Jargon

The Girlfriend recently asked me, "Who is your blog for? You have this 'film insider' stuff, then politics, then comic strips, then slice-of-life stuff." She said that it appeared that my "audience" would be fellow film professionals, since I, apparently, use a lot of insider terms and jargon.

So, today we're going to talk about film formats, and why they are of (minor)(some) importance in filmmaking.

35mm film is the standard for most theatrical films. The cameras take big reels of film, usual 400 feet long, but sometimes longer, and run them through the camera at a rate of 24 frames per second. The film is sized just like the 35mm film you run through your older still cameras, but turned on its side. Thus the image on motion picture film is actually smaller than the one you get on a 35mm camera. Which is pretty impressive, considering the image winds up getting projected to 50' across in a theater.

Unlike the home movies we shot 30 years ago, motion picture film, or stock, is actually negative film. It gets "printed" onto another set of negatives, creating a positive, and that (or rather a copy of that) is what gets shown at the theater. So, not only is the motion picture frame smaller than your 35mm slide film, it's actually a copy of a copy.

There are other film sizes out there. When I was a kid, my father had an 8mm (well, Super8, technically) camera. It had no sound, and the pictures were jerky, and, unlike with theatrical movies, what you ran through the projector was what came out of the camera; lose it or scratch it and that's that.

An intermediate size, created about 30 years after the 35mm size was standardized, is 16mm. As you might guess, it's a little less than half the size of 35mm stock, and the frame size is thus 1/4 that of a 35mm frame. The advantages are that the film itself is cheaper, and you use less of it. Also, the processing, which is generally charged by the foot, costs less as well. If you were in school in the 60s and 70s, pretty much all of the films you saw in school were 16mm, shown through those big blue Bell and Howell projectors that geeks like me threaded for you.

The obvious disadvantage to using 16mm is that there is a noticeable degradation of the image. It's just like with your digital cameras and the megapixels: The bigger the source material, the better looking the image (everything else being equal). But sometimes that grainy look is actually what the director is going for. The TV show "Homicide" was shot on 16mm stock, and it has an edgy, rough look to it that complements a show whose tag line is "Life on the Streets." 16mm cameras are also noticeably smaller and lighter than 35mm cameras, so it's easier to use them hand-held (as opposed to on a tripod or a dolly). You can also mount them in weird places more easily, like off a car bumper or on the handlebars of a bicycle.

The advent of DVDs has made 16mm more acceptable. While in a theater you would easily notice the difference in image quality versus 35mm, it's much harder to tell on a regular television set. When a 16mm project gets a theatrical release, it is almost always converted (blown up) to 35mm, as that is the standard in movie theaters.

Who uses 16mm? Most film students, for starters. But a fair number of independent films are shot on it. In fact, some Oscar nominees in the past couple of years used the format. These include Hustle and Flow, Transamerica, The Squid and the Whale, The Station Agent, Vera Drake, and Thirteen.

Of course, there are all kinds of variations. 16mm film, like the 35mm film that you put into your still camera, originally had to sets of holes on either side, called sprocket holes. Most cameras today only have sprockets on one side, so the image was made a tad bigger to use that space where the other set of holes used to be. This is generally called Super16, and in fact all of the movies I mentioned above were shot in this format.

Next time we'll talk about video, hi-definition video, and how it is creeping into mainstream film production.