Night scenes are often devoid of much color anyway. This moody sequence of
soldiers doing a house-to-house search became more ominous in black and white.MMethhhhhooooddddss OOOff PPPrrrooodduuuccciiiinnnnggg
Bllackkkkkk--AAAnnnddd--WWWWWhhhittteee MMMMMeeeedddiiaa
There are many different ways to
arrive with a black-and-white end
product, but let’s just cover a few of the
simplest and most obvious:
Shooting With Film: For the most
authentic look, you might consider
shooting with black-and-white film.
It may seem more expensive
than shooting video, but it may
not be much more if you con-
sider how it’s used. For instance,
you can rent film cameras now for
bargain rates.
But be sure you factor in the follow-
ing: buying film stock, developing it
and transferring it to video to edit—
all of which can be expensive. But
there are still plenty of rental houses
renting the cameras, both 35mm and
S16 /16mm.
Unless you have experience with
motion picture film, though, you’ll
need to hire a DP and ACs who know
how to shoot with film cameras. The
end result will be unmistakably filmic;
it will have all of those film character-
istics that many of us know and love.
Shooting film, if you have the right
concept, can be a very viable way to
end up with that look you’re seeking.Shoot In Black-and-White Digital
Video: Believe it or not, there are
cameras available that only shoot
monochrome/black and white.
High-end cameras like the RED
Monstro are available with a mono-
chrome sensor. For a lot of techni-
cal reasons that we don’t have room
to cover, the Monstro Monochrome
camera actually has measurably
better image quality than a regu-
lar RED Monstro color camera.
Of course, the RED isn’t an inex-
pensive camera, even to rent, but it
does represent what’s probably the
state of the art in black-and-white
native acquisition.
At a more down-to-earth cost,
there is the Fujifilm XT-3, a mirror-
less, high-quality 4K-capable hybridcamera system. One of the Fuji’s stron-
gest selling points is that it includes
film simulations of famous Fuji film
stocks, one of which is called ACROS,
a black-and-white film stock.
The X-T3 offers a “monochrome
adjustment” function to faithfully
reproduce warm and cool tones,
which were conventionally achieved
using specific photographic papers
and developers.
This function, available in the stan-
dard “monochrome” as well as the
“ACROS” mode, provides smooth
halftones, deep blacks and beautiful
textures to broaden the scope of mono-
chrome expression.Shoot In Color And Convert To Black
and White In Postproduction: This is
probably the most common method,
and with the quality of modern digital
cinema and mirrorless cameras, it has
become an even more viable option
than in the past.
Post-production tools have become
more sophisticated, and shooting in48 | Digital Photo Pro digitalphotopro.com