Last week Marc, Andrés, and I went over to Michelle's house to see the four short films she made last semester at NYU. These were her introduction to shooting on film — all her projects so far have been shot on video. This semester she was allocated eight rolls of black & white 16mm reversal film to be used over the course of the semester. All of her films were really good, but I especially liked the one she made for her final project. She really has a lot of talent and great creativity. I'm constantly impressed with the ideas she comes up with for her movies.

Aside from the quality of the films themselves, I really enjoyed the experience to see a film shot on a projector. It really does have an indescribable quality that makes it look a lot better than video. I've always wondered what exactly causes the difference in appearance, but I've never really been clear on the answer. Based on what I've read, it seems to be due to the difference in capturing mechanisms.

Film is shot at 24 frames per second, but the shutter design in a film camera only exposes each frame for half of that time (the other half is spent moving the film to get the next frame in place), so each frame is exposed for about 1/48 of a second, and obviously, the entire frame is recorded at once.

In the case of NTSC video, the frame rate is about 30 (actually 29.97) frames per second, with no downtime for moving film, but it's actually recorded in two half exposures. First the odd lines of the frame are recorded, followed by the even lines. As a result, each frame in a video camera only contains 1/60 of a second of information, which results in less motion blur than film.

I guess the combination of a progressive exposure (an entire frame is exposed at once, instead of half-and-half), the downtime between frames when no image is recorded, and the increased motion blur all contribute to the more cinematic, "dreamy" look of film.

Anyway, it was an awesome experience both because of the medium and the content of the films. It made me want to go out and buy a film camera, but I think maybe I should be able to make a simple film with a cheap camcorder first :)