July 14, 2010 • 31 mins
Jonathan and Chris take a look at the technology that's used to make movies, from movie cameras to Steadicams, in the first episode of a two-part series.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Pollett, and
I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
(00:22):
Sitting across from me, as he always does, is senior
writer Jonathan Strickland. It's time to make the music. It's
time to light the lights. You know you you you
bring this seriousness to to the lyrics at the Muppet Show.
I have a feeling that it requires gravitas. Yes. So
we're going to talk a little bit today about the
technology used to make movies, and we're breaking this up
(00:44):
into several podcasts because, as it turns out, there's a
lot of tech that goes into making movies and it
would be way too much material to cover in one
single podcast unless we just mentioned things and then moved
on immediately. Yeah, I agree with you. So we're going
to talk about what goes into capturing images and sound
(01:07):
and then projecting them for your entertainment, you lucky people. So, um,
let's let's start off with talking about We're gonna talk
about both film and digital here, but let's start with film,
because of course that preceded digital, So film is an
interesting thing already. All right, So we're talking about a
(01:30):
material that is photoreactive. When exposed to light, a chemical
change occurs and you can capture the light from a
particular instant and preserve it on film. And this is
this is how film cameras work. You have a very simply,
(01:51):
you've got a lens that focuses light. You have an
aperture which is normally blocked by the shutter. The shutter
keeps light out from the film. Because of course, if
you if you had light constantly exposed to the film,
it would just the chemical reaction would occur in an
uncontrolled fashion, so you wouldn't be able to capture the
picture that you wanted, right So, plus you wouldn't be
(02:13):
able to control the exposure and much light gets to it,
so washed out. Be this weird, washed out, blurry picture
of nothing, um, which could be interesting, but it's not
not going to work as a movie, at least not
unless you're some sort of grad student in Hollywood who's
(02:34):
trying to make some sort of quote statement unquote. So
assuming that's not the case, you need to have the
shutter there to block light out when you when you
open the shutter, light comes through the lens, is focused
by the lens through the aperture, which is the opening
that exists between the lens and the film, and then
(02:56):
hits the film. The shutter closes, and the chemical reaction
that takes place on the film is what preserves that image.
So uh, that's how a film camera works in general.
Now a movie film camera is based upon the same premise,
with the major difference being that film is fed through
(03:17):
the camera at a certain rate and the shutter opens
and closes at a particular frequency so that you take
several images all within a second, and when you play
those images back at the proper speed, you get the
illusion of movement. So that's that's the whole basis of
film right there now, the way it works. And in
(03:38):
the old and olden days with film cameras, you had
hand cranked cameras. That sounds like fun, Yeah, um, these
are the cameras. If you've ever seen footage of of
old movie sets or even a film where that's it's
set in that era, you see like the guy peering
into the camera and he's turning a crank on the
(03:59):
side of it is the shooting a film. Uh. That
is physically moving the film past the shutter which is
opening and closing at a specific rate. Uh. And if
you were a very good film operator, camera operator rather, um,
you could move that at a pretty consistent rate through
the camera. When it was played back, it would be
(04:23):
smooth ish. Well, because we're human, right, Well, of course
we're never going to move it at the specific speed
we need. And again, projector speeds are also variable, so um,
the theater operators might in fact, in the olden days
has happened a lot back in the silent film era,
theater operators might set their projectors to to play back
(04:46):
a little faster than normal because it meant that you
could fit more showings in a single day. I see,
your film would be over faster. So anyway you would
hand crank the film, the film goes past the point
where the shutter opens, closes and the images are captured.
Um as and if you if you were to crank
the film faster so that you're you're putting more film
(05:09):
through and you're getting more shots of the action. Uh.
This actually translated into slow motion, so uh, they back
in the silent film era, the standard frames per second
that you would have for for film. And that's another
good thing to point out film is is we talked
about film in frames, and a frame you can think
(05:30):
of a frame as a single still photograph. Yes, okay,
So back in those days, the standard, and I used
the term loosely, was sixteen frames per second, and that
was sufficient to give you the sense of movement when
it was played back at sixteen frames per second. If
you were to speed that up, where you take maybe
(05:50):
thirty two frames per second, but you're playing it back
at sixteen frames per second, the action would look very
slow to you, actually look like half speed, because you're
would be using twice as much film in that time
being Yeah, yeah, so you're using twice as much film
to capture the same action. Uh, And when you play
it back at the normal speed, it feels like it's
(06:11):
slow motion. Same thing if you were to if you
were to under crank, if you were to use less
film to capture the action, it would look sped up
and jerky. So when you see those old silent films
where everyone suddenly running at a speed that is not
humanly possible and everyone's kind of jerking around. That's when
they were undercranking the camera. And eventually they added motors
(06:36):
into cameras, which allowed you to create an actual standard speed.
And uh, it wasn't until they found a way of
putting sound into um into film as well in a
in a standardized way that they settled on twenty four
frames per second, which is the current standard of of
how many frames per second for film. And now, Uh,
(07:00):
you were going to say something I could tell and
I just interrupted you before you can even start. Well, no,
I was gonna point out that TV cameras shoot at
thirty frames per second, which is why TV looks different.
It's got that different feel than than watching a movie. Yeah,
and it's using video as opposed to film the film.
So yeah, there are a couple of differences with that
(07:21):
video is taken in. When we talk about a frame
of video, it's not the same thing as a frame
of film because with film, like I said, you take
the film from a camera. Actually, when you take the
film from a camera, it's it's in its negative format.
You have to develop the film before you can look
at it as if it were a regular image. Basically,
(07:42):
that's bathing it in in some chemicals that will help
bring the images out. Um. And then of course, uh,
you know, stopping the reaction and fixing it in place
right before it can be you know, preserved for the
long haul, right right. And that's another time where you
can't have this film exposed to light because then it
would ruin the process. It would, but it would it
(08:05):
would continue. It would be as if you were continuing
to film on that film essentially, um. And we'll probably
get into that a little bit more in our second
part of this where we're talking about post production. But
the other element of video is that a frame of
video is not is not like a single image as
it is in uh in film. Um. Television, at least
(08:30):
if we're not talking about progressive scan TV. We're talking
about classic television is played where each frame is made
up of two fields. Okay. I think of your TV
as a series of of lines of dots, Okay, like
horizontal horizon lines, and field number one would be all
(08:52):
the odd number lines, so lines one, three, five, seven, etcetera.
