“Also, the 500T is surprisingly versatile for shooting the whole gamut of bright day exteriors to low-light and night scenes that we were going to encounter during production. Things like flares, over-exposed highlights, mixed color temperatures, neon lights and sodium vapor street lighting, all look so natural on film but can easily look false, brash or just plain cheesy when you shoot digital.
“But, most importantly, this film was all about staying with our character in close-ups and medium close-ups. The way celluloid renders skin tones, in all different lighting conditions, just feels natural and realistic.”
Shooting 2-perf 35mm, also known as Techniscope, was first introduced by Technicolor Italia in 1963. Movies such as The Ipcress File (1965, dir. Sidney J Furie, DP Otto Heller BSC) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967, dir. Sergio Leone, DP Tonino Delli Colli AIC), along with more modern productions, including The Sound of Metal (2019, dir Darius Marder, DP Daniël Bouquet NSC) and the HBO TV series such as I Know This Much Is True (2020, dir. Derek Cianfrance, DP Jody Lee Lipes), were all originated using the format.
2-perf uses a two film-perforation negative pulldown per frame, instead of the standard four-perforation frame of normally-exposed 35mm film. Along with yielding a widescreen aspect ratio, shooting 2-perf 35mm doubles the running time of the filmstock in the camera magazine, maximizing stock and lowering processing costs. Which is just as well as Seiple reports that some scenes in To Leslie, which appeared as just a few lines in the script, often blossomed into lengthy takes to convey the narrative.
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