Making Films Set in the Past
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- Опубліковано 5 тра 2024
- In this video, I explore some things I usually consider when making films set in the past - from practical considerations about camera angles and colour grading, to the presentation of characters and story.
Scott's video on Dehancer: • 8mm film emulation - D...
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I'm mostly here for the "day's gone" English, but I would like to say that, in your normal videos, your B roll-like footage has stood out to me, as it's clear (at least it seems this way to me) that you're interested in giving time to look at the things that most of us have been conditioned to overlook. I've had little times in my life where I've seen the "true beauty" in the most grounded of things that would make me sound borderline mad to talk about; but I feel like you could relate to that a bit. I've heard it said before that, for great art, you need someone who has the sight to see something that most cannot, and then the skill to bring that gold back for all to see. I think there's something to that. I just wanted to say that lol.
Dude the "B-roll" is the best part. The whole reason why Simon Roper is dope. Really good eye for little things and focusing on them, visually
Agreed 100%
Well said!!
Great point about not using only 1974 cars. I was 10 in 1981 and we still had a rotary phone attached to the wall
The farm my mum grew up on still had a party line into the early 1970s.
We had a rotary phone in our kitchen until 1992. My mother loved the phone's distinctive shade of green and didn't want to get rid of it. She liked how it matched the rest of the kitchen, which was also green.
We had a rotary phone until the nineties too! I remember feeling posh when we got hands free receivers!
@@leyubar1 When I got a cordless phone in the mid-90s I knew I'd "arrived"! I started taking long baths while chatting on the phone, feeling like a movie star 🤣
My Nan had a rotary phone well into the early-00s! I think it was from the early-80s.
Slightly tangential, but this is a complaint I've made about 80s/90s parties. An authentic experience would represent what was popular rather than what was new. Bohemian Rhapsody definitely belongs in every 90s party playlist due to Wayne's World, and people didn't stop listening to "Another Brick in the Wall" one month after release.
A good practice that my brother was taught in college was to look at the pop music in popular films from your target year and the five years before it.
The "Get Back" Beatles doc was utterly fascinating to me for many of the reasons you've mentioned -- hearing what long sections of naturalistic, period speech sounded like in London in 1970 (esp. coming from celebrities who we are very used to hearing in more scripted, or at least more camera-aware settings); hearing how people negotiated disagreements, jokes, verbal word-play; seeing the material culture of audio equipment, clothing, glasses, beverages, cigarettes...
yes, and how incredibly American Billy Preston sounded for example, compared to the English people. reminds me of a comment Mitch Mitchell made about Hendrix, 'we didn't think of Jimi as black, we thought of him as American' (in itself the comment is also somewhat of its time of course)
14:20 “granda” - my dad was from Workington in Cumbria and his dad was always my Granda. Haven’t heard that in years.
I have an antique house that dates to the 1890s, and I've tried hard to re-create a realistic time period of 1920. You're absolutely right that no realistic room would be furnished all exactly to one year. We inherit things, we may keep things for sentimental reasons, and wallpaper is a big job, so although my house is old it's interspersed with older antiques and newer reflecting the average evolution of a household of the early 20th Century.
14:51 that’s Ted Lowe. wikipedia: ‘Lowe uttered the occasional on-air gaffe, one of his most famous quotes being, "and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green."’
When I watch "modern" films or plays set in the 1960s, it somehow never feels quite right to me. Everything is just a bit off: The interior sets look too clean or too new, the actors look too young or too healthy for the roles they play (you touched on this), their skin looks too unblemished. In this respect, John Hurt was ideal for playing this era, as his skin had a nicotine-weathered look and he definitely never worked out at the gym. I've watched a lot of 1950s UK B movies recently. What struck me was how empty the streets were - hardly a car in sight.
[The actors look too young or too healthy for the roles they play (you touched on this), their skin looks too unblemished.]
And the teeth. Let's not forget the teeth.
I can't verify the veracity of this claim, but I read a long time ago that American pop fans in the 1960s were a bit puzzled by British album covers.
American bands like The Beach Boys would appear with happy smiling faces on their album covers. British bands depicted on album covers looked pretty grim, with mouths tightly closed. This made them appear serious and soulful, but the article said this was really because they were told by the photographers not to smile and expose their crooked teeth.
