Why did movies look so good in the 90s?

anyone notice some of the late 70's early 80's films have a certain look or 'sheen' to them...hard to describe, im thinking author author and and justice for all (both al pacino movies by accident)

 

Movies looked so good in the 90s because Brad Pitt and Daniel Day Lewis were in a lot of them.

 

The entire film was shot with diffusion, because that was the style of that era. It's one of many valid creative choices that directors and DPs do all the time. It's never going to be 100% sharp because the highlights were deliberately blurred during principal photography. My preference is for them not to do this in production and let us do this same effect in post, but it's not my call.

They were still pretty good at it at the lab. But we adjust stuff like Red Printer Points and all that stuff digitally, using scopes.

Note that 5 points of Red at Deluxe, Fotokem, and Technicolor were all slightly different -- no two labs agreed exactly on things like this. "Accuracy" is very subjective. And the computer merely executed the decisions of the human lab color timer -- the corrections were no better and no worse than the guy turning the knob. It was still just a knob.

Here's what a Hazeltine Color Analyzer looked like at most labs in the 1980s and 1990s:



Note they were still using a monitor to judge the image. The trick is that the lab color timers were hip enough to understand how and why the image would change once it was printed to motion picture film. That's a mysterious process (to me). The color decisions were simple Red, Green, and Blue corrections, all saved to punch-tape (later floppy disk), but the corrections were very, very basic.

Fotokem in Burbank was able to do something that none of the other labs could do, as far as I know: they could do a dissolved color change over a period of time. That's a very clever company, and they really did use customized computers there... but they only figured that out in the early 2000s.

 

One of the best-looking films I ever worked on was Santa Clause 3, lit by the great Robbie Greenberg. His secret was Tiffen GlimmerGlass, which was a very glossy filter that added a kind of "sheen" to the highlights. That plus fantastic exposure, art direction, and lighting added up to an extraordinarily beautiful image. So filtration and careful lighting was a big part of it.

 

It was. Mann talked about it interviews at the time. He wanted to completely eschew the expectation/cliche of how period movies are usually shot. Personally I like his approach; he uses the medium of digital itself to impart a certain experience (as also with Miami Vice).

 

One combination that, to me, seems to be the worst is historically-oriented "films" shot digitally. The scrubbed sterility of the digital image works heavily against any feeling of historical mood, regardless of the millions used on production design, costumes and lighting. Netflix' "The Borgias" looked beautiful in terms of all of the above, but the shooting (on Alexa?) took away the layer of 'dream separation' that 35 mm would have added all by itself (the irony is that for some underwater scenes they used 35 mm, but for the rest they shot digital.)

Imagine "Barry Lyndon" shot digitally...yes, Kubrick would have had an easier time with the low-light shots, but imagine the rest of it looking clinical as opposed to lush?

 

That's subjective, isn't it? Kubrick was going for a look and atmosphere just as Mann was in MV and PE. I agree with Mann's viewpoint, that audiences have this seemingly built-in expectation of how period films should look, and deviation from that apparently is jarring for many audiences.

 

Here's a great article in American Cinematographer going in to great detail about how they shot "Public Enemies" and why they went with that look.
The ASC -- American Cinematographer: Big Guns

dan c

 

I think Michael Mann has a thing for the 360 degree shutter look, it's been in everyone of his films since he started shooting digitally with Collateral. Even Blackhat which is shot on the Alexa has it. Public Enemies was a bit of a mixed bag for me visually, I remember watching it in the cinema and the restaurant scene at the start was quite harsh on the eyes because the motion is so smeary. On reflection I wonder if this came from it being projected on film and perhaps it would work better on a digital projector as the film did become easier on the eyes at home. The 360 shutter always reminded me of all the mini DV films I made as well so I never really liked it at the time either. Though I still think that the scene where he arrives at the airport and it's lit by a flare looks pretty nice. The chase through the orchard is probably the worst part though, there is so much harsh detail and it looks somewhat amateurish to me. I think it's one of the first films shot on the F23 as well.

 

Very interesting title in that context. Now I have to see it.

