[Frameworks] Super-8 Shooting Ratio

[David Tetzlaff]

There are many different kinds of docs. Shooting ratio on 'professional' docs didn't really hit double digits until hand held sync cameras became available to capture extended actualities -- the era of Direct Cinema in North America and Cinema Verite in Europe. Somewhere you can probably find the notes about how much more film the Maysles shot each time they did a new project. They were the first, really, to employ 'video-type' ratios AFAIK.

Part of working in celluloid is the different kind of creativity engendered by the fact you only have so much money and that doesn't buy you much film, so you have to work within that. It really doesn't matter whether it's doc, narrative, experimental -- you've got to turn enough of your limited supply of stock into usable shots to make anything. Typical student projects, or anything that comes out of your own pocket, usually are somewhere between 3:1 and 5:1.


On Jan 30, 2011, at 4:49 PM, Sarah Reynolds wrote:

> I'm guessing maybe 1/3 of the total shooting ratio will be b-roll ... and
> I've heard that for docs the ratio is about 30:1 overall, but that's video
> and so I wanted to get some input that is more specific to film. Any
> thoughts or wild guesses are welcome!
> 
> Style is more or less cityscape, panorama, early-actuality film-influenced.
> 
> 
> 
> On 1/30/11 4:37 PM, "Adam Hyman" <amleon13 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>> I don't think there's any way to answer that without knowing your style,
>> your editing ideas, your ability to pre-conceive shots, or how much of the
>> film is B-roll.  It could be 1:1 or 100:1