Why did movies look so good in the 90s?

The Help is shot on 35mm so no, it isn't the difference between film and digital. If I recall correctly Roger Deakins shot Shawshank on Tungsten stock and corrected it later in colour timing so maybe that had a big influence on it's look compared to The Help. I think a lot of the "90s" look, if there is such a thing comes down to colour timing and the scanning tech of the time.
Just look at the difference between the old and new releases of Terminator 2.

 

From what I've read:

1. Film stock hit it's peak in the 90's, with Fuji and Kodak releasing really advanced stuff, with outstanding color balance and saturation while being fast and sharp.
2. The developers were also more advanced, and the intermediates used for special effects maintained quality better than previous techniques
3. Color timing became much easier with computer control, so clueless operators had a shot of getting decent color, and experts could do nearly anything they wanted
4. You had MUCH less compositing back then, and a lot more practical effects, so you don't have these goofy insert shots where lighting is different, focus is different, the entire intermediate process is different...

Something has definately been lost with the switch to digital. Sometimes it can look fantastic. Sometimes things just look worse. Even if you look at a 90's movie that used a desaturated color pallet for effect, like the first Matrix movie, it just looked like everything was shot under flat fluorescent light. Now even a bit of desaturation and the actors look like walking corpses.

For a great comparison, check out the original Lord Of The Rings trilogy, which was gorgeously shot on the best film gear available. Then watch The Hobbit, which was shot on 5K RED cameras. The Hobbit films usually look really good, and can look spectacular sometimes, but there are occasionally shots that just look wrong for some indescribable reason.

 

The 90's easily had the most natural look due to quality film, the technology being mature, while it pre-dated color grading entire films. I think there are films these days that look good, usually ones where they shot on film or at least worked hard to approximate the look of film. Sometimes that's a more "stylized" film look, sometimes its natural. You won't see the big budget ones looking to do this, but I'm not bothering with those anyway.

Either way, I try to enjoy the best of what's available. I used to not listen to modern alternative too much because all the instruments sounded "fake" and I preferred organic, analog sounds to computerized mess. Then I had a realization that some of these groups are utilizing modern technology to create dazzling soundscapes not too disssimilar with how the Beatles pushed the envelope with Sgt. Pepper. I came around, and even though nothing sounds better to me than 1971, there's a lot of good modern music I like now, even if it has a different character.

 

I think another thing that happened in the 90s is the rise of Super 35mm film which I think became a more popular way to shoot 2:35:1 movies as it allowed you to get to 4:3 VHS tapes with less sacrificing. Really sharp and clean results though depended on the lab and how hands on the director and cinematographer were willing to be. Or at least that's along the lines of what James Cameron said. I remember there being a video where he explains this on one of the Terminator 2 DVDs but I can't find it on youtube.
Around the millennium I think DI was able to remove a lot of the generational steps in printing and Super 35mm movies became a lot sharper, 3 Perf also became a more viable shooting format making it a bit cheaper to use.

 

Thank you all for these insights. I feel this is a closer explanation of what is going on. Any chance anyone would have some samples to demonstrate some of these processes? Or maybe some links for further reading?

Hopefully @Vidiot can come in at some point as well...

 

I dunno. I can remember a ton of hideous films in the 1990s, depending on who shot it and how it was shot. The 1990s were the beginning of Kodak Vision T-grain film stocks, and those did go a long way towards making films look sharper and simultaneously less grainy, which is a good thing.

Digital effects is kind of a peripheral conversation, and that alone didn't contribute to the look of 1990s films. I've said before I nearly fell out of my chair when the new Kodak stocks started emerging in the early 1990s, because it made a huge difference for television. I can recall having arguments with producers who saw the difference with the film stocks, but then were reluctant to spend the money because it'd be an extra $5000 a week or something to use them.

Note that computer color correction -- at least digital color correction -- did not really become a thing until about 2002-2003 or so. O Brother Where Art Thou was the first wide-release film to be digitally color timed (by Julius Friede and the late, great Mike Bellamy), and that was 2000... and Cinesite went through thousands of hours of pain getting that done. The process was really only perfected by about 2008-2009 or so, and by then, film prints largely went away in favor of digital projection. I'm generally in favor of digital projection even for projects shot on film, provided the digital projection is corrected aligned and calibrated. (Big if.)

