What is the 'organic look' according to you?

S

Stab

Well-known member
Many times you hear people talk about the 'organic look', often used in the same sentence with 'film look'. The 'video look' does not have that organic look.

But what is it exactly? Is it the colors or their transition? Is it the contrast of the lack of? Has the sharpness level anything to do with it?

And most importantly: Can any footage (HD with decent DR) be graded in a way that it looks organic?

Please share your views about the 'organic look' and what the necessary ingredients are.
 
I think "organic" or "film look" has the most to do with lighting and composition. A beautifully lit subject will look better on a DVX100 than a subject lit completely flat with a 35mm camera.
 
Organic implies non-digital. You shouldn't be able to tell it's from a computer and an electronic sensor.

The most organic looking major films of the past couple years were Moonrise Kingdom and Black Swan. Also The Wrestler. See The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for a great look too. These are film acquired of course. The grainy 16mm massages the retinae.

I would call Prometheus the opposite of this, and it looked to me like a video game. Actually hated the look of the entire thing.

Film captures infinite colors. An 8 bit camera captures 256. Each bit you add doubles the number of colors you can capture. A 9 bit camera would be 512, and 10 bit 1024. The BMC captures 12 bit, but apparently there is some logarithmic algorthicm taking the number of colors from a 16 bit sensor? Not sure on that architecture.

The Reds are up to 16 bits, I believe. But they don't look all that "organic" to me.

The DR is another factor, and the way you expose. I've gotten decent film looks from a cheap camcorder by severely underexposing in daylight and bouncing light onto the actors to minimize the DR of the scene. As soon as the brights clip, you lose that organic feel, and it looks like cheap video. That's the biggest tell tale sign that you're shooting on video (which I literally hate).

It looks like 13 plus stops are needed to capture bright sun convincingly enough to mimic film. Film has a beatutiful roll-off with the brights, so that they almost never appear to be a hard clip. That's what's so great about it.

Then there's the "color science" of turning that data into something beautiful. Sometimes minor changes in the brightness level on faces, as the actors move about, give subtle and not-so-pleasing shifts in the color. This is less so with real film, but a lot of cameras are vulnerable to crappy inconsistent color rendering. The more technical people could probably explain this phenomenon better, but I just know what I see, what I like, and what I don't like.
 
I'm just a hobbyist, but to me the "organic" look means the video footage has the the same image characteristics as a top notch still camera image; i.e. bright with deep, lively colors that give you the feelings and senses you'd have if you were actually visiting the scene being filmed. Like this footage:


Panasonic LX7 consumer grade point & shoot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phkhgBgzOmQ
Panasnonic GH3 footage: https://vimeo.com/55219894


The non-organic look to me means the video footage looks blander and duller than real life which in turn makes me feel distant and detached from the scene. So it's not as satisfying to watch.

Examples:
Panasonic AC130 pro camcorder footage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEKtZaeLtFY
Panasonic X900 consumer camcorder footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2GNQ6Kq-Gg
 
Tree of Life, to me, was very organic in every imaginable way. The shooting style, the exclusive use of natural lighting, and the spontaneous acting approach makes it a unique experience. Mind numbingly boring for some since there is no narrative per se, but the feel is in a category by itself.
 
Organic, to me, is early 90's indie films like Swingers, Reservoir Dogs, etc. Those films to me, just look and scream, indie film. I love the texture. Don't know what it is.

Most big hollywood films from that same era just seem so slick and smooth in comparison. Those indie films just had something I can't place. A texture.
 
To me the most organic looking stuff I can think of recently is something like No Country For Old Men. It's like someone else alluded to - it's like each frame is shot with a still camera. Not a lot of ultra present digital manipulation going on, very warm..but full of life.
 
"Organic look" is a cliche that really means: "I don't know what I'm talking about", or "Gee, look how intellectual I am".
 
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I associate the term organic look with expensive analogue, although I think with a good colorist some digital cameras can look the same or maybe even better in terms of the organic look. Latitude is not really a part of the look itself for me, as many of my favorite movies from 50-70s were captured in either B&W or Color film stocks with a low DR compared to many of today's cameras and stocks. The more I think about it I think it is a combination of image artifacts and a pleasing color reproduction(not necessarily accurate).

A good example of a organic vs digital(?) look to me would be Sci-Fi movies: Older movies like Blade Runner and the first Star Wars movies(4-6) which has a look I find very organic albeit the scenes being futuristic and all that (I love it!). While newer Sci-Fi movies, for example the previously mentioned one in this thread, Prometheus, is very clinically looking to me, due to the hyper-clean image and skin tones, they aren't very pleasing to my eyes but I don't know how to describe why.
 
mail4joeg said:
Organic implies non-digital. You shouldn't be able to tell it's from a computer and an electronic sensor.

