Cinematography Breakdown: How to shoot on 16mm Film

I want to briefly talk about this super16mm performance video that I got to shoot for an artist recently and share some of my lessons that I learned.

GIG

This job came through a label connection here in Nashville with a friend who works as a creative director and had asked me to pitch a treatment for a seamless clean video. I wasn’t necessarily interested in shooting a clean performance but I had wanted to shoot one project on film this year. We had enough budget for me to shoot 8 full takes of the song which meant we had about 5x 200ft rolls to shoot with. I chose the 250D film stock because I was mainly lighting for daylight and wanted to match tones. I had also been on set and seen other friends shooting 250D, and the final look is very desirable.

LIGHTING

We had 2x Apture 600d(w/ soft box) as the key light pushing through 6x6 silk. Aputure 300D hitting the cyc wall and another 300d for backlight.

CAMERA

In terms of picking the right camera, I went with the Aaton Minima S16 and lensed with the Canon 8-64mm. I decided to expose for t/4 but shot at 2.8, one stop over so that I can pull my highlight down and bring a slight halation around the bright areas and creates a richer image overall. This is something that I saw Lewis Potts do on his video and thought I should try it out too. because I want it to have the film look. Since we were trying lip-sync the song with the footage, we had to start each take with a slate so I could match timecode in post.

CAMERA MOVEMENT

Cineped as the slider. Slow, intentional pushes and pulls.

All of this is just a summary of the video. For more info, please watch full video!