All the way down those would be field one, and
that would be half of a frame, and that would
that your your television would paint these these dots. Uh,
and it does at a very very fast rate. It
sounds like it's you know, like you'd be able to
(09:12):
see it, but it's so fast that you can't you
can't perceive it. But it would paint all the odd
lines first, and then it would paint the even lines.
That would be the second field, field one and field two,
and together those two fields would can would make a
frame of video. Um, and your television would be playing
that back. Is it thirty or sixty? I think, well,
(09:33):
I know that when you're when you're capturing it, it's
thirty frames per second. But um, so it's a little
it is a little different. It feels different from film,
and that translates over into digital cinema will get into
that too. So getting back to the film, uh set,
(09:53):
So you're limited originally with the old cameras, you were
pretty limited to stat shots. You couldn't really move the
camera very much. So if you look at old old movies,
you'll see a lot of shots that are single take
and it lasts a good long while and then it'll
(10:14):
move to a totally different setting and a new scene
and the point of view won't change very much, right,
just because of the you know, the setups that they had.
They didn't have the sophisticated equipment that goes along with
you know, the setting up the shots that we used today,
the the dollies and all the cranes and all those things,
right exactly. Yeah, those and back then you would have
(10:37):
a tripod, set up a camera on the tripod, and
that was pretty much it. You might be able to
do a pan where you you turn the camera uh
in a certain direction so that you can follow the action,
but beyond that, it wasn't There wasn't much movement. It
wasn't until we started thinking seeing things like dollies, and
a dolly is essentially a platform that's on wheels, uh,
(10:57):
And the tripod is on the platform, so the camera
itself is still stable, it's just on a surface that
can move around. Uh. Many dollies, in fact, I would
I would probably say most tend to be set on tracks,
so that in turn also limits the motion that the
camera will experience while you're capturing film. Uh. This is
(11:18):
in general a pretty good thing because most filmmakers want
to avoid the really jerk emotions you would get if
you were just holding a camera and trying to capture images.
If you've ever you know, watch any home home video. Ever,
the home video effect is something that most filmmakers want
to avoid unless they're doing something like a documentary, or
(11:40):
they want to evoke a particular mood. Like let's say
it's a war scene and you want that chaotic feel
where you know it's every it's very disorienting and frightening
and you're not really sure what's happening. Uh, you may
want to have a handheld camera effects so that it
gives the audience kind of a feeling of disorientation and
(12:03):
it helps evoke the mood you were going after. Yeah,
just just to point out for all of you amateur
home video efficionados, Yes, it can be better than that,
but most people don't take the time to invest in
the equipment and practice shooting as a professional uh filmmaker might. Yeah,
and and there are a lot of that you can't
(12:24):
do it. Oh sure, there are a lot of people don't.
And there are a lot of of home filmmakers who
have made their own dollies, they made their own cranes,
they made their own steady cams. We'll talk about steady
cam in a second. Um. Yeah, actually, I ran into
that in my research and it's it's pretty cool. It's
not that hard to do to build, you know, just
a basic setup for home video equipment. Yeah, it's very
(12:45):
it's it's very much kind of a Jerry Rigg kind
of approach to it. But really the whole film industry
is based off of that sort of ingenuity. You know.
We we look at the stuff that is used in
films today and you think, wow, it's advanced technology, but
all of it is pretty much based on some guy saying,
you know, it would be really cool if we could
(13:06):
get this such and such shot, but how do we
do that? And then just coming up with a way
of making it work. And really it's just refining that
mother necessity. Yes, yes, hey mama. So uh all right,
so we've talked about how how film is capturing the
(13:26):
light and you know, you get it the photochemical reaction
on the film. You later developed the film and you
can you can watch it once you play it back
at a in a projector let's talk about the difference
with digital. Okay, so to kind of kind of transition
from film to digital. Let's talk a little bit about video.
And we mentioned it already about how it's played back,
(13:49):
it's captured and played back at a different speed than film,
so it does give you a different feel. Um. And
this is this is actually perceptible. People will say, like,
you know, television does not look like visa and even
watching a movie on TV doesn't feel like it does
when you're watching it in a in a theater. And
not just because you're not watching it on in a
(14:10):
huge screen and you have, you know, a fifty surround
sound system around you or anything like that. It's that
the actual quality of the picture and the quality of
the movement that you see in the picture is different.
It's because there's a weird conversion process. I'm not going
to get into it. We've mentioned it before. Then the
pull down process. Yeah, yeah, there's a weird process that
(14:32):
you have to go in order to make the frames
of film fit the frames of video format. And it's
a very strange mathematical process. Uh. And it doesn't it
doesn't give you the most natural uh playback, which is
why it doesn't really look the way it should in
the lord of the way it would if you were
seeing it in the theater. Um. Now, video cameras have
(14:55):
uh an interesting set up as opposed to the the
film cameras. So instead of capturing the image and putting
it onto film, it's using something called a charge coupled device,
all right, So that's a semiconductor image sensor, and so
it's it's measuring light and it is then taking those
(15:19):
measurements putting it towards photo sites, which convert this, uh,
with an analog to digital converter, convert this this these
measurements of light into ones and zeros. That's where we're
getting into the digital. Now, these ones and zeros, that's
just digital information that can either be used to capture,
(15:40):
to to put onto magnetic tape. You actually wouldn't even
use the analog to digital in that case. You could
just put the measurements of the light directly onto the
magnetic tape, use the magnetic tape to play back in
something like a VCR and that would take those measurements
and cover them back into light and sound. Or you
could do the analog to digital conversion, um, and then
(16:03):
you have a digital image, right which you can play
back and lots of devices, as it turns out, things
like DVD players, computers, that kind of stuff. Uh. The
interesting thing about digital versus film. Uh, there is a
difference in the appearance. Again, you're not capturing necessarily at
(16:25):
twenty four frames per second. Although there are digital cameras
out there that can do that, they can capture images
at the same rate as film. In fact, the Attack
of the Clones was filmed with a camera that could
do that, and that was the as a matter of fact,
the very first major movie as I'm not if I'm
not mistaken that used digital filmmaking. And that's actually that's
(16:47):
that one of the reasons that you might go to
this process. You know, you might say, well, hey, why
would somebody use if there's equality to film that makes
it different from shooting it directly to a digital version
of of the movie, why would you do that? Well,
one of the biggest reasons, um, other than its flexibility,
(17:09):
is the cost, because there is a huge cost savings. Yeah,
you don't have to buy film. Yeah for one thing.