@@AttilatheNun-xv6kc Yes, and drinking all that tea or smoking also stains the teeth. Bad teeth are the silent killer in the UK - lots of dentists have left the (free) National Health Service for the more lucrative private practice.
@@expatexpat6531 Indeed. The link between poor dental health and poor general health is difficult to ignore.
I remember the sixties, sooty buildings and tea roses. The class encounter under floodlights of cigar smoke from the grandstand and cigarette smoke from the terrace. A European football tie and seventy thousand cheering Celtic fans. Memory. Thanks for a spark of time.
Read the title as “Making film sets in the past”. Interesting as the history of set construction may have been, this was super cool.
No, I won't read it that way, but thanks all the same 😉
My mother and I watched an old video from 2009 some time ago, and realized that our rather "new" carpets were already present in our living room back then.
when i think of ‘historical naturalism’ of film set in 1973, and since you mentioned colour grading, i actually think of the look of the film stocks of the time; especially the early 1970s, those film stocks are very distinctive.
Yeah nobody today can quite imitate the sheer filthiness of those 70s film stocks
I love this kind of musing on history and media. Some random (anecdotal) thoughts of my own.
Isn't it odd how reconstructing reality can never really be 100% correct? We can't even properly reconstruct our current reality to the full if we tried, we can only record it as it's happening. Everything we do will logically always be tinted by our current world (our technology, morals, expectations, et cetera).
I love watching old British TV shows. Some of my favorite types of scenes are when they go outside and film on location. A lot of buildings and streets filmed in the 1960s and 70s looks like it's straight up dilapidated Victorian material, especially the run down industrial areas of big cities
I also love it whenever there's regular traffic in the background. That's *real*, those people are really there, not aware that a tiny part of their their daily commute is now forever on a DVD box set. And somewhere in that background world, our parents, grandparents, whatever, are really *there*.
Simon Roper is the GOAT for just conveying how natural things were in the past. He puts the human in humanity and story in history
You're bang on about the difference in specific physiques. In bodybuilding a physique with highly developed arms but much less so of a chest is known as a 'bronze age physique' as chest developing equipment is extremely modern. Said bronze age refers to one within the sport rather than an archeolgical one, but it stands that many bodies portrayed on screens are painfully obvious products of routines that don't reflect the time period portrayed.
Also, the snooker commentator in question was Ted Lowe.
My favourite you tube 'grey screen' channel
I started watching your channel for the old english videos, but I think more and more I look forward the most to your philosophical videos. Philosophic exploration is something you rarely encounter now adays. Probably because there are so many experts taking the spotlight and even more people who want to be experts. All of them giving clear instructions and opinions on how things are, were, will and should be done.
My parents bought our first colour TV so that we could watch Princess Anne’s wedding in colour. I think we were quite late to get one, although my dad always seemed to be an avid TV viewer. We were similarly late to get a phone installed. It wasn’t until we had an emergency and had to go round to someone else’s house to call for an ambulance that it occurred to my parents that it might be a good idea. All our walls (in the 1960s to 1980s) were wallpapered. I have a very clear memory of the different (and frankly gaudy) designs and occasionally find myself indulging in nostalgia, browsing through websites of 1970s wallpaper patterns. You’re correct about the longevity of home decor. The wallpaper that was on my bedroom wall when I was a 4 year old (in 1969) was still there in 1983. The 1960s wardrobe and 1950s chairs in my parents’ bedroom were there until my mum moved home in 2010!
the picture at 18:30 is just too cute :DDD your whole family looks cute
There are a lot of misconceptions about and demonisation of the 1970s. Was it all sunshine and roses? No. Neither was it all grey and depressed. It was a decade of huge change, economic shocks and social advances. We went from a majority black and white TV era to most having colour with a good number of VCRs.
If I were nitpicking the 1974 scene I'd point out the orange swing, possible but not normal.
Thank you Mr Roper- I'm old enough to remember when nobody would use ones first name unless a close friend ! Interesting to muse upon all you bring up. Film is still so new and one wonders how recording spoken word etc on paper before recordings were availible diverged in a similar manner ? A lot of scope fro editing in the past !
