How ‘Black Phone 2’ has created one of the best visual experiences of the year by combining digital and analog

If you have read my review of ‘Black Phone 2’ you will know that, despite acknowledging without hesitation that it is not the most lucid work of the once all-powerful Blumhouse, much less of its head, Scott Derrickson’s latest stands as an exemplary sequel in a world in which the clone and form are usually the order of the day.

The reasons to defend this idea are several but, beyond its interesting twist of the plot and its supernatural triple somersault, there is one in particular with a specific weight – especially for a visual obsessive like myself: the superb cinematography of Pär M. Ekberg and the way it combines the best of two worlds, digital and analog, in favor of narrative.

between two lands

To give us a general outline before getting into the subject of how the small miracle was carried out, it is worth explaining – without spoilers – that ‘Black Phone 2’ is set simultaneously in reality and in a dream space through which one of its main characters travels. Two scenarios that obtain two radically different visual treatmentswhich takes the set to a new level.

On the one hand, the icy reality that Derrickson and his team present, digitally captured with Sony Venice 2 camerasis marked by desaturated colors, slightly elevated blacks to reduce contrast, and a cleanliness that is not entirely clinical, but much neater than that of the dream scenes, much more vivid, saturated and contrasted and with one hundred percent “tactile” textures in which grain and halation are the big stars.

I will not deny that, when the first dreamlike passage invaded the big screen after a transition with a glazing blow, my first reaction was to wonder what the post-production process was to achieve such a precise photochemical appearance. After a few seconds it was clear to me, It could only look like a movie because it was shot with hersomething that has been confirmed by several of those involved in the feature film.

The first was screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, who confirmed in a post on BlueSky—a social network also known as “the good Twitter”—that “There are no digital tricks in the film. All the scenes that look like a film are”. But be careful, because the thing goes beyond look Super 8, embracing a greater degree of complexity by combining this format with Super 16higher resolution but worked in post to match the dirt and particularities of its little brother.

2 x 8 = 16

For the most part, the dreamlike moments of ‘Black Phone 2’ were captured in Super 8, making the jump to Super 16, whose frame has a larger capture surface, for two specific reasons, the first of which is closely related to sound. And it is that Super 8 cameras are not particularly suitable for recording sound and synchronizing it with visual materialamong other things, due to the inconsistency of the frame rate per second when filming—generally around 18fps, although the standard 24fps can be reached in the medium.

For this reason, the dialogue scenes or scenes with synchro sound were captured with Super 16 cameras, framing in the central area of ​​the frame to later process the resulting material and enlarge it until you obtain an image that fits in scale—and, consequently, in grain and texture—with the Super 8. If we add to this a second reason, focused on the greater offer of lenses with different focal lengths that the Super 16 enjoys, the cocktail of stocks It makes all the sense in the world.

As reported in SlashFilm, during the film’s presentation at Fantastic Fest, Scott Derrickson himself explained that “Everything you see there is real film. There is nothing that is digital photography worked to make it look photochemical”, defending the peculiarities of the Super 8 tooth and nail as follows:

“Everything seems beautiful. It’s not just love for the photochemical, it’s love for the recklessness of Super 8. You have aberrations, you have strange things happening, strange flares… It seems like a dream, and it has always seemed to me that Super 8 has something transgressive.

“I’ve always said that if you find Super 8 movies in your grandmother’s closet and a projector and you put them on, they make you feel weird, because there’s something about the medium, so the idea of ​​letting the language of the dream world be captured entirely on Super 8 was a big challenge and very difficult, but I think it’s so worth it.”

Wow, it was worth it, Scott…

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