alt Hacker NewsCorrect, theaters at the time could not really been project anything other than 24fps. So there were 2 parts to the shooting style, and one of them is what you describe, shooting at the higher frame rate used in order to have it play back slower when conformed to 24. But they did this in a pretty unusual way. During the action sequences, they would ramp up frame rate from 24 to 30 and back down. They would do adjust during the shot, so the action scenes had these subtle but constantly-occurring increases and decreases in speed that looked very interesting and had not been done before.
The other major part was the shutter speed. They of course could not actually shoot/project 48/60fps, but they a shot a lot scenes at the high shutter speeds one typically uses when shooting those frame rates, a lot of it had that "ultratrealistic" look that people had weren't used to in films, resembling more the look of video, TV soap operas in 60i, etc.
I feel slightly absurd even writing about this considering how little of this really applies today, and how inconsequential changing the shutter speed on a camera is now. "I hit the '+ shutter' button a couple of times, revolutionary!" But it's crazy how conditioned everyone was to these looks at the time due to how little variety there was. I taught this film class where I would demonstrate to everyone, with nearly 100% success, that they all were influenced by and conditioned for these frame rates, even if they didn't know what a frame rate was. We'd shoot a scene with multiple cameras side-by-side shooting at different frames rates, play it back to the class later, and ask which one looked "more like a movie" to them. Invariably, even if they couldn't explain why, everyone always picked the 24p version
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"We'd shoot a scene with multiple cameras side-by-side shooting at different frames rates, play it back to the class later, and ask which one looked "more like a movie" to them. Invariably, even if they couldn't explain why, everyone always picked the 24p version"
Isn't this the most expected result? How could it possibly be anything else?
In the book _In the Blink of an Eye_ by Walter Murch (which is generally about film editing), there's a section that speculates that 24 frames per second somehow resonates with some innate constant of how human vision works, which is wild to think about!
"Correct, theaters at the time could not really been project anything other than 24fps. So there were 2 parts to the shooting style, and one of them is what you describe, shooting at the higher frame rate used in order to have it play back slower when conformed to 24. But they did this in a pretty unusual way. During the action sequences, they would ramp up frame rate from 24 to 30 and back down. They would do adjust during the shot, so the action scenes had these subtle but constantly-occurring increases and decreases in speed that looked very interesting and had not been done before."
Wouldn't this just lead to judder? Maybe that was something that had not been seen before in a movie shown at cinemas.
I've heard that sometimes scenes like kung fu fights were filmed in a lower frame rate (maybe 20 fps) and then it got faster when it was projected in 24 fps. If you do it the other way around movement just get slower (which is what you want for slow motion).