Film vs Digital

I saw a new print of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the theater last weekend and was struck by the difference between the old-fashioned lighting and film stock used to make that picture and the digital processes that are commonplace in films today. On the big screen, that difference was profound, and not in a good way for the digital workflow.

I think you can see the difference in these stills from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Note the ugliness of the backgrounds and the harsh lines in the faces in the digital vs the more subdued beauty of those same elements in the film.

It’s odd that I lean towards the argument that film is better than digital in movies because with still photography I prefer digital.

Historically, my argument has been that the look of film is not some magic from on high, but the result of the choices made by humans who were trying to get a certain look. Some films were designed to be super saturated, some neutral, some warm, some cool. Point is, there is nothing natural about them. They were created by technicians in white lab coats, each with its own special color palette, dynamic range, contrast, grain, and whatnot.

Digital is essentially the same thing. Although the sensor captures raw data, camera and software manufacturers translate that raw data into what you see in preview or when you open it in your digital darkroom software. Just like with film, choices have been made by technicians in white lab coats and that’s what you see.

The main difference is that there are many more options for changing the look of digital images than there are for film, and also that with film most of those changes occur in the setup before the scene is shot, whereas with digital most of the changes occur after, or as they say, in post. Film shoots use lighting techniques, filters, and gels to their specific look. Digital films are typically shot to be as flat as possible, to try to capture the most information in the file so that it can be manipulated best with software after the images have been captured.

The counter-argument I would make against the idea that film is better than digital, is that what you see in the above images isn’t so much the difference between film and digital as it is the difference between the skills of the people who made those particular films. Could Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon look the same, or better, if it had been shot by the same people in the same way with digital? Could Everything Everywhere All at Once look like Crouching Tiger if that’s what the people who made it wanted, and they had the skills to pull it off?

In my own work, I’ve done it both ways. Going back to what I said about people in white lab coats designing films to have unique characteristics, when I came to understand digital, I realized that I could effectively design my own film with its own special look that would work best with whatever project I was working on.

Bunker Mentality is one of the more extreme examples. What I was trying to accomplish is a visual thing that I really can’t put into words. There was something kicking around in y head about contrasting human hate with nature, but hinting that hate warps how people actually see and experience nature, if not nature itself. I wanted the images to somehow communicate a special kind of nauseating sickness. I came up with this garish red green blue palette and then applied the colors inconsistently across both the bunker and nature shots.

I used multiple flashes with gels to try to accomplish all that, so what you see was captured in-camera, not digitally manipulated in post. It would be very time consuming and difficult to achieve those effects in post, if not futile on the budgets of most productions.

Curious People is another example of creating my own “film” and getting it all in camera, only for that project I created two distinct but complementary looks.

The Congress of Curious Peoples is a symposium of sorts that takes place at Coney Island USA every year. Half of it is a program of academic lectures by people who study the Sideshow and half of it is performances by some of the top sideshow artists, which can be pretty intense, to put it mildly. So I developed color palettes that I thought would distinguish between the two, but also show that they are complimentary, not at odds.

You can see that for the academic side I used muted colors leaning blue and red with little yellow, while for the performance side I used the same blues and reds but enhanced the yellow. And again, this was all done in camera using strobes and gels.

Point is, in both of those examples I essentially created my own film. That’s what I love about digital still photography. I’m much less limited by technicians in white lab coats.

So why don’t I have the same positivity about digital in film that I have for it in still photography?

Is the problem in the technology or in the craft? Are there digital movies out there that compare favorably to film? I’m sure there must be, but nothing is jumping immediately to mind. Whereas with still photography I can think of many examples.

I don’t usually think about whether a movie was film or digital. But I couldn’t help thinking about it while I was watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the big screen. The difference in quality was striking.

My guess is that, as I hinted at above, it’s because they shoot with the intention of fixing it in post more than they do for getting it right in camera. Doing it in post may save a lot of money, but something is lost. Or more likely, doing it very well in post is possible, but to achieve the quality of film actually costs more than using film and getting it right in camera. So they compromise.

But I’ll go further and guess that what is lost has as much to do with intentions as it does with technology. When you shoot film, or trying to get digital right in camera, you are more or less carving your decisions in stone. You are setting limits and working inside those limits to get the work you envisioned before you started shooting it. When your shooting strategy is to get the most information in the file so you can best manipulate it in post, you put off that decision, then you have such an infinite number of choices. It’s easy to get wishy washy, or to play to the crowd.

Constraint works, at least in the visual arts.

Thank you for reading Michael H Webster. This post is public so feel free to share it. If Substack throws up any plea for money, please ignore it. It’s them, not me.