I miss a lot about the way things were done prior to the digital age, but what I miss most is the experience of print dailies. Young people have never had the chance to partake in this exercise, and that’s truly their loss. To this day, just a whiff of stop bath can summon a thousand special memories. When the elevator doors opened at the lab, its vinegary fragrance would suddenly hit you…and it was magic. I’m sure I speak for many of my colleagues: In those moments, I knew I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing.
Though seeing the previous day’s work projected on the big screen for the first time could induce stress on occasion, the presence of the director, producers and department heads created a communal reassurance. High-end monitors and on-set grading didn’t exist, so there was a certain detachment between having done the work and watching the result. This gap encouraged fresh perspectives; by picking things apart – rather than retreating to our own silos, as so often is the case today – we quickly learned what was right and what wasn’t, then made adjustments accordingly. Some of my most important technical and artistic lessons were imparted during these times. It’s too bad that practice has gone the way of public decency. It was so much more satisfying than squinting at an array of zeroes and ones by myself.
Whenever possible, I tried to get to the lab prior to call time, often at 4 or 5AM. Seated next to the Dailies Manager and with two projectors running at 48fps, I liked to review my work right out of the drying cabinet. My self-established Hazeltine printer light made communication with the timer simple and precise. Every facility spoke the same language and everything was uniformly defined. Considering what we have to go through now to maintain control of the look, it was an easy, universal process that for decades gave birth to many of cinema’s most affecting images.
At the other end of the clock, I never minded the extra few hours print dailies tacked on to the workday after wrap. It was something of a religious experience…this was where you learned! While on location, almost any space would be commandeered for use as an improvised theater, usually with a cooler of beer to rest your feet on. Hotel rooms, vacant storefronts, grammar school auditoriums…even large storage closets all stood in for the genuine item at some point in my career. One of the great charms of the film negative was that it sometimes delivered surprises, good and bad. While exhausted crewmembers nodded off in their seats, I kept my eyes peeled for them. Believe me, no one ever looked at a piece of celluloid with more critical intensity than the one who exposed it!
Unfortunately, that’s all relegated to the memory pile now, like so much of what we used to take for granted in this industry. Everyone scatters at wrap and we watch dailies whenever we like on electronic devices a fraction the size of a movie screen. Though I’ve made my peace with the new way, one of the greatest rewards of having been brought up old school remains strong. I urge everyone on the come to take this notion seriously. It served as a beacon for every dailies session I ever attended.
Always be improving. In whatever way you view your work, strive to finish as a better cinematographer than you were when you started!
I only had the pleasure of working on one small film with celluloid dallies. The actors would sit down in front and run their lines. It was hilarious!
The reverence with which I hold Cinematographers of your generation is out of deep respect for the art of “doing business” in the days of a linear photochemical workflow. I think of it like Navy pilots being graded for ever single landing no matter what the conditions are.
In the beginning of my time as an AC I carried my own chemicals and would do a registration and other camera tests by developing a little bit of film in the hotel sink on location. People thought I was nuts and could not believe I was doing that. But my mentors have always been old-school and that was just part of what I was taught as SOP when dealing with film. I loved every minute of it!
Spoiled by digital and always looking for the edge…
Only my first three features were edited on film, but I think I learned so much from viewing prints that the memory helped me get through the next 20 features shot on film! On those we only printed Day 1 footage as a check and then occasionally printed a roll now and then, though mainly because we heard there was a problem.
Though HBO’s “Westworld” was shot on film, it was scanned, not printed of course — but Jonathan Nolan had a trailer on location set-up with a big monitor to digitally screen footage all day and many crew members wandered in there on their lunch hours. Not the same as what you described but it was better than nothing.
Chris – Ha! I also did plenty of hand tests in my time as an AC…people thought they were weird for me, too!
David – I never learned as much about cinematography as I did when regularly seeing film dailies. It incredibly accelerated your knowledge. It’s so sad that that’s completely over. Everyone is much the worse off because of it.
