Anyone miss film projection glitches?

L

lambert

Well-known member
Probably just feeling nostalgic for a different time when reels on occasion were reversed or out of order or forbid end up on a floor or burn in the gate. I remember watching a screening of the wild bunch in Austin at the paramount where the first reel was flipped. Obviously not ideal viewing experiences but the Russian roulette reminded me each time how much effort went into making the film.
 
Yeah, I miss the defects and glitches. As well as the general feel around cinema.

Oddly, one of my favourite things was when the speed of the projector ranged, and the sound warped a little.
 
Me, too

Wabi-sabi: "In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.[2] The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".[3] It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印, sanbōin), specifically impermanence (無常, mujō), suffering (苦, ku) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空, kū).

Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
 
I don't miss filmic glitches at all. Hair in the gate, gate weave, no thanks. The same as I don't miss the dropouts of Hi-8.
Most of the people who think they miss defects weren't around to deal with them under client pressure, time pressure.
If you were there, you wouldn't miss them.

Kind of like how if you were at Woodstock, you probably wouldnt miss the smell of the latrines and outhouses.
 
I think they're talking strictly about the audience's point of view

And you know the saying - if you remember Woodstock, you weren't really there
 
I was amazed when I saw how fast 35mm film melts if it is stuck in the gate. Within a second it starts melting.
 
In my late teens I worked a series of movie theatre usher jobs (absolutely worth it for seeing free movies, over and over again). One night one of the projectionists asked me to help him out as this particular movie was long, right on the edge of not being contained on the platter. For those that haven't seen in person, the horizontal platter system was an improvement over the dual projectors switching between reels as it contained the entire film. It took up from the middle outwards, so if you can imagine by the end of the film you have an ever-thinning "donut" of film. In this instance, it was precariously close to the edge. Sure enough, right as the movie was ending it started to slip a little. I pushed it with one finger and much to my dismay it immediately rippled inwards, the ripple spread around the perimeter and the film fell off onto the floor. Instant mayhem as it spun itself into a knot, which slid upwards towards the projector. I was standing frozen in horror, not knowing what to do. The projectionist sprinted to the projector and ripped the film just before the knot, the image went white on the screen and he turned off the projector. The credits had just started, thankfully, so no-one from the house complained. I was in shock. He promised me it wasn't the first time it had happened.

If I ever went in that booth again, I kept my hands tucked behind me.

FILM!
 
ahalpert said:
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes."
Click to expand...

Someone else who knows wabi-sabi :)

As for film artifacts, I mostly miss the grain. I welcome a small amount added to video.

To get my fix, I sometimes search Youtube for "35mm trailer", which brings up ones from release prints. The grain and scratches are often over the top, more than I would want to put up with for two hours, but it's fun in small doses.


Waterworld is not a good movie, but fun fact: the child is Tina Majorino, who later played Deb in Napolean Dynamite.

As for the more extreme artifacts, they were annoying at the time, and I don't really miss them:

- frame melts
- every once in a while, anamorphic trailers were projected with the wrong lens, and everyone was skinny
- a drive-in accidentally switched two of the middle reels for a mystery movie
 
I don't miss any aspect of the film projection experience. Nor do I now miss any aspect of the film PRODUCTION experience.

In my early college days I spent a lot of time around Alexander Films in Colorado Springs. That's where I did free-lance optical printing, and got all my negative and positive processed for my projects and commercials. Watching your film go through the development process is jaw-droppingly terrifying. The lowest paid guy in the lab was first person to handle the film. I remember helping fish a dead rat out of the ultrasonic cleaning machine. Ah, you're thinking, that's just in an OLD lab... modern labs are much better... yeah, not so much. I once bid on digitally taking the lab-generated center-frame scratch out of an entire 16mm reel of "Walker Texas Ranger", processed in a brand new lab in Dallas. No one on this forum that routinely shot film is free of some major lab disaster story that WASN'T YOUR FAULT.

