Netflix’s Media Production Suite

I was reading about the cinematography of _Collateral_, possibly the first large budget feature film to be shot digitally, and one of the issues back in 2004 when it was made was the amount of storage required for digital video and the risk of not being able to retrieve the images from the data stores:

> “We did massive testing with the hard drives, and everything was great, and then we had an experience where we shot, and when we sent in the material, they couldn’t get the information off the hard drive,” said Cameron. “So the studio went ballistic and was like, ‘There’s just no way we can we can let you guys do this.’”

> The compromise was the production would record to hard drives as well as SRW tape. And unlike today, verifying the digital footage was equally cumbersome and tension-filled.

> “We recorded everything two or three times on decks that we carried with us,” said Beebe. “So we were backing up, two or three times.”

https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-c...

Collateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major, all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones, but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.)

But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)

And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very close to "raw". It was also a huge pain in the ass. The camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as the "Director's Friend.")

In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school, drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called Russian Ark[2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange little Russian film where a never-named character walks the viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode of the recently-released Netflix show Adolescence, this entire film was a single, very long, very complicated, unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just hidden to the audience, one shot, through streets, buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was back then.

As we've now established with Collateral (and this film predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem. Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him. And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few takes where there were no mistakes.

None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all absolutely insane!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomso...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark

"But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)"

Why was certain scenes in Collateral filmed in other frame rates than 24 fps (unless you are doing slow motion of course)? AFAIK it was never projected/shown in anything else than 24 fps.

Correct, theaters at the time could not really been project anything other than 24fps. So there were 2 parts to the shooting style, and one of them is what you describe, shooting at the higher frame rate used in order to have it play back slower when conformed to 24. But they did this in a pretty unusual way. During the action sequences, they would ramp up frame rate from 24 to 30 and back down. They would do adjust during the shot, so the action scenes had these subtle but constantly-occurring increases and decreases in speed that looked very interesting and had not been done before.

The other major part was the shutter speed. They of course could not actually shoot/project 48/60fps, but they a shot a lot scenes at the high shutter speeds one typically uses when shooting those frame rates, a lot of it had that "ultratrealistic" look that people had weren't used to in films, resembling more the look of video, TV soap operas in 60i, etc.

I feel slightly absurd even writing about this considering how little of this really applies today, and how inconsequential changing the shutter speed on a camera is now. "I hit the '+ shutter' button a couple of times, revolutionary!" But it's crazy how conditioned everyone was to these looks at the time due to how little variety there was. I taught this film class where I would demonstrate to everyone, with nearly 100% success, that they all were influenced by and conditioned for these frame rates, even if they didn't know what a frame rate was. We'd shoot a scene with multiple cameras side-by-side shooting at different frames rates, play it back to the class later, and ask which one looked "more like a movie" to them. Invariably, even if they couldn't explain why, everyone always picked the 24p version