The Cinematic Look in Video

A common desire among video creators is for their footage to look the same as a film we watch in the cinema. In other words: we shoot digitally, but we want it to look like celluloid. Several misunderstandings tend to arise here, and they get in the way of a result the audience will actually find compelling.

If you’re after the contemporary film look, I have some very bad news for you right off the bat:

The camera you own doesn’t matter all that much.
Whether you shoot at 24, 25 or 30 frames per second doesn’t matter.
Simply grading the finished video in post won’t save you.

The film look is a concept that speaks first and foremost about what we see. Not about what we see it with. Yes, the camera plays a small part too, but what’s decisive is how you light the scene, how you compose it, what you’re filming and in what narrative context. What makes a shot cinema isn’t the quality of the camera or the frame rate. You could shoot on a “real” Panavision camera with the right settings onto honest 70mm celluloid and your shots might still have nothing to do with cinematic design. Nor will anamorphic glass rescue you. And the reverse holds too: a good filmmaker can capture excellent, cinema-grade shots with a mobile phone.

[su_note]Cinema becomes cinema only after a crew of dozens of experienced specialists makes an unexpectedly large number of small, almost invisible preparations that the audience usually never even registers. It’s the sum of many tiny factors that produces the right artistic experience.[/su_note]

These days we have access, at quite reasonable prices, to cameras with genuinely very good technical specifications and first-rate images. Even the cameras approved by Netflix are relatively accessible, even if only as a rental. At that level there are few compromises left and no excuses to hide behind. And conversely — a good cinematographer will casually pick up their phone and shoot a better frame than a beginner with a professional camera. It was true in photography and it’s true here.

Even so, many video creators feel dissatisfied with their work. They want it to look like the cinema, to have THAT certain filmic something.

They buy more expensive cameras and lots of different lenses.
They shoot RAW.
They try shooting at 24 frames per second.
They run the footage through a series of LUTs to create the impression that it came off film.
They adjust the colour grade so the video follows the tried-and-tested orange-and-teal scheme.
They add artificial grain so it looks like a scan from celluloid.

And it’s still not right. Video like that often ends up resembling Instagram effluent more than cinematography.

My favourite advice would be: if you want film, shoot on film. Except that’s advice nobody can act on. Shooting on film is no longer a routine option unless you have an enormous budget (compared with capturing the same material on video). And the result? Shooting on film by itself won’t help you.

[su_note]Cinematography is an art form involving an unexpectedly large number of creative contributors. There’s no faking that when you run a small video production outfit, or when you’re an enthusiastic beginner.[/su_note]

If you’re going to attempt to imitate film design, take a look first at the credits of any ordinary feature. You’ll count hundreds of names. Dozens of professions. Don’t expect to assemble that kind of specialist firepower at home on the tight-fisted budget of a wedding party, or of a start-up company that wants its workshop and two products filmed.

Before we go further, let’s take a short look back.

Which cinematic look do you actually want?

Because what we consider the cinematic look today wasn’t the case thirty years ago, and I’m afraid it won’t be the case later either.

How things are filmed — and why they’re filmed that way — changes over time. The look of a video is historically determined by technology, but also by taste and by budget.

If you shoot video with a small crew and a tight budget, my opinion and recommendation is this: don’t try to imitate what filmmakers do. It won’t come off easily, and if you go to great lengths, you probably still won’t be satisfied.

Sometimes it’s simpler to admit that we’re working with video. Let’s not pretend it’s something it isn’t. There’s no need to weigh a product video down with filters better suited to a horror film.
Shoot it correctly on a technical level — that’s often perfectly adequate for what the client needs.
Apply your best knowledge to any colour preparation, adjustment and correction that supports your visual language.

The generation that still remembers real cinema will soon start dying out — that dark room with celluloid backlit onto the screen. Film is disappearing. Cinemas are increasingly digital. That process can’t be stopped, and it’s only a matter of time before simulating film’s technical defects stops being attractive to filmmakers. For audiences, I suspect it stopped being attractive long ago.

So how do they do it when they make cinema?

If you want to imitate filmmakers, you can analyse existing films. Probably recent ones. You’ll find that certain patterns run like a golden thread through the whole history of cinematography, refined over time. Those elements are reliable. Pay attention to them.

