Saving Private Ryan

[JZASMM]

Dear Mr. Mullen,

I was wondering, if you knew, how the look of the image of saving private ryan was achieved. I noticed you briefly mentioned in another thread how this was done, but I was wondering if you could perhaps give a more detailed explanation. Thanks.

Jacob

 

[David Mullen ASC]

It was mostly shot on 200T color neg stock using a 81EF filter instead of the 85B filter outdoors in daylight for a cooler color cast.

Sometimes the negative was flashed using a Panaflasher to lower contrast.

All this because later the prints went through a silver retention process similar to a skip bleach process where contrast is increased and blacks become very dense, not to mention there is some silver grain in the image.

Some battle scenes were shot with a closed down shutter (45 degrees instead of 180) to increase motion strobing due to the short exposure times per frame. But one shot during the landing (when an explosion deafens Tom Hanks momentarily and he sees a man pick up his own arm) was done the opposite way -- undercranked at 6 or 8 fps for a longer shutter time for more motion smear, and then step-printed back up to normal speed.

Some shots used a shutter out of sync with the movement to cause some vertical smearing of bright areas, because the movement started advancing to the next frame before the shutter had completely closed over the gate.

Some shots used lenses with the coatings removed to increase flare and milkiness.

 

[JZASMM]

If I were to do the flashing and skip bleach process, would I need to meter differently for that, or meter for the regular asa of the film?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Not if you do the skip bleach to the print, not the negative.

But if you skip bleach the negative, you gain a lot of density as if you had overexposed the negative by one stop, maybe one and a half stop. So you may want to rate the stock a stop slower to compensate.

But if you do it the print, then what happens is that you lose a lot of shadow detail, so you may want to add more fill to compensate.

Flashing lifts the blacks but it doesn't affect the highlights, so you don't need to compensate, exposure-wise. But it helps to expose consistently because if you have a 10% flash, for example, but one shot is a half-stop darker than it should be, then that same 10% flash looks heavier on that underexposed subject compared to how it looks on the correctly exposed subject.

If you can't flash, you could consider using a heavier UltraCon filter instead.

I also smoked sets when doing a movie with neg flashing and a silver retention process for the prints (and used less flashing in those scenes)

 

[JZASMM]

Awesome, thanks.