FILMmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s F65 shoot

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s F65 shoot

“I stopped shooting 35mm years ago. My last four films have all been digital, and all four were shot with Sony cameras,” he says. “The first two were on the F900, and my previous film, “Once Upon A Time in Anatolia”, was shot on the F35. In some way Sony was the most suitable for me for each of these films. Every company has their own colour understanding and maybe the way Sony understands colour is closer to how I understand it.”

Added to this, says Ceylan, “For a director, one of the important things aesthetically is the depth of field; that’s more important than the resolution. With the F35 and F65, it’s a Super 35 chip size, and that gives you the opportunity to control the depth of field as you like.” The resolution, the natural colours and especially the skin tones really appeal to me about the F65,” he says. “It’s the first time I’ve seen something better than 35mm.”

This still of the opening sequence in Anatolia was used in a previous post. Then I didn’t know he was using digital, so it has added interest now. All this piece and the embedded short video is very interesting. The depth of field over resolution is to note and inwardly digest. It’s a Sony plug, there we are.


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17 Things You Should Know About Cannes Top-Prize Winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan

FILM ESSAY The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts by Stephen Prince

The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts
by

Stephen Prince


Film Quarterly, vol 57, No 3, pp 23-33 ( 2004)


Abstract

The tools of digital filmmaking are transforming all aspects of cinema, including production, postproduction, and exhibition. In the process, they are altering the visual characterisitics of the moving image and changing the viewer’s perceptual understanding of the nature of cinema, leading to the emergence, for the first time in the medium’s history, of filmic artifacts.

Things get interesting from page 30 when the discussion turns to how digital video:

….”reads” a scene very differently than film does. One of the unmistakable hallmarks of DV is its clarity and depth of field. DV tends to record everything in deep focus and with extreme sharp focus, whereas varying degrees of shallow focus are the norm for images shot on film. Most shots have a limited focal plane, as determined by the speed of the film, the f-stop and the amount of light available. Even celebrated deep-focus films also include numerous shots where the focal plane is restricited. In contrast, DV produces deep focus as a kind of auto-default, and filmmakers working in the format studiously try to avoid this look.

Price wonders what Bazin, who advocated deep focus, would think of DV, suggesting he would have thought it good. But he then goes on to consider the paradox of film looking more alive than DV, despite being grainy. Films like Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest and Citizen Kane that have been digitally re-mastered for DVD have a very different feel from the film versions.

A few other important differences between film and digital are mentioned.