Film School in Ten Questions Trivia Quiz

Answer: The speed of the film and the color temperature

When purchasing new film, we would want to know our requirements for the shoot. In our case, "low, indoor light" would tell us we need a fast stock that will pick up well in low light and film that is balanced to indoor, tungsten lighting.

Similar to the still photography aspect of film, the type of movie film is designated by its ASA rating or film speed. Normally, stocks range from 100 ASA to 800 ASA, but depending on the conditions of shooting and the manufacturer, these numbers can be lower or higher. A good rule to use, is the lower the lighting conditions, the higher the ASA, or film speed. In our fictitious example, we might select an ASA of around 500.

While seemingly not as important, the color temperature requires a great deal of forethought to capture the best images. Tungsten film, using an 85 filter, can be color corrected to use outdoors. Daylight balanced film, using an 80 filter can be used with tungsten lights. But if we use the wrong color stock, and don't have a filter, the results can be less than desirable.

Answer: A light meter

A light meter is extremely crucial to shooting beautiful images. Basically there are two settings on the average meter: the ASA of the film we are shooting and the frame rate we are shooting.

For our fictitious example, we are shooting ASA 500 film at a normal speed of 24 frames per second. We would adjust our light meter to these two settings and begin taking our readings. For our "low, indoor light" scene, we are going to take incidental readings off our actor or actress's face and set our aperture, or F-stop, to expose the face. This ensures the actor or actress is properly exposed on the film.

Answer: Use a clapper

Not to be confused with the life-changing product from the eighties, the clapper is used when shooting film to sync audio and video down to the exact frame. There are basic clappers and there are fancy, electronic clappers that sync with the "roll camera" button on a film camera, but the basis remains the same.

A crew member writes the take, scene and any other pertinent info on the board and holds the clapper in front the camera's view as the camera starts rolling. He or she usually says what take number it is and lets the top part of the clapper fall and strike the bottom part, giving a common sync point for the audio and video.

Answer: Use a Barney

I'm not sure where the name came from, but a barney is used to quiet the hum of the motors and the film passing through the camera's gate. Usually, Barney's are made of a soft material and wrapped snugly over the magazine of the camera.

Answer: True

Crystal-sync is on most every film camera in film making. Though there are some 8mm and 16mm wind-up cameras available that with the twist of a crank and tightening of an internal spring, can run film for a given amount of time through the camera.

Crystal sync matters the most when dialogue is shot. Since the audio is filmed on a separate piece of equipment, both have to run at exactly the same frame rate to ensure the audio will match up with the video and not gradually drift apart.

Answer: All are important and we cannot afford to forget any of them

Like a puzzle of a house of cards, a successful shoot requires a number of pieces in the right place to make the picture come out; otherwise all we have is some unexposed film and rising tempers.

Answer: Get the film processed

This is an important aspect to shooting on film. Without processing the film, we only have a paperweight to show for all of our money, time and expelled profanity. There are differing ideas of how long to wait after film is shot to process it, but most of what I have heard is not more than six months after the fact.

Processing fees can range from a standard processing, to a special processing that uses one or more extra ingredients, or leaves out a few ingredients in the processor's witch's brew. Bleach bypassing is a popular processing technique that skips the bleaching of the film, retaining the silver emulsion and thus creating a semi color saturated image. A shining example of this technique was the film "Saving Private Ryan."

Answer: Using a telecine

A telecine is a marvelous, yet dumbfounding process that transfers film shot at 24 frames-per-second to a digital source tape with a frame rate of 29.97 frames-per-second. How the inventor thought of it is beyond me, but the process involves what is called a 3:2:2 pull down, meaning every four frames of film is converted to five frames of video.

For the true trivia fan, what this really means is that film frames one and two are split into two video fields each, occupying video frame one (both fields), and field two of video frame three and field one of video frame four, respectively. Film frames two and four occupy three video fields, or one and a half video frames. These correspond to video frame two and field one of frame three; and also field two of video frame four and all of frame five. Did I lose you? If so, follow the link below to see a visual representation of the concept.

http://www.zerocut.com/tech/pulldown.html

Answer: Scan the film at a higher resolution

Some may argue, but the best path forward is to scan the film at a higher resolution.

A transferred tape from a telecine usually has a resolution of 720 w x 486 h pixels, the same standard as NTSC broadcasts. For our special effects artists, we want to give them at least a 2k plate to work with, meaning the horizontal resolution is 2048 pixels wide.

The height of the frame will vary depending on our aspect ratio, but a 4:3 image scanned at 2k equals 2048 w x 1540 h. This is factored by a 4:3 image having a 1.33 aspect ratio, meaning the width is 1.33 times greater than the height. Taking that example one step further, the NTSC standard for High Definition is 1920 w x 1080 h. Divide 1920 by 1080 and it gives you 1.77, with that being the aspect ratio. It also conveniently equals a 16 x 9 ratio, which is the street name for a high definition TV set. Intriguing, eh?

Answer: A 3:2:2 removal and re-edit the film using our original negatives to get the best possible quality

A 3:2:2 removal will remove the telecine in the original footage and bring everything back to 24 fps. Not only will it fix the frame rate, but by re-editing our original negatives, we will be enhancing the quality. Some color is lost during the telecine process and by transferring it to a computer for editing.

This process will be considerably easier because when the telecine was done, the film feet and frames were etched into the footage. Now we can cut and splice the exact frames from the original to match the edited version.