20 years ago HBO made the tv show Rome. They filmed it on analog film. I’ve recently been watching it for the first time and it’s absolutely amazing how well it looks compared to shows shot on digital from the same time. It looks good even compared to modern cinema and because it’s film they could do 4k captures.
For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.
Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.
I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.
We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.
Random idea about “the look”. Doing an analog transfer might kill the gradation banding that digital images suffer from, especially those that have gone through lossy or low bit depth edits to brightness values in large flat color areas like sky. Analog transfer may add dithering to the bands to make them look more natural.
I'm a film colorist and have done the film print out method plenty of times.
You don't need to print to film to dither and reduce banding, it's trivial to add grain to achieve the same (either digitally or via film grain scans which are overlayed).
The film outs are just a different method of getting a film tone, curve, and grain - though honestly I've done some where people were unable to identify which was the digital master and which was the post film out version. Much of the time it's just an ego boost for the director and dp and a competent colorist can easily recreate it. That said, it's fun to do and means less work on my end so I don't discourage it.
For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.
Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.
I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.
We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.