That's that's exactly right. And film unlike unlike digital. You know, digital,
if if something is actually there's a lot of reasons
why you would do this, but film, that is one
of the bigger ones. Right, Film you can only you
(17:31):
can only use once, that's right. So you buy, you
have to buy way more film than you're actually going
to end up using in your movie, because of course,
you know you're not every take is going to be perfect,
and you want to make the best film possible, which
means you have to do lots and lots and lots
of takes to give yourself as many choices as possible
in the post production process, which we'll get into in
(17:52):
another podcast. Um, you wanna give as many choices as
possible once you reach that point so that you don't
have to go back and do anything again, or do
a new scene or anything like that. So, yeah, that's
a huge cost buying you know, ten times more film
easy than you're ever going to Actually ten times is
(18:13):
not even close to how much film some of these
these movies required in order to bring a two hour
film to theaters. Um. And also distribution. If you're distributing
a film, that means you have to actually produce. If
you have to buy more film to to produce your movie,
you have to actually make another print of it, yes,
(18:34):
and then ship that to a physical copy theater. Yeah,
and if you have you know, multiple screens, say for
one of the blockbuster films, right, then you have to say,
you know, have your local screen megaplex and six of
those screens are showing the same blockbuster movie. Then you've
got six copies for that one theater alone. Right, that's expensive. Yeah.
(18:55):
And the other another really big problem with using film
versus digital I'm not I mean again, film you get
that certain quality with it, but digital you can see
immediately how well that take came out. Well. Yeah. Anybody
who has a digital camera still camera, who has used
film in the past is fully aware of the differences
of being able to, you know, go back and look
(19:17):
at the screen and see what you just shot, versus well,
I'll see this after I get it back from the
developer and two or three weeks and then I'll see
whether or not that that picture actually came out. Um. Yeah.
The immediate feedback to digital is a huge boon to filmmakers.
They can see, like, you know, you shoot a scene,
you take a look at the scene immediately after you
(19:38):
shoot it, and then you decide whether or not you
need another take. Uh. With film, you you all you
can go on is what you saw as the as
the take was going. But you can't really you know,
maybe the camera wasn't aligned properly, and maybe the light
wasn't quite right for the film to capture it. Um,
but you wouldn't know until you get a chance to
(19:58):
look at it later on in daily's and that you know.
By then you're like, you may find out that you
have to go back and reshoot a scene that can
push your whole production back. So yeah, digital definitely helps
during the movie making process to keep things on schedule.
Assuming you're not someone like Stanley Kubrick, who would do
a hundred takes of a single scene, whether or not
(20:19):
it was perfect the first time, that would be immaterial. Um, well,
you never know, there might be something in the other
and the other versions one of the other takes. It's
oh yeah, I never even intended that, but look at that. Yeah.
Another difference between digital and film, which we mentioned really quickly,
assuming that you're watching a digital movie on some sort
(20:40):
of digital uh playback device as opposed to because some
digital movies are converted into film, right, You shoot it
digitally and then you transfer it to film. In fact,
a lot of movies have to be done this way
because not every theater has a digital projector, so you
have to convert it into film. But assuming that you're
watching it from a digital sort and uh, you know,
(21:01):
like a digital projector, it's gonna look the same way
the hundredth time it's shown as it did the first
time it was shown. So if you want those little
burn marks, you have to put them in there when
you're right. Yeah, the little hair that's going across the screen. Yeah,
with film, film degrades over time and overuse. So the
hundredth time of film is shown, a physical film is
(21:23):
shown is gonna look different than the first time because
the film is gonna have some wear and tear on it.
So that's another thing that the filmmakers taken too consideration.
So the digital process is different when it goes to
these photo sites. The light when it's hitting the photo sites,
that then gets converted into ones and zeros. Some of
(21:43):
the digital cameras have something called a beam splitter, splits
the light into component colors. All right, Yeah, So the
component colors of video are red, green, and blue. And
we've actually had some listeners right in with a related
question asking why is that considered the primary colors in film? Why? Red, green,
(22:06):
and blue? Because in art class I learned that the
primary colors were red, blue, and yellow, because red and
yellow make orange, and yellow, blue make green, and blue
and red make purple, and a whole bunch makes a
big mess. Um. And the answer to that is the
difference between additive and subtractive colors. Now we've we've talked
(22:27):
about this in the past two we got into the cables,
right right, So let's I'll talk about subtractive colors first,
because that's that's kind of the you know, you go
to elementary school and you learn your primary colors red, blue,
and yellow, and you get a little color wheel and everything, um,
subtractive and it sounds it's first it seems kind of
um counterintuitive because you think of it as subtractive, but
(22:50):
you're adding pigments together to make new colors. But in
subtractive you start with white. All right. That's that's that's
one end of the spectrum. And the more colors you add,
the closer to black you get. So if you were
to add all the different colors together, you would eventually
get black. Um. And also I do know that if
(23:11):
you want to be really technical, you you really should
say mentioned to cyan and yellow, not red, blue and yellow. Um. Well, yeah,
for for print, for print and for for photos and
things like that. Um. Now when we're talking about film
and we go into red, green, and blue, that's because
we're talking about light. When you're using light, you start
(23:32):
with black. Black is the absence of light, so you
have no light. UM. If you use different colors of lights,
say red and uh and green, then you start If
you add those together, that's when you start getting, um,
different colors. You so instead of being red, yellow, and blue,
it's red, green, and blue. And those are the colors
that when you start adding the different colors of light together,
(23:53):
you start getting the other colors of the spectrum. If
you add all of them together, you get white. So
you start with black and you end with white, as
opposed to the subtractive method where you start with white
and you end the black. So it's all all has
to do with the nature of light and color. Yep.