Richard,
What memories you invoked here. My years at Technicolor as the principal dailies liaison caused me to witness and experience all of what you describe. The Cinematographers coming to Technicolor first thing in the morning before going to the set (teaching Cinematographers that no, I’m sorry we can’t watch all of your dailies at 24fps, because I had a queue of 15 – 20 features I needed to get delivered so we had to watch them at 36fps- the speed we watched dailies at
Tech, and while I could project everything on one projector, we still had to keep two projectors running all the time-
on occasion we would put on a scope lens to watch some anamorphic material “unsqueezed ”), when I visiting films on location and watching dailies projected in an improvised hotel room, or trailer.
Also what a learning g experience to watch the film projected, sprocket holes and all, on the screen. I’m convinced that’s how I became so schooled in film formats watching the full aperture frame at all times.
I have boatloads of memories… one salient one is on “Back to the Future” with Dean Cundey.
After shooting for six weeks with Eric Brevig as Marty McFly, they shut down for a week and started reshoooting EVERYTHING with Michael J Fox.
Imagine what it was like for everyone after that first day’s shooting, not really knowing if they got what they wanted until they saw the film?
The morning after the first day, my phone rings at 5:45am in the special direct line we had in the dailies room, and it was producer Bob Gale calling and saying, “HOW DOES HE LOOK? HOW IS THE PERFORMANCE?”
Not the usual questions I would get, but I had built up relationships with filmmakers where they did trust my opinions…
I responded, “Bob, I just got the film here and Dean is coming by to watch it with me.”
Gale asked me to please screen it now, and call him as soon as I’d seen it all.
So I did, figuring I’d screen it a second time for Dean when he arrived.
I called Bob Gale back afterwards, and I remember telling him, “he leaps off the screen! Michael’s energy is tangible!”, even though I was watching at 36fps and silent.
All speaking to your point of that magic of trusting the film to have captured every photon of light and nuance of emotion, and not revealed in some video village, but not until the next day after the film emulsion and chemicals were allowed to do their magic by the dedicated lab technicians that took such pride in what they did.
Unrelated to film, Also what is amazing is the decisiveness of Spielberg, Zemeckis, Gale, Cundey, and Marshall, to make the decision that reshooting six weeks of material would be best for the film.
Don’t see that much anymore, do we?
Richard – Is there any way to recreate that film daily experience digitally? What would you want to see and do with the dailies in order to keep learning daily?
Rob – As always, you hit it right on the mark!
Loren – I have very definite ideas about this issue going as far back as suggesting to Technicolor the concept for their DP Lights System. The conversation is way too deep and detailed to carry on here in public. Let’s speak directly sometime this week…
Richard and Loren,
I’d enjoy being part of that discussion if it would be helpful.
Best,
Rob
My first photography job was making photostats of page layout for the Wards, Sears, and Speigels catalogues at Vogue-Wright Studios in Chicago. Part of my job was mixing the chemicals from scratch in the enormous trays where we developed the prints. There’s nothing like the smell of Acetic Acid in the morning…it smells like photography.
I started my “career” in the mid-50’s as a teenager in my father’s darkroom, setup with a homemade sink, 16×20 developing trays and an Omega D condenser enlarger. As stated earlier, I loved the smell of photo chemicals in the morning, afternoon and evening! I remember one distinctive 35mm shoot with Rich as my a/c and the terror I had to hide going to dailies. The dailies turned out fine, but as a cinematographer, you were only as good as your dailies which could easily turn into your lastlies!
Printer lights are such a good indicator of how you exposed a scene. I remember testing the Tiffen LLD filter versus no filter and correcting for daylight on tungsten film, and it was the printer lights that told me that there were a few points less correction needed for the blue layer when using the LLD.
David – I don’t know how anyone ever shot anything without a full understanding of the relationship between exposure and printer lights…!!! It’s a horrible shame that we’ve lost that precise simplicity in the digital age.