roger.magnusson wrote:For me however, the look of Jaws is defined largely by the anamorphic lenses. It's also pretty soft like many movies of the era. Maybe use a Black Pro Mist/Hollywood Black Magic filter if you have one. There are also several scenes with a split diopter.
Very good advice from Roger here. I would definitely suggest an anamorphic lens look plus about a 1/8 or a 1/4 ProMist. They went pretty heavy on diffusion back in the 1970s.
I've had knock-down screaming arguments with people online who think it's easy to capture the look of film on a digital camera, but -- from my perspective -- it's actually pretty difficult. A lot of people think a $10 LUT or $140 for FilmConvert is going to do it, but the reality is a lot of the look of films in the 1970s boils down to art direction and specific lighting techniques.
Having said that: Filmbox is the best film emulation plug-in I've seen so far, and it has a lot of very tweaky parameters that can create interesting looks. The way they provide grain and contrast adjustment is very interesting, and there is a big difference between film negative and film prints. (I've done restoration work on more than 2000 films in the last 30 years, including
Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, and
Die Hard, to just name three.) There are a lot of elusive things about what we call "the film look."
Note that what's out on Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray is a scanned 35mm negative of
Jaws, which doesn't quite look like a projected print. But I think the scan is very good and the director did supervise and approve the work. The people at Universal DVS do terrific work.
Noted DP Steve Yedlin has some interesting theories on what distinguishes film from digital, including halation, grain, and contrast levels:
http://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/