And uh. You know anybody really who's messed with their
computer settings and started pooling around with the little color
(24:15):
settings on your computer. When you're you know, doing some
kind of project UM and you have the different sliders,
you probably have an idea of what we're talking about.
But now I have to confess I am singing Ludwig
von Drake's Spectrum song in my head. The red deal
gree red, blue, blue, blue, red. Can't do that or
Disney will sue me. Um you kept it under five seconds? Yes,
(24:38):
all right? Yeah, like like there's any hard and fest
rule to that. Um So. Anyway, with a digital camera,
a lot of these have beam splitters in them that
split the light into their various component the red, the green,
and the blue, and then has they have dedicated photo
sites that record that information converted into digital information. All
of that together combined makes the picture. The reason for
(25:01):
splitting the beam into the component colors is to try
and stay as true to the original image as possible,
so that what what you see in front of you
with your own eyes when you're capturing it with your
camera is what you would theoretically see when you're playing
it back. Because we all know, you know, cameras can
alter the way things look to you. Like you can
(25:22):
see something that you saw with your own eyes, and
then you see a picture of it and you think, wow,
that looks that looks different than the way I remember it.
And there are a couple of different reasons for that.
Some of that is because we're human and sometimes our
memories are not so so accurate. But others is that
the cameras can kind of alter the way something looks. Um.
I had another point there with that too, But now
(25:43):
I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna falter around until I come
back up with it. Do you need a minute? Yeah,
vamp Oh, so you know this, it's funny. Uh not
that this is on topic, but you know, we had
meant to cover a whole bunch of other stuff in
this podcast, and we are getting very close to time. Yeah,
(26:04):
I think this may be how movie cameras work. Well, no, no,
I'm gonna, I'm determined to get a little further in it.
First of all, steady cam because I said that we
were going to talk about it, okay, because we didn't
even touch on the higher definition video cameras or any
of that stuff. Yeah, well, we'll have to do one
where we'll talk specifically about higher definition video cameras, because
the red one is the one you wanted to talk
(26:24):
about specifically. Yeah, but that's that's fine, because you know
there's plenty more where this came from. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
the nice thing is this is, uh, well, we'll have
fodder for future episodes, and don't worry, folks, we will
space them out so that you won't get exhausted. It's
not how movies work after all. Um, So steady cam
is that was an approach to Remember when I said that,
you know, cameras were kind of in a fixed position
(26:46):
until they came up with things like dollies and cranes
and eventually things like helicopter shots and stuff. Um, they
still it's still kind of hard. You didn't have as
much freedom to follow actors as a director might like.
And so that brings us to around nineteen seventies six,
and yeah, that's that was. That was when steady cam
(27:07):
became an actual like thing thing. The development of the
state cam preceded that. And Garrett Brown is the guy
who invented that. Was back in the early seventies. He
started working on this in was the Steadicam brand became official.
And that is a system that consists essentially of a
vest and articulated arm and a rig that holds the camera.
(27:33):
And the rig is essentially a pole with some elements
on it that at the top, usually at the top
you had the camera and at the base you might
have a monitor so that the camera operator can see
what the camera is capturing because it's not gonna be
an eye level necessarily, and a battery to power the monitor,
and uh it what it does is it increases the
the amount of inertia that the camera experiences because you know,
(27:56):
a camera is not that heavy and the tiniest motions
can create these jerky reactions. And that's what you know,
most filmmakers want to avoid because it kind of takes
the audience out of the action at point of order. Yeah,
I just like to point out it depends on the camera.
Some of those cameras are pretty heavy. Yeah, yeah, I'm
saying relatively relatively, like alright, compared to say a hum
(28:18):
Vy now, which obviously has an elephant greater amount of
inertionvved through the Humvy than it would with a camera
um or say compared to a cameraman. Most cameras are
going to be lighter than that. So the steady cam thing,
it creates a bigger access that creates it changes the
(28:40):
cinero gravity for a camera, and it reduces the jumps
and jitters that you would get, uh as you move
around with a camera. It's more or less like a
system of shock absorbers. Yeah, because it's it's giving with
the weight of the camera, and so it keeps it
steady when all the world is bouncing around it. Right
as the camera's weight makes it move downward. The the
(29:02):
articulated arm actually has some springs in it, like shock
absorbers that act in an opposite upward direction, which means
that the camera itself kind of remains semi level. I mean,
there's still going to be some movement, but it's it's
much more smooth than it would be if it were
held against the shoulder of a camera operator. Yes, so
(29:25):
it's a it's a really interesting and useful invention. Um.
My favorite steady camp shot ever is in Goodfellas. Yeah,
there's a five minute single take of following a character
through a restaurant, and it is absolutely brilliant. Scorsese was
a master as far as I'm concerned with that shot.
That was amazing. Um, But there are a lot of
(29:46):
other examples of steady camp shots as well, So I
had to get that in there because I mentioned it before. Also,
there's microphones. Yes, we're going to mention that we were,
but I think we're going to have to we'll have
to do an EPI so specifically about microphones and sound
on film that will be in the future. Folks. We're
gonna wrap this up because yeah, we're hitting the thirty
(30:07):
minute mark now. So this was a good discussion about
film and digital video cameras for in the filmmaking business.
In our next episode, we will be talking about the
post production side of making movies, and we might get
into a little bit of sound stuff there. Um, not
too much, probably because judging how long I talked about
(30:30):
movie cameras, uh, it may end up being its own episode. Yeah. Well,
other than the line, yeah, I mean to be honest,
we're really scratching the surface of it. There's so much
technology involved in the production of movies that we could, uh,
we could probably do a pretty long series. We could
probably really got into Yeah. Yeah, well, we'll talk about
things like practical effects and digital effects and in future episodes.
(30:52):
But yeah, we'll give them a nice rest for a while,
so you guys can listen to some other podcast topics
in the meantime. If you guys have any suggestions for us,
or you know, you have a question or comment something
like that, you can write us our email addresses tech
stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and
I will taught you again really soon. If you're a
(31:17):
tech stuff and be sure to check us out on
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now on the how Stuff Works homepage. Brought to you
(31:42):
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Pollett, and
I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
(00:22):
Sitting across from me, as he always does, is senior
writer Jonathan Strickland. It's time to make the music. It's
time to light the lights. You know you you you
bring this seriousness to to the lyrics at the Muppet Show.