[su_note]Where you can, use those same proven elements in your own video. Then it will be “cinematic”, even if you shot it on a mobile phone.[/su_note]

One of the most important artistic devices is contrast.

Use it and you have half the battle won. Contrast can be:

Narrative (slow versus fast, sad versus funny, good versus evil).
Tonal (light versus dark).
Chromatic (red versus green).
Aural (silence versus noise, or a high voice against a low one).
Kinetic (fast versus slow movement).
Optical (sharp versus soft).
Editorial (a fast versus slow arrangement of shots).
Scenographic (large versus small, or dark versus light elements).
And many, many others…

Wherever contrast can be found, filmmakers put it there.

Filmmakers frequently use the following devices

Before you read on, please note that what follows concerns the concept and the preparation of the scene only. It’s entirely irrelevant what it’s being shot with, or onto:

Colour temperature is often pushed markedly away from what we’d consider correct. Frequently everything in frame is almost blue. Or yellow, even at the cost of a colour cast. Or a single colour dominates the picture dramatically — think of the almost monochromatically brown Alien 3. Colour has a specific effect on the viewer and filmmakers exploit that heavily.
The golden hour is a favourite for shooting (or for simulating). Sunrise and sunset are excellent conditions for scenes with strong tonal and colour contrast (yellow against blue, light against dark).
A great many scenes are shot in darkness, at night, in unlit environments. As the saying goes, no dark, no drama. Darkness is ideal because it creates mystery, and the viewer is usually a curious creature. For the filmmaker it’s an advantage — in the dark, certain things can’t be shown in much detail. It’s cheaper to produce and it multiplies the dramatic effect. Remember what happened in the later instalments when they showed the alien in full, as a figure. It started to look more like an amusing costume than a predator worthy of sweaty palms in the audience.
What you see in the frame is almost never an accident. Empty walls get dressed with posters, props or lighting before shooting. A shot can’t feel empty or unbalanced — unless that’s precisely the intention.
Costumes and other props are usually designed to be precisely coordinated with the surroundings and the lighting. On screen you never register that there’s intent behind even the smallest details in a film. But that intent is what achieves the desired effect.
Haze and mist. Many films are shot with a little smoke dispersed across the set before the camera rolls. This produces better light effects and separates foreground from background more cleanly. Often this single factor is the difference between a film in the cinema and a piece of video — hardly anyone shooting video bothers to haze the set.
Smoke. Similarly, if the intent of the scene allows it, you’ll usually find smoke forming somewhere in frame. It’s an effective texture that enriches the scene and creates the illusion of reality and of action in progress.
Fire. Fire works the same way — where possible, you’ll find flames somewhere in the shots. In an action film, an explosion has to have a fiery glow even when logically there’s nothing there to burn.
Rain. Another favourite film prop is rain. Sure, it’s usually just a sprinkler, but visually it’s attractive. Sometimes the filmmakers let the rain register only as a play of shadows and light, but in the cinema there has to be rain! Or some other spraying water.
Wet ground. Wherever it’s feasible, night scenes in particular are shot with a wet floor. Lights and colours glisten in it. Instead of darkness on the ground, the filmmaker gets an interesting texture. With a bit of luck, that water will even be moving somewhere in frame as it runs off.
Backlight. In a dark environment especially, something absolutely must be shining into the camera. Shooting without it is unthinkable! The lights have to produce blooms and blobs, otherwise known as lens flare.
In many films the set and costumes are coordinated to be predominantly orange or teal. Nothing else. This is the approach known as orange and teal. You can smirk at it all you like, but it runs through the entire history of colour film, so whatever we think of it, it works.
Plenty of scenes are shot low-key or high-key. Although this is partly a technical matter, I’m keeping it under scene preparation, because the filmmaker decides in advance that the scene will be nearly white or nearly black. That’s the intent, and the rest is handled by technique.
Where possible, filmmakers shoot from the shaded side. They use powerful lights, but aim them towards the camera and shoot the actor from the side that isn’t lit. It increases the drama.
Sound. Sound also sits on the border between conceptual preparation and technology. In any case, well-crafted sound is the foundation of a good film. The viewer doesn’t consciously notice it. It has to be well designed and stylised while still feeling natural.
Music. Here too it’s vital to choose quality material. Without good music, a series of shots with sound may never become a film that leaves a strong impression on you.