Another great video 💙 I appreciate the way you are not afraid to use time and slow down the rhythm of things. Especially on a platform that rewards high speed and overstimulating content. Feels like a very welcomed and informative break for the chaotic nature of modern life that you come away from with interesting questions and ideas.
In many fields I agree with Simon, where I value and derive enjoyment from sticking to authenticity, intimacy, and traditional practices (like in cuisine, cultural wear and festivals, etc). In the worlds of film and storytelling in general, though, I think there's an inherent abnormality that at its worst you have to put up with, and at best enhances the story. I think the fact that you're trying to tell a story worth consuming makes the story necessarily exceptional, in some way. So, where Simon says "in real life people don't walk to one corner of the room to make sure they look as cinematic as possible" (20:11), I think there's a point missed, that the setting and lighting add to the perceived atmosphere in a way that unproblematically disregards authenticity or realism. I'm often immersed in otherworldly and mythical plots, I still find value and enjoyment in stories I can't exactly get immersed (for me the Mahabharata is this), and many cinematic masterpieces are wildly out-of-the-ordinary or feel displaced from its setting. Obviously I'm trying very hard to toe the line between giving voice to the value of unrealistic or inauthentic plots/settings, while not straw-manning Simon because he never asserts that authenticity or realism is a value that has a place in all film. Still, I think a hasty or myopic interpretation of this video lends easily to the thesis that authenticity has a place in all film (or even just period stories), so I wanted to put my thoughts out there.
An example that springs to mind for me is the difference between two different screen adaptations of John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which was published in 1974 - the BBC miniseries from 1978, and the film from 2011. You can tell that a lot of the film version's budget has been devoted to constructing a retro "70s" aesthetic, with vintage cars, fashion, brown wallpaper, etc - on the other hand, the TV version was made in the 1970s and is intended to be more or less set in the present day, and while each scene likely still is elaborately constructed through e.g. set design, to me it feels much more naturalistic without the compulsion to convey "this is set in a particular era in the past" with such broad strokes. Even Gary Oldman's performance as Smiley feels like a noticeable effort to emulate what an old upper-class English person from the 1970s would have behaved like than Alec Guinness' performance, which feels much more straightforward and effortless. Great video as always!
A serendipitous video - just beginning early pre-pro on a film set in london in the 70s. Already quite a task to consider as low-budget american filmmakers with no period piece experience, but this has given some really handy bits of thought for us to keep in frame here from the beginning
This image is from Doctor Who, 1st episode of Jon Pertree
Big shout out to everyone commenting on this video. It's one of the most fascinsting comments sections of any video on UA-cam
Is that a Doctor Who thumbnail?
Really fascinating stuff. It's honestly stuff I think about from time to time, so it's cool to hear someone else's thoughts on the matter. It's currently interesting that, as someone in my 20s, I can look back at the 2000s as a time that's now markedly different from the present, and what aesthetic and cultural changes drive that. As an example of what you talked about in the latter part of the video, my family used VHS tapes well into the late 2000s despite digital video being well established at that point. We'd actually connect video cameras that used SD cards to the TV and record onto tape.
Thank you! Whatever you talk about, I really enjoy your way of homing in on tiny details while keeping the big picture in focus. Brilliant video 😊
When you mentioned the furniture stuff I just realized how if I was a film everything would be wrong by assuming well it's the 2020s because real people sometimes have heirloom furniture, don't like new stuff or just don't update immediately because who really does? Like people have hobbies so I'd argue more films should reflect that better.
While many folk look back fondly on the 80s and 90s, there was a desaturated almost colourless grimness about the 70s that I remember well.
Thank you for a very thought provoking video. Much appreciated.
4:19 It was I who commented that-and now I feel kinda bad. Sorry, Simon. It just made me dizzy and I really wanted to enjoy your fine work. With love and respect (truly), Christopher.
Interesting point re: the cars in Gavin and Stacy. I was talking about this with a friend quite recently. Around 2008 you saw all those 90s cars suddenly disappear and I wondered if it had to do with some policy change especially in regards to emissions. Even now you see far less "old" cars on the road then you did when I was younger.
everyone I know who was alive then really had a good time in the 70s. Wombles, ABBA, Rolf Harris on the telly, jim'll fix it, shawaddy waddy, Mike Reid: “runn arrraahnd”, Cheggars plays pop. Led Zeppellin, Queen and Black Sabbath. A job for life for my dad’s generation, houses were £400. I did play a couple of my most nostalgic records on our work’s Teams channel but had to swiftly cancel as some choice words I forgot about popped up. But no one minded because we loved the 70s
Interesting perspective. Thank you.