I have a feeling that it requires gravitas. Yes. So
we're going to talk a little bit today about the
technology used to make movies, and we're breaking this up
(00:44):
into several podcasts because, as it turns out, there's a
lot of tech that goes into making movies and it
would be way too much material to cover in one
single podcast unless we just mentioned things and then moved
on immediately. Yeah, I agree with you. So we're going
to talk about what goes into capturing images and sound
(01:07):
and then projecting them for your entertainment, you lucky people. So, um,
let's let's start off with talking about We're gonna talk
about both film and digital here, but let's start with film,
because of course that preceded digital, So film is an
interesting thing already. All right, So we're talking about a
(01:30):
material that is photoreactive. When exposed to light, a chemical
change occurs and you can capture the light from a
particular instant and preserve it on film. And this is
this is how film cameras work. You have a very simply,
(01:51):
you've got a lens that focuses light. You have an
aperture which is normally blocked by the shutter. The shutter
keeps light out from the film. Because of course, if
you if you had light constantly exposed to the film,
it would just the chemical reaction would occur in an
uncontrolled fashion, so you wouldn't be able to capture the
picture that you wanted, right So, plus you wouldn't be
(02:13):
able to control the exposure and much light gets to it,
so washed out. Be this weird, washed out, blurry picture
of nothing, um, which could be interesting, but it's not
not going to work as a movie, at least not
unless you're some sort of grad student in Hollywood who's
(02:34):
trying to make some sort of quote statement unquote. So
assuming that's not the case, you need to have the
shutter there to block light out when you when you
open the shutter, light comes through the lens, is focused
by the lens through the aperture, which is the opening
that exists between the lens and the film, and then
(02:56):
hits the film. The shutter closes, and the chemical reaction
that takes place on the film is what preserves that image.
So uh, that's how a film camera works in general.
Now a movie film camera is based upon the same premise,
with the major difference being that film is fed through
(03:17):
the camera at a certain rate and the shutter opens
and closes at a particular frequency so that you take
several images all within a second, and when you play
those images back at the proper speed, you get the
illusion of movement. So that's that's the whole basis of
film right there now, the way it works. And in
(03:38):
the old and olden days with film cameras, you had
hand cranked cameras. That sounds like fun, Yeah, um, these
are the cameras. If you've ever seen footage of of
old movie sets or even a film where that's it's
set in that era, you see like the guy peering
into the camera and he's turning a crank on the
(03:59):
side of it is the shooting a film. Uh. That
is physically moving the film past the shutter which is
opening and closing at a specific rate. Uh. And if
you were a very good film operator, camera operator rather, um,
you could move that at a pretty consistent rate through
the camera. When it was played back, it would be
(04:23):
smooth ish. Well, because we're human, right, Well, of course
we're never going to move it at the specific speed
we need. And again, projector speeds are also variable, so um,
the theater operators might in fact, in the olden days
has happened a lot back in the silent film era,
theater operators might set their projectors to to play back
(04:46):
a little faster than normal because it meant that you
could fit more showings in a single day. I see,
your film would be over faster. So anyway you would
hand crank the film, the film goes past the point
where the shutter opens, closes and the images are captured.
Um as and if you if you were to crank
the film faster so that you're you're putting more film
(05:09):
through and you're getting more shots of the action. Uh.
This actually translated into slow motion, so uh, they back
in the silent film era, the standard frames per second
that you would have for for film. And that's another
good thing to point out film is is we talked
about film in frames, and a frame you can think
(05:30):
of a frame as a single still photograph. Yes, okay,
So back in those days, the standard, and I used
the term loosely, was sixteen frames per second, and that
was sufficient to give you the sense of movement when
it was played back at sixteen frames per second. If
you were to speed that up, where you take maybe
(05:50):
thirty two frames per second, but you're playing it back
at sixteen frames per second, the action would look very
slow to you, actually look like half speed, because you're
would be using twice as much film in that time
being Yeah, yeah, so you're using twice as much film
to capture the same action. Uh, And when you play
it back at the normal speed, it feels like it's
(06:11):
slow motion. Same thing if you were to if you
were to under crank, if you were to use less
film to capture the action, it would look sped up
and jerky. So when you see those old silent films
where everyone suddenly running at a speed that is not
humanly possible and everyone's kind of jerking around. That's when
they were undercranking the camera. And eventually they added motors
(06:36):
into cameras, which allowed you to create an actual standard speed.
And uh, it wasn't until they found a way of
putting sound into um into film as well in a
in a standardized way that they settled on twenty four
frames per second, which is the current standard of of
how many frames per second for film. And now, Uh,
(07:00):
you were going to say something I could tell and
I just interrupted you before you can even start. Well, no,
I was gonna point out that TV cameras shoot at
thirty frames per second, which is why TV looks different.
It's got that different feel than than watching a movie. Yeah,
and it's using video as opposed to film the film.
So yeah, there are a couple of differences with that
(07:21):
video is taken in. When we talk about a frame
of video, it's not the same thing as a frame
of film because with film, like I said, you take
the film from a camera. Actually, when you take the
film from a camera, it's it's in its negative format.
You have to develop the film before you can look
at it as if it were a regular image. Basically,
(07:42):
that's bathing it in in some chemicals that will help
bring the images out. Um. And then of course, uh,
you know, stopping the reaction and fixing it in place
right before it can be you know, preserved for the
long haul, right right. And that's another time where you
can't have this film exposed to light because then it
would ruin the process. It would, but it would it
(08:05):
would continue. It would be as if you were continuing
to film on that film essentially, um. And we'll probably
get into that a little bit more in our second
part of this where we're talking about post production. But
the other element of video is that a frame of
video is not is not like a single image as
it is in uh in film. Um. Television, at least
(08:30):
if we're not talking about progressive scan TV. We're talking
about classic television is played where each frame is made
up of two fields. Okay. I think of your TV
as a series of of lines of dots, Okay, like
horizontal horizon lines, and field number one would be all
(08:52):
the odd number lines, so lines one, three, five, seven, etcetera.
