The 'Film' Look

Shooting on film looks great, but it's expensive and not an option for student film. Luckily, there are countless numbers of tutorials and explanations on youtube regarding how to achieve the film look.
But why is that film look so desirable?

There are a number of differences between film and digital with arguably, the biggest contributing factor being colour. Many YouTube film-makers try to achieve the film look with colour correction through software such as Adobe After Effects or 'Color'. The colour in film seems to be much more contrasting, vibrant and deep. Another factor that contributes to the film look is FPS (frames per second). Films are shot at 24 fps, and although the average moviegoer won't be able to tell the difference between 24fps and 30fps, there is a difference.

Control of the camera also has a major affect. If the camera is shaking everywhere, not focused properly and controlled in an amatuer fashion, it won't look like it's been shot by a filmmaker, just a student with a camera; filmmakers should use tripods, dollys and steadicams to a achieve a much better image.

Perhaps another very obvious giveaway in regards to film vs. digital is the aspect ratio. When you see a film on TV, you'll notice the aspect ration becomes letter-boxed (most of the time). This is because televisions are made accustomed to the 16:9 aspect ratio whereas film is usually shot in either 2.35:1 or 1.85:1. The camera that we and the majority of other student film makers use shoots in 16:9 which is why during the editing stage, many choose to add the 'letterbox' effect to achieve that film look.

The video below shows a great comparison of digital and video including the main differences between each. The point of the video is to see how closely the film look can be replicated on digital. The end effect is quite impressive. 

Achieving the film look may not be not necessary, but as Tarantino was saying, it all helps to create the illusion of what a movie really is.

Taking these things into account I tried to make a short video of my dog playing, look more filmic;

A screen shot from raw, unedited video.

As you can see form the still, the colours are a little dull and could do with some correction.

Using the technology that I have available (Final Cut), I only went through a couple of stages to get to the finished result.

1. 'Widescreen'

 The cheap effect of altering the aspect ratio of my video from 16:9 to 2:35:1 by simply adding the 'letterbox' effect.
2. 3-way Colour Correction
The most important step of the two. As you can see from the visual colour correction diagrams below, there are a number of things I changed. First, the saturation, which refers to how 'bright' the colour is. No saturation will make the video black and white, whereas full saturation will show an unnatural, vibrant picture. I bumped up the saturation slightly to enhance the colours, but not ruin them.
I then made both the blacks and the mids slightly darker to create more depth, and made them both ever so slightly blue, whilst moving the whites more toward orange.

Original

Colour Corrected

The process was purely experimental, seeing what suited the video best, and colour correcting accordingly. I assume each location will require different colour correction and alterations, but practising these skills before the editing stage will surely help me in the long run.

Here is the end result -

The image looks deeper and colours are more vibrant because of colour correction.