Does shooting film work with LED walls? We’ve conducted a test to answer that question. Cinematographer Kaity Williams and I were in the late stages of developing a feature that Kaity wanted to shoot partly on 35mm, and we were discussing the implementation of OSVP technology. Kaity was curious as to whether incorporating an LED wall into our plans would be possible. At that point, I was aware of one small test conducted in the U.K. on 65mm, and that the Westworld series had incorporated LED walls with film for a number of scenes — and that was about it.
Kodak, FotoKem, Keslow Camera, XR Studios Hollywood, MBS and J.L. Fisher enthusiastically agreed to support our test. Our findings were significant enough that in addition to sharing them here, we will also elaborate on them in a white paper for the ASC MITC OSVP Display Committee.
Setting Parameters
One goal was to try a variety of media on the LED wall: a still, stock-photo background; 2D video plates (photographed by Kaity); and 3D Unreal Engine environments. We also wanted to test various color temperatures of material on the wall; the wall’s native color temperature is 6,504K (D65), and we also wanted to test the content at 3,200K and 5,600K. To that end, we selected three film stocks: Kodak Vision3 50D 5203, 250D 5207 and 500T 5219. The tungsten stock was the real wild card, as it is the furthest from the wall’s native color and requires pushing the color of the content more than I’d normally prefer to — but it’s also the negative that’s closest in ISO to most of today’s digital-cinema cameras.