All the way down those would be field one, and
that would be half of a frame, and that would
that your your television would paint these these dots. Uh,
and it does at a very very fast rate. It
sounds like it's you know, like you'd be able to
(09:12):
see it, but it's so fast that you can't you
can't perceive it. But it would paint all the odd
lines first, and then it would paint the even lines.
That would be the second field, field one and field two,
and together those two fields would can would make a
frame of video. Um, and your television would be playing
that back. Is it thirty or sixty? I think, well,
(09:33):
I know that when you're when you're capturing it, it's
thirty frames per second. But um, so it's a little
it is a little different. It feels different from film,
and that translates over into digital cinema will get into
that too. So getting back to the film, uh set,
(09:53):
So you're limited originally with the old cameras, you were
pretty limited to stat shots. You couldn't really move the
camera very much. So if you look at old old movies,
you'll see a lot of shots that are single take
and it lasts a good long while and then it'll
(10:14):
move to a totally different setting and a new scene
and the point of view won't change very much, right,
just because of the you know, the setups that they had.
They didn't have the sophisticated equipment that goes along with
you know, the setting up the shots that we used today,
the the dollies and all the cranes and all those things,
right exactly. Yeah, those and back then you would have
(10:37):
a tripod, set up a camera on the tripod, and
that was pretty much it. You might be able to
do a pan where you you turn the camera uh
in a certain direction so that you can follow the action,
but beyond that, it wasn't There wasn't much movement. It
wasn't until we started thinking seeing things like dollies, and
a dolly is essentially a platform that's on wheels, uh,
(10:57):
And the tripod is on the platform, so the camera
itself is still stable, it's just on a surface that
can move around. Uh. Many dollies, in fact, I would
I would probably say most tend to be set on tracks,
so that in turn also limits the motion that the
camera will experience while you're capturing film. Uh. This is
(11:18):
in general a pretty good thing because most filmmakers want
to avoid the really jerk emotions you would get if
you were just holding a camera and trying to capture images.
If you've ever you know, watch any home home video. Ever,
the home video effect is something that most filmmakers want
to avoid unless they're doing something like a documentary, or
(11:40):
they want to evoke a particular mood. Like let's say
it's a war scene and you want that chaotic feel
where you know it's every it's very disorienting and frightening
and you're not really sure what's happening. Uh, you may
want to have a handheld camera effects so that it
gives the audience kind of a feeling of disorientation and
(12:03):
it helps evoke the mood you were going after. Yeah,
just just to point out for all of you amateur
home video efficionados, Yes, it can be better than that,
but most people don't take the time to invest in
the equipment and practice shooting as a professional uh filmmaker might. Yeah,
and and there are a lot of that you can't
(12:24):
do it. Oh sure, there are a lot of people don't.
And there are a lot of of home filmmakers who
have made their own dollies, they made their own cranes,
they made their own steady cams. We'll talk about steady
cam in a second. Um. Yeah, actually, I ran into
that in my research and it's it's pretty cool. It's
not that hard to do to build, you know, just
a basic setup for home video equipment. Yeah, it's very
(12:45):
it's it's very much kind of a Jerry Rigg kind
of approach to it. But really the whole film industry
is based off of that sort of ingenuity. You know.
We we look at the stuff that is used in
films today and you think, wow, it's advanced technology, but
all of it is pretty much based on some guy saying,
you know, it would be really cool if we could
(13:06):
get this such and such shot, but how do we
do that? And then just coming up with a way
of making it work. And really it's just refining that
mother necessity. Yes, yes, hey mama. So uh all right,
so we've talked about how how film is capturing the
(13:26):
light and you know, you get it the photochemical reaction
on the film. You later developed the film and you
can you can watch it once you play it back
at a in a projector let's talk about the difference
with digital. Okay, so to kind of kind of transition
from film to digital. Let's talk a little bit about video.
And we mentioned it already about how it's played back,
(13:49):
it's captured and played back at a different speed than film,
so it does give you a different feel. Um. And
this is this is actually perceptible. People will say, like,
you know, television does not look like visa and even
watching a movie on TV doesn't feel like it does
when you're watching it in a in a theater. And
not just because you're not watching it on in a
(14:10):
huge screen and you have, you know, a fifty surround
sound system around you or anything like that. It's that
the actual quality of the picture and the quality of
the movement that you see in the picture is different.
It's because there's a weird conversion process. I'm not going
to get into it. We've mentioned it before. Then the
pull down process. Yeah, yeah, there's a weird process that
(14:32):
you have to go in order to make the frames
of film fit the frames of video format. And it's
a very strange mathematical process. Uh. And it doesn't it
doesn't give you the most natural uh playback, which is
why it doesn't really look the way it should in
the lord of the way it would if you were
seeing it in the theater. Um. Now, video cameras have
(14:55):
uh an interesting set up as opposed to the the
film cameras. So instead of capturing the image and putting
it onto film, it's using something called a charge coupled device,
all right, So that's a semiconductor image sensor, and so
it's it's measuring light and it is then taking those
(15:19):
measurements putting it towards photo sites, which convert this, uh,
with an analog to digital converter, convert this this these
measurements of light into ones and zeros. That's where we're
getting into the digital. Now, these ones and zeros, that's
just digital information that can either be used to capture,
(15:40):
to to put onto magnetic tape. You actually wouldn't even
use the analog to digital in that case. You could
just put the measurements of the light directly onto the
magnetic tape, use the magnetic tape to play back in
something like a VCR and that would take those measurements
and cover them back into light and sound. Or you
could do the analog to digital conversion, um, and then
(16:03):
you have a digital image, right which you can play
back and lots of devices, as it turns out, things
like DVD players, computers, that kind of stuff. Uh. The
interesting thing about digital versus film. Uh, there is a
difference in the appearance. Again, you're not capturing necessarily at
(16:25):
twenty four frames per second. Although there are digital cameras
out there that can do that, they can capture images
at the same rate as film. In fact, the Attack
of the Clones was filmed with a camera that could
do that, and that was the as a matter of fact,
the very first major movie as I'm not if I'm
not mistaken that used digital filmmaking. And that's actually that's
(16:47):
that one of the reasons that you might go to
this process. You know, you might say, well, hey, why
would somebody use if there's equality to film that makes
it different from shooting it directly to a digital version
of of the movie, why would you do that? Well,
one of the biggest reasons, um, other than its flexibility,
(17:09):
is the cost, because there is a huge cost savings. Yeah,
you don't have to buy film. Yeah for one thing.
