Oh hush, Robert
Robert Rodriguez in Wired: “The only reason you would shoot on film would be for nostalgia reasons…It’s embarrassing. We’re still dragging that same film corpse around after 100 years.”
Rodriguez joins George Lucas and James Cameron as vocal proponents of HD, specifically the Sony CineAlta equipment. Are these professionals the first wave, or tilting at windmills?
A few thoughts:
- Over the last century, film has made massive improvements in resolution, speed/grain, and range. Is it really “embarassing” that the same mechanical equipment used for Gandhi (Academy Award, Best Cinematography, 1983) can also be used for Road to Perdition (Academy Award, Best Achievement in Cinematography, 2003), while in the two decades since, Kodak’s Vision2 and other stocks have continued to improve?
- HD is a system developed for TV: the “high” means relative to the (atrocious) definition of NTSC television. Using an HD camera may be great for the local news, but now imagine blowing up that same amount of detail to a cinema screen.
- It’s interesting that the three directors loudly proclaiming that film is dead seem to be doing movies heavily laden with special effects — of course they’ll gravitate to digital acquisition. Lucas, the worst offender, apparently thinks of the camera merely as a way to get human actors into his ILM-generated world. Rodriguez is a guy who likes to do it all himself (note the roles in his filmography.) He’s his own camera operator and editor, so no doubt he loves the fact that no scanning is required before he’s happily editing away in his garage. Fine, but not how everyone works.
- Have you heard any cinematographers clamoring for HD lately? Me neither.
- Touting the cost savings of HD is a bit misleading: when the images don’t match, can you make direct comparisons? True, there is an order of magnitude difference to the expense, but let’s face it: studios aren’t going to allow directors to spend those dollars somewhere else (screenwriting, perhaps?) — they’ll just expect HD productions to do more with less. And the result will be uglier films; even Episode II, which was shot entirely on HD with a budget exceeding the GNP of Guatemala, looked like shit.
Moral: digital has much promise, but it hasn’t beaten film yet. Let us praise the American Society of Cinematographers and others who quietly ignore a few impatient directors as they look for tools that will take motion picture quality forward. Still, Rodriguez and his acolytes can take heart: there is some very promising equipment on the horizon.