I'm working on restoring a 1993 film right now (a title I can't reveal), and it's been a bit of a struggle to work with in 2K but is not too bad given the budget and intended audience. The scans held up very well in 2018.

 

Pulp Fiction was good color.

 

Superb, and the home video color on that was done by Rich Garibaldi, who was (and is) a very fine mastering engineer and a good dude.

 

What do you think of the period color on Once Upon A Time In Hollwood's is going to turn out ?

 

I dunno. Bob Richardson is a helluva DP, but he had very strong opinions and has been known to go to extremes on occasion. (I have color-timed two films for him: Nixon and Rolling Stones: Shine a Light.) Just because it's a 1969 movie doesn't mean that Tarantino will go for a 1969 look.

 

He wants it period orientation 1969 de facto I would imagine Laugh In color.

 

Absolutely. Even with better gear you still need to know what you are doing. Still, compare a well shot 80's film, like Blade Runner, with an equivalent 90's film, like Dark City, and from a strictly media perspective, Dark City just looks better.




I mean, Blade Runner looks great, but Dark City just looks fantastic. Even with less light there is a ton more detail (assuming the high contrast didn't blow out the film in Blade Runner, I assume Cronenweth knew what he was doing.)

The article I read about color timing was about O Brother It made mention that the developers became fully computer-controlled in the late 80's, and were better quality all around (more even coverage, better temperature control, more precise timing) leading to much more accurate color timing. It went from being dependent on the operator knowing what they were doing to get the results you wanted, to telling the machine that you want a 20% push on reds and it takes care of it for you.

Let us know, we'd love to check it out!

 

If you mean it looks cleaner, sure. Better? To me, it's the opposite.

 

I hope it's Excessive Force. Do I really hope that?

 

You haven't seen Blade Runner 4K in a legit home theater, have you?

Dark City isn't available in a home video release worthy of discussion (by today's new standard).

 

The Pulp Fiction Blu-ray is well done?

 

No, but I saw the director's cut in theaters in 1992, which what I was thinking about when I was watching Dark City in theaters in 1998.

Again, I'm not saying Blade Runner looks bad. It looks fantastic. But, compared to Dark City, most scenes look like there's a thin layer of gel on the lens of the camera. Everything is just a bit soft. Compare it to an old B&W noir like the Maltese Falcon (which I saw in the theater for the first time a year ago) and most scenes, though still relatively dim and shadowy, are pretty sharp. Now compare The Maltese Falcon with The Good German, which was shot on color film (using old 1940's lenses) then digitally decolorized. It's *startling* how much detail there is.

Maybe how much detail there is in a film is a preference. But, if a director puts it in the movie, it's supposed to be there, and I'd like to see it.

 

No offense, but you can't recall what you saw in 1992 or 1998. No one can. Besides, there are variables with commercial theaters.

 

I would imagine many factors at play with Blade Runner. Just about every shot has visual effects optical compositing (though, the very best of the analog era, done on larger format film); perhaps softer focus, especially on closeups of Sean Young, was a desired effect (ala closeups of starlets in the classical era). Plus, that scene has a lot of smoke and haze.

 

That's true. However, I clearly remember comparing Blade Runner with Dark City while I was watching it, as there was a clear influence going on, and I had relatively recently seen Blade Runner in the theater (it was a big deal with my friends and I.)

That being said, that's the time frame I had written a paper on Blade Runner for a film class, and probably watched it a dozen times on VHS, and that might be fuzzing my memory.

Now I want to watch it again...

 

Off-topic, but you would have seen the greedy studio exec cut of the film. The FINAL CUT, which is the Director's original vision, is available on Blu and especially 4K|HDR. Too bad you don't live closer. I can screen it good enough to make a grown man cry!

 

Were most 90s films shoot using celluloid?

 

There would have been exceptions, the Dogma 95 movement came in during the mid 90s and I’d say documentaries began to be shot on Mini DV and Digibeta but my understanding is that digital shooting in movies didn’t really begin until 2001 or around abouts.

 

I remember seeing PUBLIC ENEMIES on Blu-ray on a big TV and being aghast at how poorly it looked. This is what big budget films had come to? $100 million and it looks like an intern's surreptitious iPhone footage?

 

It really looked like video to me at the time (I only ever saw commercials for it), so I was worried about the rash of digitally shot movies that were gonna look like home videos coming out. Thankfully, most digitally shot things I’ve seen look more filmic to me than Public Enemies did. It must have been an aesthetic choice on their part.