now what i'm with isn't 'it' and what's 'it' seems weird and scary to me

[bossymarmalade]

In my attempt to get back into journaling, I may be taking people off my reading circle! Please don't feel that this is hugely personal, I'm just trying to whittle down the list until I get a handle on dreamwidthing on a regular basis again. :)

Tumblr was good for a while when I felt burnt out on journaling, and just wanted to flick through pretty pictures and gifsets and so forth. And it still is! But now I have come again to the point where I want conversations with people, which Tumblr is completely and utterly useless for unless I want to get into a screaming match with random teenagers about how much I hate that fucking "What Does the Fox Say" song. (And that's another thing, I want to talk to some damn GROWNUPS again, heh!)

So from now on, Tumblr is for playing on the DC roleplaying group that I run with glockgal and that's pretty much it. BTW I will be posting an ad for that RP group soonish, so if you've ever considered a DCU game, please keep us in mind!

I probably got this link from somebody on DW but I can't remember who! Anyhow, I want to put it here so I don't lose it: The Aesthetic Politics of Filming Black Skin.

Also I just put my pillows in the washing machine. If the machine manages them and comes out unscathed, I'm'a do my comforter too. SO EXCITING

Comments

[devilc]

[Daughter of person who built superduper high-end cameras for the US government for a living.]

"Filmmakers working with celluloid also need to take into account that most American film stocks weren’t manufactured with a sensitive enough dynamic range to capture a variety of dark skin tones."

If you look at old color movies, you'll see that a lot of nighttime scenes were shot in the daytime with a filter over the lens. And this was because the science of color film was not yet advanced and you couldn't shoot color in low-light.

Oh, there was film that could capture the full dynamic range of color in low-light, but it was so fucking expensive that only the US Government could/would pay for it because it was a need to capture research, and the cameras with the shutter speed to deal with this kind of film were also astronomically expensive. It was not financially practical for a motion picture studio to buy a single camera that cost as much as a mansion, nor was it financially practical to shoot reels and reels of incredibly expensive film* when most of it ends up on the cutting room floor.

Studios had big budgets in the 1950s-1970s, but they sure as hell didn't have the budget of the US Military Industrial Complex.

At the time In the Heat of the Night was shot, we were just starting to
see nighttime scenes shot at night in our motion pictures, so yes, Sidney Poitier had to be lit up super bright unless he was being filmed the newest in high-end pro equipment.

However, that all said, by the mid 1980s film and cameras capable of full dynamic range was the standard due to advances in technology, so after that? No excuse except for people too lazy to adjust lighting and calibrate a meter. :(





*Think about it -- even in the heyday of the picture camera, even after supply and demand brought prices down, 3200 speed film cost 4x as much as 400 speed film due in large part that it was simply more expensive to manufacture due to the cost of the raw materials and process.

[bossymarmalade]

Ah, interesting! I didn't know that about old-skool film stocks and dynamic colour ability -- I honestly just take the technical stuff as written, that not being my area of knowledge at all. Thank you for the further info.

My personal experience with film has all, of course, been very modern (stuff like getting professional group photos taken with light-skinned high school friends where they come out poreless and lovely and I'm a strange dark blob). And I'm not even that dark-skinned!