Slowing down 24p

[kye]

Recently I've seen a few instances where a TV show or movie slowed down 24p footage, effectively creating a <12fps shot.

The interesting thing is that often these productions are modern, shot on Alexas, and could just as easily shot 50p or 120p+, but didn't.  The moments that were slowed down were obvious shots for slow motion, so it's not like the editor went in an unexpected direction that the director or script couldn't have anticipated.

The thing that strikes me is that it's a different effect to shooting 50p and slowing it down.  A different aesthetic.  TBH it seems more timeless and more emotional than the typical 50p, high-emotion, queue the big music, pivotal story moment that is commonly done.  It feels more like classic cinema.

Have you noticed this?  How does it feel to you?

Would you do it deliberately?

[tupp]

In the film days, I under-cranked the camera on a couple projects.  It's a dramatic effect that sort of "feels" slow motion, but it is not the same as slowing the frame rate in post.

[TomTheDP]

Depends on the project. John Woo used it a lot in Hard Boiled if I remember correctly. 

[Mark Romero 2]

I think that Wong Kar Wai was kind of the king of undercranking. (Thinking of "As Tears Go By" and "Days of Being Wild" in particular... not sure if he used it up as much n his later works though).

 

Can we undercrank with digital cameras??? I think on my S1 I can shoot at 24fps but then have a shutter speed of 1/12th of a second. Will have to try it. I'm such a sucker for late 80's Hong Kong Cinema. 

[KnightsFan]

@kye isn't talking about undercranking though, right? He's talking about slowing down 24 fps. Speaking of Wong Kar Wai, didn't he use used the effect kye is talking about in Chungking Express? It's a nice effect for some scenes. I feel like it's used more for "impact" in action scenes as opposed to the "cool factor" or "rhythm" of normal slow motion, if that makes any sense.

2 hours ago, Mark Romero 2 said:

Can we undercrank with digital cameras??? I think on my S1 I can shoot at 24fps but then have a shutter speed of 1/12th of a second. Will have to try it.

Long ago on my GH3 I did that trick with the shutter speed, but a lot of digital cameras don't let you lower the shutter below the frame rate. The Z Cam E2 can shoot any integer frame rate from 1 up to the max, and as a bonus the shutter angle setting always behaves correctly. I did some "retro" tests with 16mm crop mode and a few C mount 16mm lenses, in 15 fps.

[HockeyFan12]

Step printing?

[fuzzynormal]

17 hours ago, kye said:

A different aesthetic.

Super common in 80's movies.  It kind of came into vogue for a stretch.  Think Luke Skywalker facing Ghost-Vader in the Dark Side cave on Dagobah.  I'm not sure what popular movie initially leaned really hard into the effect and pulled it off, but I seem to recall Lucas was enamored with the look and that's why we see it in Empire Strikes Back. 

I just remember seeing it often...war movies, cop movies, dramas, etc. --since I watched a ton of HBO and Cinemax back in the day.

Oh god, I just remembered the Tarzan movie made by John Derek!  I think they shot a 45 minute movie and decided to pad it out with that effect to reach 90 minutes.  That was a "too much cocaine on set need to fix a problem we created" use of the technique, not an aesthetic.

[fuzzynormal]

1 hour ago, KnightsFan said:

Long ago on my GH3 I did that trick

Old Canon video cameras used to shoot low shutter too. I remember shooting 15 fps hi-8 video for my "dramatic" moments.  That's not really step printing though.

I did stumble across a neat little in-camera effect back in the day.  Shot 8fps shutter with my XH-A1 and then would ramp up the footage in post.  Lots of camera blur, and if you filmed your subject moving in slow-mo, it looked like stop motion animation.

[KnightsFan]

@fuzzynormalThat's a much better idea, shooting photos. Lots of camera can get nice, high fps. The NX1 can get to 15, I never thought to use it that way.

[leslie]

2 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

@fuzzynormalThat's a much better idea, shooting photos. Lots of camera can get nice, high fps. The NX1 can get to 15, I never thought to use it that way.

its a burst mode right ? not sure which cameras could do that continuously ? 

[KnightsFan]

1 hour ago, leslie said:

its a burst mode right ? not sure which cameras could do that continuously ? 

It's continuous. Hold the shutter and it goes until you run out of card space--according to specs. I only ever used it for short bursts.

[leslie]

49 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

It's continuous. Hold the shutter and it goes until you run out of card space--according to specs. I only ever used it for short bursts.

Lucky you 😉 my new olympus m10 mark ii only goes to 8.5 fps. I just checked,  Which doesn't actually bother me overly much. I think i can run the bm p4k at lower frame rates than 24 fps if i so desire. 

There may be a video challenge in something along the lines of a slower frame rate. That's sure to be interesting with what people come up with.

[tupp]

9 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

@kye isn't talking about undercranking though, right? He's talking about slowing down 24 fps.

 

Yes.  That is why I said this:

12 hours ago, tupp said:

It's a dramatic effect that sort of "feels" slow motion, but it is not the same as slowing the frame rate in post.

 

[kye]

The XC10 can undercrank.  I shot some pretty amazing night footage once at about 1fps, which I didn't use in the edit but was quite useful at the time because the camera could see the boat passing nearby, how far away it was, how many people were on it, and many other things, when to the naked eye the boat was completely in darkness apart from its headlights.

I was talking about filming 24fps and then playing it back slower, ie 12fps / 50% speed, or lower.  Most recent usage was the dramatic scene where a woman is crying and chasing a train which is pulling out of the station and has her lover on it.  I felt it matched the aesthetic very well.

My understanding of cinematic language is that 50p conformed to 24 is typically used in Hollywood to make something seem a bit surreal, the way we experience reality during peaks of emotion.  Shooting 50p and playing it back at 24p slows time but still gives a continuity of medium, ie, it doesn't break the illusion of continuous motion.  It is also a subtle speed reduction that the footage doesn't feel overly artificial, whereas 120p at 20% feels completely artificial and calls attention to itself.

Having less than 24fps displayed to the audience will break the continuity of motion.  This can be used to great effect for sequences where the perception of a character is highly impaired, such as due to heavy drug use, injury, or severe trauma.  In situations like this the use will likely be seen as fitting into the context, but if it had no alignment to the story then it would pull the audience out of the experience and call attention to the medium, so it can't be used without careful consideration.

Slowing down 24fps footage will do both of the above things - it will slow down the events to slower than real-time and it will show an altered perception of reality.  This may be appropriate in situations like the point of view of a car accident victim coming in and out of consciousness, or the above mentioned woman chasing the train, but the level of emotional engagement has to be right - it would work for the woman if her lover leaving would mean that her life would be basically over but it likely wouldn't work if her lover was going away for a week and forgot his spare socks.

I think frame rate effects are something that you can only use effectively when you understand the aesthetic associations involved and are using these to support the dramatic content of the story.  Failure to do so is one of the things that I see with vloggers who have copied the Casey Neistat vlog formula but don't understand it, so they use slow-motion in ways that say "I just discovered this function of my camera" rather than "here's something that looks awesome in slow-motion, and the thing and the slow-motion effect are both relevant to the story".  

One thing that is interesting is the use of slow-motion pedestrians walking in a city.  It's a stereotypical image that I find works quite well occasionally, typically when the music is on the higher-intensity end of things, but also where the context is also high-intensity.  If someone always wanted to go to NY and this was their trip of a lifetime then that context might warrant it, but a NY vlogger going out to buy milk would have to try a lot harder to 'justify' the altered-state high-emotional context of that shot.  The wedding film-maker shooting a wedding couple in the middle of Times Square that I saw when I was there might get away with using it in the wedding reel, as the wedding is likely a high-emotion situation too.

I see film-making as a three-level thing: 1) understand the technical aspects, 2) understand the aesthetic of each technical aspect, and 3) apply the right technical choices in order to support the story at each given moment.

[KnightsFan]

7 hours ago, tupp said:

 

Yes.  That is why I said this:

 

Oh yeah, I was mainly replying to the post above me

[filmmakereu]

I like slowing down 30p to 24p. It gives a more filmic mood to your video.

[Mark Romero 2]

2 hours ago, filmmakereu said:

I like slowing down 30p to 24p. It gives a more filmic mood to your video.

I pretty much ALWAYS do this but 99% of my shots are on a gimbal (in my real estate videos).

Also, I tend to do this for drone shots as well.