A very interesting explanation of different approaches to consider when filming a project. Thx for doing this, filming it and sharing it with us.
Smoking and how people do it is one of the things that sets me off in films set in the past, an Australian TV series called "Gallipoli" shows Australian soldiers in 1915 smoking filtered cigarettes, something that wouldn't be patented till the 1920s and didn't catch on with men until Marlboro made it popular in the 1950s. another thing would be that everyone in historical dramas only smokes cigarettes, watch film footage from the early to mid 1900s and you'll find that cigarettes did dominate but you would also see men smoking cigars and pipes in decent numbers, its also good at illustrating class difference.
Brilliant video
Brilliant detail
I grew up not far from Reading and don't recognise that accent - fascinating. Also, am fascinated with how my ancestors may have sounded. I've been doing my family tree since 2001 and prior to that used to be told stories by my grandparents, parents and uncles and aunts. I think so much gets lost as each generation passes. Smoke from cigarettes was everywhere - home (parents), social club where kids would be breathing it in. One thing that always stands out for me in photos and video clips is how skinny 99% of children and youths were in 1960s & 70s and we were healthy. I recently heatd about colour LUTs but not sure how to use them yet. Cheers
Thanks for the dynamic range aside! I was trying to figure out if you had made an accidental inversion or I didn't understand the term 😆
they replaced all the old orange lampposts in my town with the leds around 2018, i remember the light pollution used to be so bad, you can make out the milky way now almost wheras not 10 years ago it would've just been a cloudy orange smog
re; 17:45
A while back, a friend sent me a bunch of scanned-in photos of us all at parties, in pubs, and generally hanging out during the 1970s. The fashions and hair styles were just as you'd expect, but what stuck out for me, was that *everybody* was smoking! Men, women, youths, older folk - we all had fags (UK slang for 'cigarettes', if you were wondering!) in our hands.
In earlier years, girls and women smoked a bit less than men (still a lot by today's standards), but by the mid-seventies, they all smoked just the same as the guys. At least in my peer group.
Which was in a factory town the the Midlands. The Black Country, in fact. A lot of us worked in the factories, but there were some nurses, and builders and shop-workers. Quite a few would have been 'temporarily' unemployed. Jobs were plentiful, so we didn't stay put - if we didn't like a job, we'd walk out, sign on the dole, and get another job when we felt like it. A regular greeting was; 'You working?'. Or just 'working?'. It was normal to be between jobs - there was no stigma attached. Not for us, anyway!
We would judge long-term slackers though - it was understood that you should work, under normal circs - you just chopped and changed a lot more than people would now.
That was fascinating! I'm not planning on making a film anytime soon but I find all of these considerations deeply interesting. Also found myself wishing I had explored my creativity and interests like this when I was younger and had far fewer responsibilities! I'm retroactively inspired, would that be the right term?!
Thank you for talking about the outside lights. I think about that a lot and i hate the white ones!
I relate so much to this as someone who writes fiction that often takes place in times gone by. A couple of my writer friends laugh at me because I can't seem to go a single sentence without checking to see if a word existed and meant what I wanted it to, and if it did, I want to see how long it had been around... I'm a slow writer, to say the least, and even if others don't know how meticulous I try to be, I would feel... disappointed if I just wrote whatever words came to my modern mind without regard for realism.
Funny how I have zero interest in this topic yet I still felt compelled to watch it to the end.
I find all your videos interesting.
I've seen a complete disregard for period authenticity on a Japanese series made a few years ago but set in 1964 (the year of the Tokyo Olympics). One of the characters was a middle-aged guy who wore his hair in a long ponytail and communicated with people all over the country by fax.
Some points, in addition to all yours.
Skin - perhaps not in 1974, but for something set a few centuries in the past, pockmarks would've been common, in the face and in other places.
Stature - the average adult height has increased by 10-15 cm in most developed countries, which is quite visually noticeable in many settings.
I also find that speech had a different style going back 40-60 years. People in general, but in particular the female half of the population, used a softer, breathier, less "glottal" manner of speaking. Contemporary speech is harsher, deeper and more staccato.