And the dirt and filth that's just part of the "film-experience"... while doing free-lance VFX for Computer Cafe on films like "G.I.JOE, Rise of Cobra", "Are We There Yet?" and "The Happening" part of my responsibility was also to do the "dust bust" on the frames... it is rare, and I mean RARE to see any three scanned film frames in a row without dirt/dust/scratches. If every DP or filmmaker that still loves or pines for the film experience had to personally fix all the issues they'd never shoot another frame again.

And fake grain... I just watched "The Vast of Night" on Amazon... oh my... I don't think there was a single moment I wasn't just buzzing with awareness of it.

I love film history. I respect everything that was done with the medium, even more so for having experienced virtually every aspect and phase... I don't personally care to re-experience any aspect of the process moving forward. It's a new world, a different process with a different aesthetic. I can't tell you the moment I switched from craving grain and weave to craving a hyper clean rock-steady image, but it happened.
 
I like to think that if video came before film, people would wax poetic about video noise and complain about film grain. It's what we see first that gains our heart. It's not always true, but it is so in many cases.
 
Paul F said:
I like to think that if video came before film, people would wax poetic about video noise and complain about film grain. It's what we see first that gains our heart. It's not always true, but it is so in many cases.
Click to expand...

There's definitely an element of truth here, but...

There's some richness and warmth to that Waterworld trailer. It's like vinyl vs digital. There's definitely a difference.

I see it like the Daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes looked great with terrific contrast and detail right from the get-go. But people didn't like only getting one print ever and having to work with mercury fumes to develop it. So, in some ways, photography has always moved towards more convenient and easily distributable forms at the expense of the richer imaging techniques that came first.
 
Pulsating effects like grain, scratches, and flicker cause a tingling sensation on my retinas that I find pleasant. It's sort of like a Stan Brakhage film.

 
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ahalpert said:
There's definitely an element of truth here, but...

There's some richness and warmth to that Waterworld trailer. It's like vinyl vs digital. There's definitely a difference.

I see it like the Daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes looked great with terrific contrast and detail right from the get-go. But people didn't like only getting one print ever and having to work with mercury fumes to develop it. So, in some ways, photography has always moved towards more convenient and easily distributable forms at the expense of the richer imaging techniques that came first.
Click to expand...

https://www.redsharknews.com/audio/item/2368-the-sound-of-vinyl-is-just-an-effect-here-s-the-proof

https://www.redsharknews.com/audio/item/4133-vinyl-doesn-t-sound-better-than-digital-you-just-think-it-does
 
Run&Gun said:
https://www.redsharknews.com/audio/item/2368-the-sound-of-vinyl-is-just-an-effect-here-s-the-proof

https://www.redsharknews.com/audio/item/4133-vinyl-doesn-t-sound-better-than-digital-you-just-think-it-does
Click to expand...

Yeah okay play the "science" card on me ;)

I might be wrong, but I feel like there's a difference.

And when I look at Magic Lantern RAW Canon 5D footage, I glimpse colors that remind me of the richness of film. Sure, those recordings have limited dynamic range, and sure I might be blowing a hole in my own inherent-difference-between-film-and-digital argument, but there's something I can't put my finger on in the richness of the tones
 
That Brakhage film reminds me that when I first started out teaching media production, we used to give our elementary school age students a 10' length of clear 16mm film leader and a box of colored markers to see what they could come up with by drawing directly on the film. I wouldn't call any of the results great, but many were at least as watchable as Stan's movie. It was actually pretty great to help them visualize the size and shape of the frame, how persistence of vision works to create the illusion of motion, and so forth.

I wonder what the equivalent exercise might look like in the digital age?
 
I’m not sure how one would recreate some of the mult media events I attended in Austin in late 90s today. Multiple 16 mm projectors, slide projectors, overhead projectors along with a live plus recorded music elements. I’m sure it could be recreated but can’t imagine having same feel. Today would probably feel a little to slick.
 
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