Filming the Fantastic: A Guide to Visual Effects Cinematography

Chapter 5

How Film Works

Despite the clarion call to shoot everything digitally, motion picture film continues to hold its own. The reason for this is the fact that it is a proven technology that has been refined over a century of use and is the most high-resolution archival medium we have going. If film were of poor quality, the digital folks wouldn’t be trying to mimic it so much. Two things make this clearly apparent. First, each time you shoot a motion picture frame at a rate of 24 frames per second (fps), you get an exposure time of 1/50 of a second. In that flash of an instant, a movie film frame captures 40 megabytes of information! Second, I can go to a film vault and pick up a roll of film shot by Charlie Chaplin in 1916, hold it up to ...