On street lighting, this is something I've tracked the change of in my local area as I live on a hill. It's only been in the last five years since the whole world has gone bright white LED. I have fond memories of looking over Wirral at night in 2017/18 in my new house and there being less than a dozen dazzling LEDs (which I actually thought were pretty ugly, them being bad for the moths etc.). The councils new policy of changing over to LEDs once an old bulb broke meant that the change slowly crept up on most people. I'm currently resident in Cambridge for a bit and the lights on the main roads here are still the old orange ones. Personally, I wish they had a filter on the new ones. I find them a bit too bright and annoying. But of course I'm glad it's not the 18th Century and I don't need a fleet of athletic young torch bearers to light my path going home at night. [Another interesting point is the way the world looks from space has completely changed in the past ten years, so any aliens out there must be a bit confused as to why the world has just changed colour].
This dude talking about the time period I was born like it was the ancient past! 😜
As someone who was born around 20 years ago, sometimes it feels that way. There are some aspects lost that i will never experience
@@bALDbOY85 I can understand. I have 2 children in their early 20s. I often find my self explaining how we did things differently back then without all this technology, even what the early internet was like in the 1990s. I've even made the exact same point to my daughter that Simon made that everything didn't change overnight on Jan 1 1980, it took a few more years for disco to die, or at least transform into synth electronic.
It was all trees when I was a boy.
Before sodium vapor, mercury vapor was commonly used, at least in the various places I lived. When they started to change over, I lamented having things start looking all wrong at night, but I agreed that it needed to be done. The mercury wouldn't always stay in the lights, of course, and is toxic. I'm glad to see more natural color again.
15:26 “…but before I would guess 2010 this wasn’t the case. Street lights were orange sodium lights…”
And, speaking of 1974, sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was a very noticeable shift from the whiter street lights (either incandescent or mercury vapor) to the orange sodium vapor ones. The sodium vapor ones seemed muddy, oppressive, and vaguely dystopian. (I’ve seen them referred to as “prison yard orange.”)
I can’t think of sodium vapor lights without thinking of one of the only two-extremely minor-plot points from Stephen King’s 1979 _The Dead Zone_ that I remember (aside from the fact that it had to do with someone awakening from a coma with psychic powers). Here’s the reference:
_Bright orange light filled the car, turning the interior as bright as day it was nightmare light, turning Sam’s kind face into the face of a hobgoblin. For a moment he thought the nightmare was still going on and then he saw the light was coming from parking-lot lamps. They had changed those, too, apparently, while he was in his coma. From hard white to a weird orange that lay on the skin like paint._
The other point was another of those “period markers,” this one:
_He was making notes on a clipboard with a type of pen Johnny couldn’t remember ever having seen before. It had a thick blue plastic barrel and a fibrous tip. It looked like the strange hybrid offspring of a fountain pen and. a ballpoint._
…
_Suddenly it seemed terribly important. ‘That pen. What do you call that pen?’_
_‘This?’ Brown held it out from his amazing height. Blue plastic body, fibrous tip. ‘It’s called a Flair. Now go to sleep, Mr. Smith.’_
I think the reasons that I remember those two points, and only those, from the book and only those two were, first, at the time (in 1979), they just struck me as pretty ham-fisted and dully obvious, and, second, I couldn’t stand Stephen King’s writing and stopped reading shortly after the sodium vapor reference.
"Rooms change gradually, year by year". I remember dusty rose paint, and stark white baseboards. I remember thinking I was so aware and yet so ignorant.
There was a Black Mirror episode set in 1970s England starring a south asian woman, and it was about racism among other things.
I am eagerly awaiting the Jack of the Dump documentary. 😁😁😁
Based on the thumbnail, I assume this video is about the UNIT dating controversy.
I appreciate the effort you put into all your videos. I think you nailed the naturalistic aspect in your early medieval film but not so much in the clip you showed at the beginning. To get a bit philosophical now, people including those who've experienced it have a tendency to tie the past together with a big ribbon so that everything seems to make sense and be connected somehow. In reality of course this isn't true. Also, the intensity and tropeiness of most media from any period is self-conciously amped up. I think people were more acutely aware of this in say the 60s and 70s where a lot of society was based on these us vs them narratives and people were now sort of starting to wake up to this. I think in the clip you showed of that racist woman she seemed a little bit hesitant in her response whereas someone speaking 10 years before might have been more confident and matter of fact knowing that most everyone would nod.
