I gave film look a try

Well this week has not been good for my movie, Monday I was planning a voice acting session and all the actors would have been able to come in. However I could not get a hold of the sound guy so I had to cancel the session at the last minute. That got me looking through a Musicians Friend catalog for sound boards; some of the smaller models looked tasty until I saw the price of the mics. I swear the hardest part about making movies is getting people together.


A few days later I was looking at new presets for Effects and Composite Labs and I saw a film look plug-in. Now I’m not really sure what my stance on film look is, but I decided to give it a try. I am not satisfied using plug-ins out of the box, if I’m going for film look I don’t just want the picture to look like film, I want the whole frame to scream film, none of those half hearted attempts! I used The Wrong Trousers and The Magic Portal as reference, I’m pretty sure Trousers was shot on 35mm and I know The Magic Portal was shot on 16mm.

After I modified the film look preset to my liking I made the edges of the frame faded, but one thing I noticed from both references was that the sides were not symmetrical in there fading. So I made the right side a larger fade and on the left I made a smaller fade with an un-faded line down it. After I did this I made a black border that blurred into the frame that was also un-symmetrical. Now these effects take a hell of a time to render in 720 line high-def (about 10 min per sec of animation). All effects were made in CompositeLabs Pro (and the DV line cannot do all the grading effects I did). So my first question is, does it look like film? And secondly does it look better? Is it really worth all the trouble? (you may need to fullsize them to get the full effect)

Before:

After: