Why Movies From The 70s & 80s Look Like This: Kodak 100T 5247

INTRODUCTION

Towards the end of the 70s and into the early 80s there were a host of pretty iconic Hollywood films. And if you take a closer look at them you’ll see that most of them share quite a similar look.

The reds are punchy and saturated, the greens a bit cooler, with deep, crushed, dense black shadows and full of subdued and neutral grey and brown tones. While of course much of this was a product of what palette and lighting was in front of the camera, another factor they all had in common was that they were shot on the same 35mm film stock: Kodak Eastman’s 5247 100T II. 

In this video let’s take a look at this film stock, its characteristics, the new development process that it created, and why modern movies have a more diverse range of looks when compared to many of these films from the 70s and 80s. 

LOOK

If we look at some shots from a few different movies in this period which were all shot on 5247 with a similar colour palette, of greens, neutral tones and reds, and were all shot in natural exterior day lighting, it’s easy to see that they share a pretty similar look.

If we look at the colour, the greens favour a deeper shade which is typical of Kodak film. The reds in particular stand out. They are very saturated and punchy - which is a bit of a trademark of this stock. The blues of the sky are lighter towards white with more red or magenta in them, especially in comparison to the deeper, more punchy cyan blues found in modern Kodak stocks.

In fact overall, it has a bit of a trend towards reds, yellows and more neutral pastel colours - with tungsten lit skin tones often getting a bit of a bronzed redness to them. If we look at a vectorscope we see this. This line represents a good colour skin tone. 

The modern Vision 3 stock lands on this line. However the older 5247 line goes a bit more to the right into a reddish hue. 

This older film also has less dynamic range than modern stocks do, meaning it resolves a smaller variance between the brightest part of the image and the darkest part. 

The 1970s film manages to keep detail in images with about 7 or 8 stops of light difference in brightness, while modern stocks like 5219 have a dynamic range of around 14 stops. 

What this means is that often brighter skies will start to look white and more blown out, while shadows turn to blocks of pure black. Compared to modern stocks that can hold and roll of strong highlights far better while also maintaining visible detail in areas of shadow. 

The effect is that 5247 has a high contrast look, with deep shadows and bright highlights. The data sheet even suggests exposing with an extra half stop of light if the palette of what is being filmed is mostly made up of darker hues - to avoid crushing the shadows across the frame and making images difficult to read.

EXPOSURE INDEX

Beyond the look of the film, what are some of its more technical characteristics that determined how 5247 II was shot? 

I say II, because the first variation of 5247 film was introduced in 1950 with a mere EI of 16. It was later discontinued and then the label was brought back as 5247 II in 1974.

This film had an exposure index, or EI, of 100. You can think of this like ISO on digital cameras - an indication of how sensitive the film is to light. Each jump up in EI or ISO is represented by a stop - which means half the amount of light is needed to expose the image. 

So, a 200 speed film absorbs two times more light than a 100 speed film, 400 EI absorbs four times more light and 800 EI absorbs eight times more light. 

Therefore, modern digital cinema cameras which usually have EI’s ranging from 800 up into the 1000s, can shoot with much darker levels of light than this old film stock. Even Kodak’s modern 5219 film stock is rated at 500 EI, which means it absorbs 5 times more light than 5247.      

What this meant was that cinematographers shooting inside studios or in darker interiors on 5247, would need to pump in much larger amounts of light to properly expose the image than by today’s standards.

A byproduct of low EI films is that they produce less noticeable film grain. So, for the time, 5247 produced quite a clean looking image, even if it feels quite a lot more textured by today’s technological standards which have seen a decrease in film grain and video noise. 

COLOUR BALANCE

Unlike digital cameras where you can precisely dial in your colour balance, film stocks come with one of two different types of colour balances: daylight or tungsten. 

Daylight stocks are designed to reproduce true, natural looking colour under sunlight, while tungsten films produce balanced looking colour when lit by much warmer tungsten film lights.

5247 is a tungsten balanced film - meaning it should be shot under lights with a 3,200K colour balance. When shot in these conditions it has an EI of 100, as we discussed. 

However, if cinematographers wanted to shoot this film outdoors under natural sunlight or using lights with a 5,500K colour balance, then it was recommended that they add an 85 filter in front of the lens. 

This orange filter would warm up and correct the colour balance, however it would also decrease the exposure by around a stop.

Therefore, when shooting with this filter Kodak recommended exposing with an EI of 64. Which meant the film stock needed to be given even more light when shooting under a daylight source.    

DEVELOPMENT

Film is able to record images by exposing it to light for a fraction of a second, then later running it through a series of chemicals that fix that look onto the film as a negative, which can later be turned into a positive image that can be viewed.

These emulsions are very sensitive, so if they are taken out of their can and exposed directly to light for even a few seconds they will turn completely black and will be impossible to record to. 

To avoid this happening, film needs to be handled completely in the dark: from when it is removed from the can, loaded into the magazine, removed from the magazine and developed.
After development, the footage gets baked into the film and it can be viewed in the light for as long as you like.

ECN-2 PROCESSING

One of the reasons that 5247 is quite a pivotal moment in Kodak’s history is because it introduced a new way of developing the film, called ECN-2, which is still used to this day.

This updated the original ECN process, making it quicker to develop the film and more environmentally friendly.

One thing that makes ECN-2 different to how 35mm stills photos are processed with C-41, is due to how cinema film is shot. Stills cameras only need to take one photograph at a time, whereas to create motion, cinema cameras take 24 or more photographs every second.

This meant the film needed to move through the camera faster, which in turn made it more prone to getting scratched as it flew through and came into contact with mechanical parts inside the camera.

To solve this an antihalation remjet layer at the back of the film was introduced to protect it from getting scratched. ECN-2 has an additional two steps at the beginning of the development process designed to get rid of this protective layer before the film is then developed.

PRINTER LIGHTS

Returning to the initial question of why many movies during this period in the late 70s and early 80s looked the same, can be answered by: because there were very limited options of what film stocks cinematographers could shoot on and those film stocks to a large degree determined how colour was captured and represented.

Cinematographers did have a few ways to control how the colour turned out, but these tools were much more rudimentary and basic than what we are able to do today.
After the film has been developed into a negative it needs to get printed onto new film as a positive at the film lab. If they wanted to control the look or do colour corrections, they could do this here with printer lights. They could control how much red, green and blue they wanted to add to the print by adjusting the strength of these different lights when they converted the negative to a positive.    

It was also possible to do other tricks in development, such as a bleach bypass, which would create a more contrasty, stylised look. Or use effects or colour filters in front of the lens while shooting to create a look with a different tint.

DIGITAL INTERMEDIATE  

However, nowadays, this colour correction process is handled entirely digitally with computers and software and is called the digital intermediate or colour grade. 

Files from digital cameras or film negatives which are scanned and converted into digital files, can be manipulated in grading software such as Da Vinci Resolve or Baselight.

This software allows more granular corrections to be done, such as isolating certain parts of the image using power windows, or adjusting only certain hues.

It also makes it easier than ever to test and create different types of looks for films.

Because of these advances in grading software and cameras with increased dynamic range and colour flexibility, we can go beyond just creating a consistent colour balance based on whatever film was being shot with and move into creating different looks.

These looks could be emulations which try to mimic a look of a filmstock, or any number of digitally created looks by colourists. 

CONCLUSION

This is why, overall, the colour in many modern films seems a bit more varied than movies from past periods which were all shot on the same film stock and developed and printed in a very similar way. 

I see these advances in technology as a positive, that have made it easier than ever before to manipulate colour in the way that best suits the story of the film.