That's that's exactly right. And film unlike unlike digital. You know, digital,
if if something is actually there's a lot of reasons
why you would do this, but film, that is one
of the bigger ones. Right, Film you can only you
(17:31):
can only use once, that's right. So you buy, you
have to buy way more film than you're actually going
to end up using in your movie, because of course,
you know you're not every take is going to be perfect,
and you want to make the best film possible, which
means you have to do lots and lots and lots
of takes to give yourself as many choices as possible
in the post production process, which we'll get into in
(17:52):
another podcast. Um, you wanna give as many choices as
possible once you reach that point so that you don't
have to go back and do anything again, or do
a new scene or anything like that. So, yeah, that's
a huge cost buying you know, ten times more film
easy than you're ever going to Actually ten times is
(18:13):
not even close to how much film some of these
these movies required in order to bring a two hour
film to theaters. Um. And also distribution. If you're distributing
a film, that means you have to actually produce. If
you have to buy more film to to produce your movie,
you have to actually make another print of it, yes,
(18:34):
and then ship that to a physical copy theater. Yeah,
and if you have you know, multiple screens, say for
one of the blockbuster films, right, then you have to say,
you know, have your local screen megaplex and six of
those screens are showing the same blockbuster movie. Then you've
got six copies for that one theater alone. Right, that's expensive. Yeah.
(18:55):
And the other another really big problem with using film
versus digital I'm not I mean again, film you get
that certain quality with it, but digital you can see
immediately how well that take came out. Well. Yeah. Anybody
who has a digital camera still camera, who has used
film in the past is fully aware of the differences
of being able to, you know, go back and look
(19:17):
at the screen and see what you just shot, versus well,
I'll see this after I get it back from the
developer and two or three weeks and then I'll see
whether or not that that picture actually came out. Um. Yeah.
The immediate feedback to digital is a huge boon to filmmakers.
They can see, like, you know, you shoot a scene,
you take a look at the scene immediately after you
(19:38):
shoot it, and then you decide whether or not you
need another take. Uh. With film, you you all you
can go on is what you saw as the as
the take was going. But you can't really you know,
maybe the camera wasn't aligned properly, and maybe the light
wasn't quite right for the film to capture it. Um,
but you wouldn't know until you get a chance to
(19:58):
look at it later on in daily's and that you know.
By then you're like, you may find out that you
have to go back and reshoot a scene that can
push your whole production back. So yeah, digital definitely helps
during the movie making process to keep things on schedule.
Assuming you're not someone like Stanley Kubrick, who would do
a hundred takes of a single scene, whether or not
(20:19):
it was perfect the first time, that would be immaterial. Um, well,
you never know, there might be something in the other
and the other versions one of the other takes. It's
oh yeah, I never even intended that, but look at that. Yeah.
Another difference between digital and film, which we mentioned really quickly,
assuming that you're watching a digital movie on some sort
(20:40):
of digital uh playback device as opposed to because some
digital movies are converted into film, right, You shoot it
digitally and then you transfer it to film. In fact,
a lot of movies have to be done this way
because not every theater has a digital projector, so you
have to convert it into film. But assuming that you're
watching it from a digital sort and uh, you know,
(21:01):
like a digital projector, it's gonna look the same way
the hundredth time it's shown as it did the first
time it was shown. So if you want those little
burn marks, you have to put them in there when
you're right. Yeah, the little hair that's going across the screen. Yeah,
with film, film degrades over time and overuse. So the
hundredth time of film is shown, a physical film is
(21:23):
shown is gonna look different than the first time because
the film is gonna have some wear and tear on it.
So that's another thing that the filmmakers taken too consideration.
So the digital process is different when it goes to
these photo sites. The light when it's hitting the photo sites,
that then gets converted into ones and zeros. Some of
(21:43):
the digital cameras have something called a beam splitter, splits
the light into component colors. All right, Yeah, So the
component colors of video are red, green, and blue. And
we've actually had some listeners right in with a related
question asking why is that considered the primary colors in film? Why? Red, green,
(22:06):
and blue? Because in art class I learned that the
primary colors were red, blue, and yellow, because red and
yellow make orange, and yellow, blue make green, and blue
and red make purple, and a whole bunch makes a
big mess. Um. And the answer to that is the
difference between additive and subtractive colors. Now we've we've talked
(22:27):
about this in the past two we got into the cables,
right right, So let's I'll talk about subtractive colors first,
because that's that's kind of the you know, you go
to elementary school and you learn your primary colors red, blue,
and yellow, and you get a little color wheel and everything, um,
subtractive and it sounds it's first it seems kind of
um counterintuitive because you think of it as subtractive, but
(22:50):
you're adding pigments together to make new colors. But in
subtractive you start with white. All right. That's that's that's
one end of the spectrum. And the more colors you add,
the closer to black you get. So if you were
to add all the different colors together, you would eventually
get black. Um. And also I do know that if
(23:11):
you want to be really technical, you you really should
say mentioned to cyan and yellow, not red, blue and yellow. Um. Well, yeah,
for for print, for print and for for photos and
things like that. Um. Now when we're talking about film
and we go into red, green, and blue, that's because
we're talking about light. When you're using light, you start
(23:32):
with black. Black is the absence of light, so you
have no light. UM. If you use different colors of lights,
say red and uh and green, then you start If
you add those together, that's when you start getting, um,
different colors. You so instead of being red, yellow, and blue,
it's red, green, and blue. And those are the colors
that when you start adding the different colors of light together,
(23:53):
you start getting the other colors of the spectrum. If
you add all of them together, you get white. So
you start with black and you end with white, as
opposed to the subtractive method where you start with white
and you end the black. So it's all all has
to do with the nature of light and color. Yep.
