Emulating 80s Cinematography

[PhantomScreenwriter]

I'm not working on a project that is trying to emulate the 80s look and feel but out of curiosity I wonder how one would go about making a film that looks, sounds and feels in every way, like it was made in the 80s and not done now?

 

[filoco]

I believe you could probably do it with a trailing kind of effect on video and then luma-keying it over the original, in sync so that only the trailed highlights show up. Just saying...

 

[david landau]

Every example you posted was lit with hard lights rather than soft lights. We certainly shot with softlights back then - a lot in fact. I worked on Tv commercials in the 80s and we even brought in 8k studio softlghts on one shoot - what a pain. But that was commercials which were much prettier and had more time to light than the features. Another thing is that in the majority there is a very low contrast ratio between acting area and background and even between key and fill. This was again a product of shooting as many pages as possible in a single day. Carpenter was always doing bigger shots than he had a budget for - so the lighting was rarely refined as it was in an Altman film for example.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the lenses back then had a different coating which produced a different color range than we have today with the new lenses made for HD sensitive cameras which are very sensitive to infrared. Movies like Footloose had more of that kodak color look.

So a sharper look to the image with more saturated colors and as others have said - no handheld camera - dolly moves yes. While the steadi-cam was being used it was very expensive so it was only used sparingly on certain shots.

Hope that helps.

David Landau - author "Lighting for cinematography" available on Amazon