. This camera is held in high regard as one of the best film cameras ever designed.
Leon gave me some out of date rolls of film to practice with as I'd never even loaded a reel of film into a camera before, as I'd never been to film school this was an entirely new principle for me to learn. And it wasn't too difficult for me to get my head around, I got pretty confident at it after my second try. Luckily for me the XTR Prod is so genius in it's design that it doesn't have to be loaded entirely in darkness, so I didn't have to fiddle around in a dark room to get the film stock into the magazine. Usually with Super 16 film you'd need to load it in a completely blacked out space because obviously celluloid film is sensitive to light and you run the risk of exposing your film stock and wasting £35. But like I said the Aaton XTR Prod is ingeniously designed so that you only need to load the film onto the motor, and feed it through a slot in the middle of the magazine, the rest can be done in daylight including looping it through the pressure plate and slotting the film onto the take up wheel. It's not a difficult process by any means but you need to know what you're doing so you don't go ruining film, and by the end of the shoot I was loading the camera in under 3 minutes.
Another principle to learn whilst shooting on film is being able to shoot with not actually being able to see the footage your shooting. The viewfinder on any film camera is entirely optical and isn't a complete representation of what you're footage is going to look like, it's only purpose is to help you frame your shot. It doesn't represent focus or exposure so those things you're gonna have to do completely manually and if you fuck up then you're not going to find out until after your film has been developed. So to measure focus you need to take a measuring tape and measure the distance from your subject to the film plane. (which is marked on the side of the camera by a circle with a line through it, you've probably seen it.) You then have to use the lens markings to match your determined distance. This is easy enough in static shots, but when the camera and subject is moving, you really need to take note of your distances and having someone pulling focus for you really helps too. What I really liked about this process though was that it makes you really conscious of blocking a scene and everybody's relation to each other within a scene.
To nail your exposure you need to use a light meter adjust your aperture accordingly. Luckily for me this wasn't a completely new principle to learn, one of the first pieces of advice on filmmaking I had when I left school was from a DP who told me it was good practice to get familiar with a light meter and not constantly be relying on your camera. And I've pretty much used a light meter on every film I've made since, I actually don't like shooting without one.
For most of you that probably don't use a light meter to shoot with, the dials and numbers probably look a bit intimidating but I promise it isn't as confusing as it looks. You just match the centre to dial until it matches the ASA of your film stock, hold the meter up against your subject so it takes a light reading, turn the dial until the red marking lines up with the number you got from the reading, and then the outside marking will tell you the aperture that your lens need to be at for the correct exposure.
The next thing I had to think about was what stock I wanted to shoot on. And I decided to buy a couple of test reels of different stock before I started shooting just so I could get a bigger batch of the stock I would eventually like. The stocks I tried out were Kodak 50D, Kodak 250D, Kodak 500T and Kodak Triple X, just so I had a good variety to choose from. It ended up costing me around £150 for this amount of film which definitely isn't cheap but was worth the investment not just for now but for also knowing what film stocked I liked for future projects too.
I ended up going for the Kodak 500T stock because I really liked how punchy the colours looked but also that analogue grittiness it had, I especially liked how the stock made the colour red really pop. So I ended up buying 5 reels this stock which covered me for the full shoot. This ended up costing me around £175 just for the stock, but added up to around £495 for processing and scanning at 2k resolution. This seems super expensive but considering Leon didn't charge me for borrowing the camera and lenses, the film stock was the only real big part of the budget. In total I only spent around $650 on this video which is actually less than I usually spend when shooting on digital which really surprised me actually. I can't show you any footage from the film yet because it's still being edited and the band isn't releasing the song until the end of January so you're going to have to wait for that. But here's a little sneak peak for you, these two stills really capture the colour and grittiness you get from the 500T film stock, I think it's just stunning.
After shooting this music video I'm definitely going to be looking at shooting more projects on film in the future, I've absolutely fallen in love with the process. Sadly because most my work is digital based documentary work I really don't know when the next opportunity for me to shoot on film will be, but I've got a concept for a short film that would be perfect with the feel of super 16, so hopefully I can get around to making it that in the near future. But for all you filmmakers out there who are happy and comfortable with their digital cameras, I highly recommend stepping out of that comfort zone and experimenting with film, there's a whole bunch of different principles for you to learn that will really advance your skills as a filmmaker.
PS. If you do end up shooting on film after reading this post, send it over to me on instagram because I'd love to check it out!
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