 

Michael Mann is a very opinionated director who knows what he wants. I strongly disliked the look of Miami Vice and Public Enemy because I thought they felt too "electronic" for me. But it's a subjective call -- he makes the creative choice he feels is right for his films. (Mann is a strong-willed guy who's been known to fire DPs in the middle of production, as he did with Collatteral. That was a messy shoot.)

 

Never saw Public Enemy, but Miami Vice had an iconic signature look that breathed new life into the detective genre. That 'electronic', pastel-y look was a big part of the success of the show. I thought it was pretty cool at the time.

 

No, I worked on the 1980s show for a couple of years, and it was all shot on film and had a film look. They did go for very strong colored-gel lighting on set, and the actors wore bright colors, but beyond that it was basic high-contrast detective film noir. A lot of it was a continuation of the style of Thief, the 1981 movie Mann did with James Caan, and it had a similar lighting style and camera movement. (Mann's later 1986 film did a lot of the same things.)

The electronic look was part of Mann's 2006 reboot of Miami Vice with Colin Farrell, and it did not do well with critics or the box office. Here's what one critic wrote:

...by the end of the film’s two-hour-plus running time, I thought its hi-def cinematography ultimately a failed experiment. When the story simmers down from its overheated opening and starts reeling in the visual tropes of not just the TV show but of its cop-falling-in-love-while-undercover storyline — the sexy shower scenes, romantic boat rides, and lingering closeups of its protagonists’ conflicted faces — the digital cinematography begins to feel wan and washed out, failing to convey the visual poetry needed to make these hoary scenes work. What starts off seeming like a bold way of shooting a film version of a TV cop drama hailed for its stylishness winds up seeming like a pale, emotionally inexpressive and self-defeating technical choice.

I hated it more than this guy, because it was just "smeary and electronic-looking" to me. Slow shutter speeds and digital video do not work well, primarily for this reason.

THE GRAIN OVER MIAMI | Filmmaker Magazine

 

Ah okay, we're taking about different shows. I'd forgotten that there was a reboot of the original show - I never watched the new one. Might have to now (at least a few eps) to see what you mean.

 

It’s a feature length movie staring Jamie foxx and Colin Ferral not a show.

 

The recent movie was awful -- I was not a fan. The old 1980s show was a chore to work on, since we were using lo-con prints for NBC (and syndication), and the film transfer equipment of that time was not great. They later remastered the entire series to HD about 10 years ago at Universal Digital Video Services, and they used original camera negative scans, which I would bet look many times better than what we did back in the day.

 

Because they were shot on film...

 

I miss the filmography of these days:

 

There certainly were a lot of tricks back in the day, Black Pro Mist filters, nets behind the lens, etc.
From my perspective, it is always first & foremost about the lighting and exposure.

 

Yeah, ProMists are huge. Even a 1/8th ProMist can really take the edge off new digital cameras. There are also people who seek out "vintage" lenses, 1960s/1970s glass, because they feel the relative lack of sharpness helps the "4K-6K-8K" issues and flatters the actors better. Soft lighting helps as well. No matter what we do in the mastering process, 90% of it really hinges on the DP.

 

While I agree with much of what you wrote UHD is only as good as those shooting it, transferring it in post, etc. it is a victim currently more of an attempt to differienate it from traditional look for film on sales floors (that seemed to be more of an issue a decade ago but I could be wrong)and how the monitors are calibrated and set, etc.

Each decade has a “look”

For TV shows it was a little different for example many Universal TV shows in the 70’s had almost what I would characterize as a stock “look” due to the pressure for quicker set ups, more shots per day, etc.

 

I’d add Vertigo and Rear Window as well both of which benefit from the color process used st the time.

 

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. Lots and lots of digital shows are adding composited film grain to give the image more of a "texture" in the final. Take a look at the recent TV series The Alienist as an example of a turn-of-the-century story shot digitally, and tell me if this doesn't have quite a bit of mood to it:



To me, it's all about the lighting and the lenses -- the medium means very little. Westworld, Walking Dead, and a few other shows are all shot on film, and I don't think they necessarily look better or worse than the big-budget shows shot digitally (like Game of Thrones and House of Cards, among many others). There's good digital and bad digital, and there's good film and bad film; the medium alone doesn't dictate whether the image ultimately looks good.

 

The colours are turned up too much there.

 

Uh, Vertigo was shot during the dark times of Eastman stock.