The most organic looking major films of the past couple years were Moonrise Kingdom and Black Swan. Also The Wrestler. See The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for a great look too. These are film acquired of course. The grainy 16mm massages the retinae.

I would call Prometheus the opposite of this, and it looked to me like a video game. Actually hated the look of the entire thing.

Film captures infinite colors. An 8 bit camera captures 256. Each bit you add doubles the number of colors you can capture. A 9 bit camera would be 512, and 10 bit 1024. The BMC captures 12 bit, but apparently there is some logarithmic algorthicm taking the number of colors from a 16 bit sensor? Not sure on that architecture.

The Reds are up to 16 bits, I believe. But they don't look all that "organic" to me.

The DR is another factor, and the way you expose. I've gotten decent film looks from a cheap camcorder by severely underexposing in daylight and bouncing light onto the actors to minimize the DR of the scene. As soon as the brights clip, you lose that organic feel, and it looks like cheap video. That's the biggest tell tale sign that you're shooting on video (which I literally hate).

It looks like 13 plus stops are needed to capture bright sun convincingly enough to mimic film. Film has a beatutiful roll-off with the brights, so that they almost never appear to be a hard clip. That's what's so great about it.

Then there's the "color science" of turning that data into something beautiful. Sometimes minor changes in the brightness level on faces, as the actors move about, give subtle and not-so-pleasing shifts in the color. This is less so with real film, but a lot of cameras are vulnerable to crappy inconsistent color rendering. The more technical people could probably explain this phenomenon better, but I just know what I see, what I like, and what I don't like.
Click to expand...

I still think it is a marketing term. Film isn't organic, it is just as synthetic as a image sensor, it is no more natural or real than digital, just different. Using the term makes no more sense then walking about talking about the need to synergize the paradigm shift!

Also, I'm not sure if it would be true to say that film captures infinite colours, film gamut would be limited by the dyes used. It obviously has a much larger gamut than digital has, but I have no doubt there will be a point at which the gamut of digital devices will supersede film, and I don't believe we are that far off from it either.
 
Re infinite colors, strictly speaking I suppose you could say that since there is pretty much a stepless gradation in color density in film. Gamut defines the range, not the steps within the range.
 
""Organic look" is a cliche that really means: "I don't know what I'm talking about", or "Gee, look how intellectual I am"."

"Organic" is an adjective. Look it up. If you don't actually say anything at all, that shows you know what you're talking about?

"I still think it is a marketing term. "

From whom? I guess no one here has to actually back up what they type.


"Film isn't organic, it is just as synthetic as a image sensor,"

It's analog in nature, not digital. It isn't divided into dscrete matrices and limited by bit depths, or compression schemes. The grain structure is also a unique characteristic of film v. digital leading to a less uniform field of color and more texture. It simply looks different, less smooth, and while digital acquisition can approach this with the higher end cameras, most systems have their serious drawbacks.

"it is no more natural or real than digital, just different."

I do believe that's what we're discussing. Why the smarmy hostility?

"Using the term makes no more sense then walking about talking about the need to synergize the paradigm shift!"

I suppose the anti-intellectualism is to be expected on a filmmaking board. Try here.
 
From a technical viewpoint, for digital images to look organic to me there must be no significant visible moire or aliasing produced by the sensor pattern. Nothing screams digital to me more than visible aliasing artifacts. Ater that, enough dynamic range for reasonably film like image tonality. That can be sharp pristine clean and high contrast or it can be soft and low contrast. Film can do both. But I don't associate the term with any particular preconception of what film looks like, since it can vary considerably. Film color negative is an organic chemical medium, so maybe that is what the term refers to.
 
To me, the "organic look" is invisible production quality.

-Natural lighting, properly exposed
-DoF that's pretty deep, but that does have some softening of the background.
-Crisp audio with apropriate ambient noise
-No music
-Hand-held, but not shaky

The "film look" seems typically tied to footage with shallow depth of field, 24p, dramatic or high contrast lighting with a wide dynamic range. It's not always very organic from my perspective.

-Mike
 
To me "Organic Look" means "Natural Looking", as if you were there looking at things with your own eyes.

Keep in mind that sometimes you have to do a lot of un-natural things to create this "Natural Look", like rigging massive fill lighting on a city street.

One of the street shots from "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"...

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Street Fill Lighting.jpg
 
To me organic describes a style of shooting where the lighting is rigorously sourced and not meant to flatter and where the art direction is coherent but doesn't bring attention to itself. Movies like Sidney Lumet's The Verdict, or The (original) Taking of Pelham 123, or Three Days of the Condor, Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton. Whether digital or not is irrelevant to what I think of as organic. Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, for instance or Lumet's Before the Devil Knows Your Dead also have what I would call organic feel to them, both shot digitally.
 
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