When you look at films from the perspective of the technical apparatus behind them, you’ll often find that cameras move along dolly track or ride on cranes, that filmmakers set up their own lighting along half a kilometre of motorway, and so on. Among the technological tricks, let’s mention these:

A cinema camera almost never uses a zoom. It cuts between several shots instead.
Camera movement in a film is usually extremely smooth — at first glance it looks natural, but the paths and moves are normally worked out with great precision. A move across or through a scene can be extremely demanding to produce, but the results are worth it. This point doesn’t apply to action films.
Shots often feature obstructions in the foreground that create a sense of space. In a film it feels authentic. In a video of a conference talk, it usually just looks odd when an amateur operator tries to shoot the panellists “artistically” through a bottle of mineral water.
In many productions the image is artificially destabilised in post so that it feels as though the operator was holding the camera and moving it. In reality it was usually shot on a tripod. If you imitate this by shooting handheld, you’ll typically misjudge the right amount of movement and it won’t ring true. (The degree of motion unrest is tuned to the needs of the story, from mild to strong.)
Cinematography makes very frequent use of depth of field. Less important things go soft. That focuses the viewer’s eye where the filmmaker wants it, and it creates a further contrast in sharpness as well (sharp versus soft).
The captured footage is then colour treated. This is known as colour grading. Grading serves both artistic and perceptual purposes. In post, the parameters of the recorded shot are adjusted to evoke exactly the feeling the author intended. Grading here is a layer on top of scenography and lighting, not a replacement for them. Usually one complements the other to amplify the result.
VFX, or visual effects, make it possible to insert objects into shots, or to place filmed objects into scenes that don’t exist. I won’t even attempt to tackle that in this article.
Many films use a widescreen aspect ratio, which significantly underlines the cinematic impression. Anamorphic capture at 2.35:1, and sometimes at an even more pronounced ratio using special lenses, gives a film its own very specific properties, and those help build the right atmosphere.

I hope that by this point I’ve made a sufficient case that:

[su_note]The cinematic look is not an effect. It isn’t something you can “switch on” as an option in your editing suite. Producing something with the authority of cinema is simply a work of art created by a great many contributors.[/su_note]

Plenty of filmmakers try to add something to their videos to reinforce the impression that this isn’t video but film. Video can be “coloured” to look like a scan of a film frame rather than a digital capture.

Technical defects familiar from celluloid can be added to the image.
Colours can be baked in with LUT profiles so they look as if the film had been shot on Technicolor or on one of the Ektachrome stocks.
But what was actually filmed will usually still be shouting: I’m just cheap video, now additionally decimated by effects.

Finally, let’s look at how hard it is to imitate even something as “trivial” and minor as the frame rate. Many people try to switch on this one parameter typical of film in the hope that it will give their video the right flair. You can shoot at 24 frames per second. But there’s a problem here. Shooting in that format is automatically incompatible with the world around it — conversion is needed for both 25 and 30 frames. So unless you have a genuinely serious reason to shoot at 24 frames, don’t. You won’t conjure up a cinematic impression by replicating one particular parameter. Not even several. And frame rate is certainly not the parameter to pick.

Want the cinematic look? Then go and sit in a cinema that still projects classic celluloid — not one with a digital projector. Beyond how the film itself is crafted (set, lighting, costume, composition and so on), these differences are also in play:

A cinema screen is several metres across, in a good cinema a few dozen, and with luck it will be curved as it should be.
Film in a cinema is projected as a series of images with darkness between them. Not like on your computer, where the images alternate without darkness. So even this small detail makes a difference to the experience.
Film in a cinema is an analogue medium and normally has grain. Grain can be imitated, but it remains an imitation.
Even in a good projector, the film strip has a certain small tolerance. The image on the screen therefore drifts very subtly. This too is a subliminal phenomenon, but one that automatically triggers the feeling that “the film has started”.
The film strip is mechanically damaged. Assorted scratches and dust create a characteristic impression.
If the film is anamorphic, the desqueeze on projection is never perfect and the image has certain geometric imperfections. Another small