I bet you would like Joel Haver’s films. Perhaps you’ve already seen them. They’re all available on UA-cam
Thanks.
Funny. 50s cars are the reason I twigged young to chronological hyper specificity being oddly anachronistic. Bunch of film and TV made in the 70s/80s but set in the 50s that show teenagers all riding around in state of the art luxury cars of the time. Then you see Back To The Future and clock that Biff's Ford is from the 1930s and you remember how style and fashion and acquisition of property actually work in real life. And BTTF still feels more like a 50s theme park than a real time.
Then you check out American media that was made in the 50s and notice that the hot rodded Model T, a car from the late 20s, was the iconic symbol of teenage rebellion, not the 57 Chevy Bel Air.
We have so much surviving film media from the last 100 years and change, it's confusing the way people inaccurately fantasise perfectly observable time periods.
This stuff is subjective. I went to see Dancer In The Dark by Lars von Trier at the cinema in Brighton when it came out with a friend. For me the film was intensely moving and powerful and I had difficulty re-composing myself at its conclusion. I asked my friend what he thought, expecting to hear that he'd loved it, masterpiece, and so on. "Rubbish!", he proclaimed, "the camera was shaking all over the place! Can't they even get that right?"
Hi Simon, what are your favourite films? Would love to know!
That Dr Who clip is interesting in and of itself. Made in 1969, and aired in January 1970, the intent of all the people who made it was that it was set "about a decade in the future". (c.1980)
Today, many people who watch it think it was set at the time of its filming "because they're wearing 1969 clothes". Again, the inaccurate belief that every person religiously follows all the current fashions and trends, almost to the week.
An aside on trombones in period movies: Now aday almost all trombonist play a trombone with an F-valve operated by the thumb. And from the 1990s on the tubing of the valve is the so-called open wrap. But ALL trombonists before 1960 used a straight trombone without any valve for extra tubing: the simple paper-clip looking horn. Except the 4th trombone in big bands and 3rd trombone in orchestras. I recoil in horror when I see period movies with bands or orchestras, and the trombonists use post 1990s horns.
👍✨
I would even go beyond the idea that some people in the 70s were "as left-wing as today." Planning, social programs and egalitarian economic policies were far more entrenched back then, whether in the Third World or the First.
Economically left wing yes, socially 'left wing' (although socially liberal is probably more accurate) absolutely not
The only comment I have about the accuracy in your recreation of the 70’s speech is that your hairstyle is maybe a little old for you. This style in this length would have been for someone at least a little older than you, unless they were very, very straight-laced
"I find being specific is often better than being generic" heh
I don’t quite get your distinction between ‘1974’ and ‘50 years ago’ but that’s maybe because 1974 means something completely different to you. To me 1974 is standard, normal, very everyday like, modern, 360 degrees 3 dimensional and with fancier clothes and better music
☯️🤠💜
When you do make this film, you should consider casting Jimmi Simpson to play you.
10:07 i'm an american and there is not mutual intelligibility in that clip. i do not know what they are saying at all.
I understood every word of the Cumbrian and got the drift of the Yorkshire and I am southern English and there is quite a cultural gap.Just ask them to slow it down and you’ll get it
@@AllotmentFox i guess there is a dialect continuum
@@redoktopus3047 possibly with the two northern accents. My accent is mostly received pronounciation with a bit of London and some cpuntry. My spoken grammar is mostly standard English except where I make mistakes. The two northern “dialects” are regional rather than class-based like mine. They’re all lovely by the way, I make no judgment on their correctnesd.
There's a kestrel nest at the top of the building and the boy wants to climb up to see it.
"What will thou do when thou gets up there, take all its eggs"
"There ain't any eggs, they're youngins."
"Well, there's nowt to go up there for then, is there?"
"Can I come t' bottom then? Never seen any kestrel's nests before"
"Come on then."
Almost first.
You've shaved???
And slapped on the Brylcreem!
Simon looks like my Uncle Jack, circa 1965!
(Which I suppose was the general idea).
First!!!