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- Solving Moiré Issues in "All of Us Strangers"
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In this week’s post:
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Solving Moiré Issues in All of Us Strangers
One of my favorite films from 2023 was Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, which received no love from the Oscars but numerous accolades elsewhere.
Critics have particularly praised the cinematography by South African DP Jamie D. Ramsay, which is indeed fantastic. Ramsay was interviewed by No Film School about the shooting of the film, where he described the cameras, lenses, and film stocks they utilized as well as the reasoning behind their usage:
We shot on the Acam St and LT 35mm cameras, and we opted for Master Primes as our lens choice. We also used UE Zooms. Our film stock choice was Kodak, and we used 50 D for sort of exterior daylight. Then for sort of our turn of day and interior day, we used two 50. Then 500 for interior night. This was largely a locations based shoot... so our darker interior scenes and our night scenes, our film stock choice was motivated largely by the practicality of the time of day and the environment that we were shooting in.
Also of interest was Ramsay’s use of an LED backdrop for scenes taking place in the main character’s apartment. All went well until they received footage back from the lab and found it contained the dread of digital cinematography: moiré.
As Ramsay explains:
I was like absolutely mortified because we had tested the 35mm film against the LED backdrop because moire has always been a big issue of digital versus LED, and we had got no moire. We had thought, we've really figured out the hack to this volume backdrop, how not to get moires. You just shoot on an analog base.
It turns out that there was a combination between the glass on the window and the digital scanner at the lab that was somehow introducing the moire to the footage.
We decided to reshoot it and change our focal plane to have a deeper stop and to try and avoid work out our distances to the LED backdrop to see if we could avoid the moire because the moire was introduced once you kind of pulled through the reflection onto Andrew's face. That was when the LED backdrop would be sharp on the glass, and that's when the moire came.
We tried all sorts of things to try and work that out, and we thought we'd done it, we'd shot it again and realized that the moire was still there. So we ultimately had to do it as plates and just use the plates to tidy up where the moire had entered and all of that. That was a big learning curve for us.
If I was on set, a situation like this would make me want to curl up into a ball and cry! Kudos to Jamie Ramsay and his crew for problem-solving instead, using both cutting-edge techniques and classic film methods to create an incredible visual experience.
Who Owns the Unknown?
If you regularly spend any time on Twitter or TikTok, the past week or so has no doubt provided you with limitless coverage of the disastrous Willy Wonka-ripoff event in Glasgow. You can read the Wikipedia article for the hilarious full story, but the basics are that an events company used AI to advertise and plan an immersive Wonka-esque experience but instead delivered a bizarre, low-rent kiddie Fyre Festival in a mostly-empty warehouse.
@thetimes Children in tears and police called at Willy Wonka event that was an ‘empty warehouse’ #willywonka #willyschocolateexperience #chocolate #... See more
This is almost as bad as the time my Aunt Joan realized most of the people invited to her wedding wouldn’t come, so we had to hire extras to make her wedding video look better. By “hire” extras, I mean we tricked them into thinking it was a party with free alcohol (the alcohol was not free).
The Hollywood wrinkle here is that according to Bloody Disgusting, a horror film based on one of the characters from Willy’s Chocolate Experience has been announced.
Obviously, the value of such a tie-in seems pretty low, this would be like making a Chewbacca Mom movie set to release in early 2017. What’s interesting is that the filmmakers seem completely confident there won’t be any rights claims from the event’s producers. After all, if the script was AI-generated, and was itself an unapproved derivative of Willy Wonka IP, what copyright claim could be made? I would assume Warner Bros. might have a case, but “The Unknown” as a character does not exist within Wonka IP. A computer came up with it, based on unclear training data.
As they say on Reddit, I AM NOT A LAWYER, but circumstances like this and the caselaw they generate will absolutely determine the future course of intellectual property in entertainment.
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
Oppenheimer cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on the challenges of 65mm black and white photography. (link)
Sound designer Johnnie Burn on The Zone of Interest. (link)
How studios are wasting time and money on streaming. (link)