Slow mo (in the mood for love)

[Michael Chen]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to imitate the shot that was used in this particular film.
The scene where Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung always cross path, when they go for their dinner in that particular stairway scene.

What's the best way to shoot , so that when I slow down the footage, it can come close to that?

I'm shooting in PAL, using either XL1s, or DVX100.
What's the best shutter speed mode to shoot 1/50? and should I shoot in 50i, or 25p/frame mode for this particular scene?

thanks for the help.

[Nick Conti]

Hey Michael,

I just happened to come across this thread randomly, but In the Mood For Love is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen and those shots you're talking about are really amazing. Christopher Doyle and Wong Kar Wai are huge influences on me and what I'd like to strive to achieve in the future.

I'm really not deeply educated in all of this or anything, but I can tell you what I've tried and know about. As far as shutter speed goes I would choose a high, or faster shutter speed if I was going to slow down the footage in post using your editing app. It will give you a smoother slo-mo...those sequences in that film actually weren't overcranked too much; you could try another way to get a slow motion effect.

In my case since I'm shooting on an NTSC DVX100A, if I were to shoot in 60i and then place that footage into a 24 frame timeline in FCP, that footage would end up being played back 2.5x slower than my other footage shot in 24p. In your case since you'd be shooting in 50i, you could capture that footage and place it into a 25p timeline and you'd get footage playing 2x slower than your 25p footage. I'm not sure if there is a shutter speed that would work best with this, so you may want to do some tests. That may give you just enough of that slightly dreamy and fluid motion, although this method probably works slightly better with 60i.

Hope I was able to help a little. Good luck with your project!

Nick

[Michael Chen]

Thanks for the feedback.
Yes I agree that the film is very well shot.
It has huge influences on me as well

Anyone else has other suggestions?
I guess my plan now is to shoot at 1/50 shutter speed, and for that particular scene, i'll shoot them in 50i mode.

Since the rest I intend to shoot in either in XL1s frame mode or DVX100 25p.

Hope I wont have any problem intercutting these 2 footages.

[Jacques Mersereau]

One of the students I worked with on his film loves "In the mood for love."
He gave me his DVD and I was impressed with the composition and
lighting. Very nice.

If I were you I would shoot in 50i using the DVX. On Avid, you can choose to
interpolate when doing motion effects (slo mo). What that does is take
each field and makes a whole frame out of it.
That's what the XL1 does in frame mode, so I would
NOT shoot in frame mode as you are already tossing out one field.
You want as many pixels as possible to work with.
If you shot with the varicam and it's 60 full frames per second,
getting good slo mo would be even easier when bouncing to PAL.

It is fairly easy for the computer to do a good job @ 50% reduction in speed.
There are other software solutions like Twixtor and Avid fluid motion that
use morphing and pixel motion algorithms to create new frames but
Twixtor has a high learning curve and fluid motion is only available on
high end avids.

[Charles Papert]

I was to be be working alongside Christopher Doyle on a shoot in a few weeks, but he had to pull out of the project. It's a shame. I thought "In the Mood for Love" was beautiful also.

[Sean McHenry]

I'm not sure I follow Nick's logic. If you drop 60i footage into a 24p timeline it should be coverted (conformed in Avid and Premiere Pro speak) as soon as it is imported. It would do no time stretching. I believe you may be thinking that each field would be displayed as a frame? If that happened, each frame would only have half the resolution and have noticable horizontal black lines running al through it.

At least that's what I have seen if you mix types in Avid Xpress Pro and Premiere Pro. It is conformed to the timeline settings in a temp file someplace on your drives.

Maybe I missed something there.

To really slow down motion, almost always there is some sort of motion blur added that helps smooth out the interlacing artifacts present when you start to show one field then another too slowly. There are all sorts of versions of this built in to most software. Blended, VCR style, interpolated etc.

Premiere used to just slow the footage down and it was quite choppy. Now, there is some interpolated blending thing happening in Pro that actually seems to work pretty well.

You might simply try manually adding some gausian or motion blur as an effect to a clip and see what happens. A little should go a long way here.

Sean McHenry