American cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who is mostly famous for his camera work on films like “Looper”, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and “Knives Out” also has quiet astonishing results on film emulation on his website.
In his so called Display Preparation Demo he compares 35mm film to the Arri Alexa (film emulated) while also explaining his thoughts on the, according to him “false”, yet dominant narrative that the selection of the camera type or film stock type has a major leverage point on defining the photographic look and that the audiences perceptual experience of the final image is significantly defined by the camera format itself in ways that can’t be controlled otherwise. Yedlin sees this assumption as problematic and not supported by the evidence and later on continues to say to not think of a camera as a lookmaker but merely as a data collection device that records uninterpreted data about the light coming into the lens and that the aesthetics of the photographic look are created later on downstream in the processing pipeline. By comparing the 35mm film with the (matched) Arri Alexa footage he tries to further prove his point:
Steve Yedlin doesn’t argue that there are still small differences between both images that purely derive from the very different post process pipeline those clips come from. His argument is that those differences are too minor to change the perceptual experience of the viewer and don’t actually add to the tone and feel of what’s seen. Yedlin is contrasting the opinions of many cinematographers just as Hoyte Van Hoytema, who openly declared his love for the large IMAX format time and time again.
In a follow up document to the Display Preparation Demo, Yedlin writes, “As artists, to put all of our faith in the illusory simplicity of bundled systems instead of understanding the analytic components that are the undeniable building blocks of the process is to give up our control and authorship.” He believes that in order to correctly transform digital data to look like like real film more research and development has to be done. Yedlin is talking about the idea of a mathematical complex and precise transformation of a cameras data that takes all the different attributes and how they interfere with each other into consideration for a correct emulation in any circumstance. Unfortunately the industry is not quite there yet but Steve Yedlin is convinced that this is possible today and hopes to inspire other filmmakers to join in on the journey of film emulation as he believes anybody can become an author, not only be a shopper.
What Makes A Look?
In Yedlins Document he divides all attributes that form or effect a picture into either spatial & temporal attributes or Intrapixel. Some attributes also live in between those, like film’s gate weave or film grain. Spatial attributes have to do with how areas within the frame do relate to one another, like for example resolution, sharpness or some more idiosyncratic aspects like film halation. Yedlin explains it as a “characteristic phenomenon in film acquisition responsible for several visual attributes, most recognizably a reddish wrapping of light at high contrast edges.”
Temporal attributes are always dependent of motion and time, such as motion blur, exposure time, frame rate and sweep speed of a rolling shutter. Intrapixel are the most complex and according to Yedlin also the perceptually most important one’s. It includes information about the contrast, density, color idiosyncrasies and so forth. He explains it as attributes that don’t arise from areas of the frame affecting one another. “Each area responds to external stimuli (or to a transformation) in the same way as each other area in the frame”.
This categorization of attributes is key for Yedlin’s approach to film emulation but not detailed enough to actually give information on all the attributes, let alone their importance they have in a scene. This is still something, that Yedlin himself points out, “We must push for more rigorous and meaningful evaluation of camera systems.”
Conclusion
Watching and reading through Steve Yedlin’s research and opinions on the topic left me both inspired and a bit frustrated. According to him, film emulation is not living up to it’s true potential in the current state, yet seeing the digital footage he emulated next to the 35mm footage showed me that when knowing the various attributes and how to manipulate them, it is at least possible to get indistinguishable results.
