Emulating Film Aesthetics

Steve Yedlin Eat Your Heart Out

(A video companion to this article will be linked at the bottom if you’d prefer to watch instead of read)

Several years ago I watched the Steve Yedlin Display Prep Demo, and was overwhelmed by the amount of information. As time passed, I learned as much as I could about filmmaking creatively, while keeping an interested eye on the technical sides.

In 2016, I attempted two tests in prep for my first short film, Abigail.
Test one was an attempt at emulating Anamorphic aesthetics, with a heavy focus on bokeh and blooming highlights (as well as the obligatory lens flares, which were trimmed for the movie), viewable here.
The second test was on emulating the “feeling” of 8mm home movies due to a portion of the film taking place in the first half of the 1940’s, viewable here.

Since these tests I’ve finished Abigail, and am about to close on the follow up film. This has prompted me to revisit these earlier tests, and update them with my current knowledge and skillset.

After the initial color correction and exposure corrections, my first step in this process was setting up a node structure. I am currently using DaVinci, but the previous tests were all done in a layer-system in Premiere, and I am still very new to node based workflows outside Blender.

This Node structure is applied to an adjustment layer as an umbrella effect.

Halation — The Subtle First Step

Captivating.

The “Base” node has no correction applied, so the first node worth talking about is halation.

Halation is the effect of light, primarily red light, bouncing around on the film plane during capture. This creates a wrap of light, or halo, around bright areas of high contrast.
This is an effect that can be difficult to reproduce exactly, which is why instead I’ve gone for an aesthetic choice that can be adjusted depending on taste.

Steve Yedlin did introduce this concept to me, and I am endlessly grateful.

The example on the left is from the Display Prep Demo by Steve Yedlin. His approach involves a custom algorithm.

Since I cannot and will not learn to program in order to replicate this effect, I’ve instead gone the route of replicating the effect based on highlight selection in DaVinci.
By isolating the brightest areas of an image, and creating a red-biased blur, I was able to replicate the effect well enough, and control the intensity to taste, which for me is fairly subtle.

It’s also worth mentioning that part of the look of the effect was produced in camera due to the chromatic aberration in my Rokinon 35mm T1.5 wide open.

Most of the purple fringing around the window is actually an in-camera artefact, but has been exaggerated by the halation filter.

Halation is usually isolated to areas of high-contrast, such as the boundaries of the dark windows and bright sky in the photo above.
Consistency is key to keeping the effect believable instead of distracting, so picking a strength that adapts well, or being willing to customize your effect per-set up is important.

Film Color On Sony — The Nightmare That Wasn’t Actually A Nightmare

The hallmark of film for those who give a shit, is that color reproduction. While cinema cameras all replicate colors extraordinarily well, a consumer product like the A7S is almost universally known for it’s fairly funky out of the box colors.
Very sterile, and mathematically correct, but visually lacking.

The first step in this process actually comes in the capture.
I captured the shots in either a custom Slog2 or a custom Cine4 preset, with red and cyan biases, green reduction, and a yellow tweak to keep the colors in a more “cinematic” area in capture. Again, mathematically incorrect, but aesthetically much more appealing.

Once capture is done, one of the effects I’ve grown fond of over the years is a faded shadow look, such as this shot in Abigail where I first learned to love this effect.

There is no true-black in this image, despite the amount of shadow. This was graded in 2016, prior to this node setup, in Premiere Lumetri.

The benefit of lifted shadows, besides the fact that I like the way it looks, is it also helps with macro-blocking artifacts generated by low-bitrate footage, and exacerbated by the YouTube compression algorithm that absolutely DECIMATES shadows.

After the shadows have been lifted and highlights curved off, we apply a color shift to a more magenta/red bias. This part of the emulation is much more optional, as films such as Saving Private Ryan or Anything By Clint Eastwood have a much more desaturated, almost Log-like look to them. But in my tests I decided to go for a more warm feel.

Example image. The color temperature during capture was cool due to the rapidly setting sun, and I ended up warming it slightly. Most noticeable in the sky, which goes from a pale color to much more golden.

Hold My Weave — A Terrible Joke

Gate weave is an unwanted side effect of film projection. The film is not uniformly even, and the machine through which film is projected are also subject to vibrations from the motor. This means the film will wobble slightly from side to side, and being projected from a tiny 35mm film plane to a two story film screen manifests this effect as a perceptual wobble in any static shots (or worse if the film print is old or the projector is particularly well used).

This effect is very much optional. I only attempted it because I thought it would be an interesting test, and I very likely won’t be using it on any future projects outside of a specific look.

500% zoom into a shot where I rack focus. Halation and film grain are also applied, but the shot itself was entirely static prior to the weave effect being applied. The intensity of the color shift is due to cheap glass blown up to 500% resolution.

This effect was achieved through a small tweak to a built in effect in DaVinci called Camera Shake, which I know has Premiere equivalent and likely also has a cousin in FCPX or Sony Vegas.
The effect has been brought down to extremely subtle levels to keep from being distracting, and is reasonably successful.

Chromatic Aberration and Vignette — Sisters and Last Steps

Chromatic aberration is the effect of diffracted wave lengths of light, most visible in high contrast areas or toward the outward edges of an image.
This is also a popular effect in modern video games.

A vignette is a subtle darkening or lightening of the edges of a frame, in our case darker, mimicking the shade caused by the blockage of light on the outskirts of lenses or lens shades.

An extreme example of the effect, as well as a visible lens vignette.

The vignette I enjoy, but I would call the chromatic aberration almost entirely unnecessary outside of a specific look (Assassination Of Jesse James, The Revenant, etc.), mostly because it naturally occurs in all lenses, more visibly the cheaper or older the glass. In my Rokinon, the effect is relatively subtle when stopped down, and more noticeable at T1.5 as would be expected. As more light is let into the lens, more of it diffracts and bounces around.

Conclusion — #NerdyFilmTechStuff

If this sort of content genuinely interests you, I cannot recommend enough the above hashtag on Twitter, used by Steve Yedlin, as well as his site, here, where he breaks down more than I could ever hope to.

I’d also suggest watching the below video, prepared by myself, which shows the implementation and explanation of the above techniques on footage. It’s also brief, at just over 4 minutes.

Martin R. McGowan is a filmmaker living in Reading, Pa.

I can also be found on Instagram, and on a YouTube channel, about a decade late to that party.