alt Hacker NewsCollateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major, all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones, but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.)
But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)
And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very close to "raw". It was also a huge pain in the ass. The camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as the "Director's Friend.")
In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school, drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called Russian Ark[2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange little Russian film where a never-named character walks the viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode of the recently-released Netflix show Adolescence, this entire film was a single, very long, very complicated, unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just hidden to the audience, one shot, through streets, buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was back then.
As we've now established with Collateral (and this film predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem. Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him. And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few takes where there were no mistakes.
None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all absolutely insane!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomso...
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I saw Russian Ark! Definitely a piece of art made by film buffs for film buffs; impressive to see, but far more impressive when you understand the amount of work that went into it.
I'm wondering why people would have chosen to do early digital if it was so inconvenient. When did the cost and flexibility advantages start to really kick in?
"But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)"
Why was certain scenes in Collateral filmed in other frame rates than 24 fps (unless you are doing slow motion of course)? AFAIK it was never projected/shown in anything else than 24 fps.
Around 2004 I worked for a company in The Netherlands that owned a Viper camera (one of the few in NL, I guess because they were based in Breda and Thomson had an HQ there). The company actually had a big Mercedes van that contained a Quantel iQ system just to record and postprocess the video coming out of that Viper.
In the years after that I worked with them to write a custom application based on a Bluefish444 card combined with some ATTO fiber channel storage just to get the frames to disk fast enough. A lot of custom code, overlapped I/O, that kind of thing. We had a beast of a JBOD RAID setup, must have been about 12 spinning disks.
The only alternative in those days were systems that stored to tape, but could only do so in a compressed format (I think Sony had a solution that did 4:2:0 instead of the 4:4:4 coming out of the Viper). People were scrambling for these storage solutions so much that we even got Arri to lend us their prototype D-20 camera (which turned into D-21 which turned into Alexa) just so we could make sure our storage system worked with their camera. We just had this amazing prototype camera sitting around our office for what must have been a year. They just lent it to us. Wild. I think our only main competitor at the time was Codex, which admittedly had a much slicker system.
We visited the CINEC trade show and got a ton of interest. I think I still have a business card of the DoP that did all the miniature work in Lord Of The Rings. He loved the fact that we would store things uncompressed, which would make things like compositing a lot easier.
Unfortunately, mismanagement caused the whole thing to collapse. Oh well. Nowadays you just use a CompactFlash card :)