And uh. You know anybody really who's messed with their
computer settings and started pooling around with the little color
(24:15):
settings on your computer. When you're you know, doing some
kind of project UM and you have the different sliders,
you probably have an idea of what we're talking about.
But now I have to confess I am singing Ludwig
von Drake's Spectrum song in my head. The red deal
gree red, blue, blue, blue, red. Can't do that or
Disney will sue me. Um you kept it under five seconds? Yes,
(24:38):
all right? Yeah, like like there's any hard and fest
rule to that. Um So. Anyway, with a digital camera,
a lot of these have beam splitters in them that
split the light into their various component the red, the green,
and the blue, and then has they have dedicated photo
sites that record that information converted into digital information. All
of that together combined makes the picture. The reason for
(25:01):
splitting the beam into the component colors is to try
and stay as true to the original image as possible,
so that what what you see in front of you
with your own eyes when you're capturing it with your
camera is what you would theoretically see when you're playing
it back. Because we all know, you know, cameras can
alter the way things look to you. Like you can
(25:22):
see something that you saw with your own eyes, and
then you see a picture of it and you think, wow,
that looks that looks different than the way I remember it.
And there are a couple of different reasons for that.
Some of that is because we're human and sometimes our
memories are not so so accurate. But others is that
the cameras can kind of alter the way something looks. Um.
I had another point there with that too, But now
(25:43):
I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna falter around until I come
back up with it. Do you need a minute? Yeah,
vamp Oh, so you know this, it's funny. Uh not
that this is on topic, but you know, we had
meant to cover a whole bunch of other stuff in
this podcast, and we are getting very close to time. Yeah,
(26:04):
I think this may be how movie cameras work. Well, no, no,
I'm gonna, I'm determined to get a little further in it.
First of all, steady cam because I said that we
were going to talk about it, okay, because we didn't
even touch on the higher definition video cameras or any
of that stuff. Yeah, well, we'll have to do one
where we'll talk specifically about higher definition video cameras, because
the red one is the one you wanted to talk
(26:24):
about specifically. Yeah, but that's that's fine, because you know
there's plenty more where this came from. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
the nice thing is this is, uh, well, we'll have
fodder for future episodes, and don't worry, folks, we will
space them out so that you won't get exhausted. It's
not how movies work after all. Um, So steady cam
is that was an approach to Remember when I said that,
you know, cameras were kind of in a fixed position
(26:46):
until they came up with things like dollies and cranes
and eventually things like helicopter shots and stuff. Um, they
still it's still kind of hard. You didn't have as
much freedom to follow actors as a director might like.
And so that brings us to around nineteen seventies six,
and yeah, that's that was. That was when steady cam
(27:07):
became an actual like thing thing. The development of the
state cam preceded that. And Garrett Brown is the guy
who invented that. Was back in the early seventies. He
started working on this in was the Steadicam brand became official.
And that is a system that consists essentially of a
vest and articulated arm and a rig that holds the camera.
(27:33):
And the rig is essentially a pole with some elements
on it that at the top, usually at the top
you had the camera and at the base you might
have a monitor so that the camera operator can see
what the camera is capturing because it's not gonna be
an eye level necessarily, and a battery to power the monitor,
and uh it what it does is it increases the
the amount of inertia that the camera experiences because you know,
(27:56):
a camera is not that heavy and the tiniest motions
can create these jerky reactions. And that's what you know,
most filmmakers want to avoid because it kind of takes
the audience out of the action at point of order. Yeah,
I just like to point out it depends on the camera.
Some of those cameras are pretty heavy. Yeah, yeah, I'm
saying relatively relatively, like alright, compared to say a hum
(28:18):
Vy now, which obviously has an elephant greater amount of
inertionvved through the Humvy than it would with a camera
um or say compared to a cameraman. Most cameras are
going to be lighter than that. So the steady cam thing,
it creates a bigger access that creates it changes the
(28:40):
cinero gravity for a camera, and it reduces the jumps
and jitters that you would get, uh as you move
around with a camera. It's more or less like a
system of shock absorbers. Yeah, because it's it's giving with
the weight of the camera, and so it keeps it
steady when all the world is bouncing around it. Right
as the camera's weight makes it move downward. The the
(29:02):
articulated arm actually has some springs in it, like shock
absorbers that act in an opposite upward direction, which means
that the camera itself kind of remains semi level. I mean,
there's still going to be some movement, but it's it's
much more smooth than it would be if it were
held against the shoulder of a camera operator. Yes, so
(29:25):
it's a it's a really interesting and useful invention. Um.
My favorite steady camp shot ever is in Goodfellas. Yeah,
there's a five minute single take of following a character
through a restaurant, and it is absolutely brilliant. Scorsese was
a master as far as I'm concerned with that shot.
That was amazing. Um, But there are a lot of
(29:46):
other examples of steady camp shots as well, So I
had to get that in there because I mentioned it before. Also,
there's microphones. Yes, we're going to mention that we were,
but I think we're going to have to we'll have
to do an EPI so specifically about microphones and sound
on film that will be in the future. Folks. We're
gonna wrap this up because yeah, we're hitting the thirty
(30:07):
minute mark now. So this was a good discussion about
film and digital video cameras for in the filmmaking business.
In our next episode, we will be talking about the
post production side of making movies, and we might get
into a little bit of sound stuff there. Um, not
too much, probably because judging how long I talked about
(30:30):
movie cameras, uh, it may end up being its own episode. Yeah. Well,
other than the line, yeah, I mean to be honest,
we're really scratching the surface of it. There's so much
technology involved in the production of movies that we could, uh,
we could probably do a pretty long series. We could
probably really got into Yeah. Yeah, well, we'll talk about
things like practical effects and digital effects and in future episodes.
(30:52):
But yeah, we'll give them a nice rest for a while,
so you guys can listen to some other podcast topics
in the meantime. If you guys have any suggestions for us,
or you know, you have a question or comment something
like that, you can write us our email addresses tech
stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and
I will taught you again really soon. If you're a
(31:17):
tech stuff and be sure to check us out on
Twitter tech Stuff hs WSR handle, and you can also
find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech
stuff h s W. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and
be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog
now on the how Stuff Works homepage. Brought to you
(31:42):
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
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