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It’s surprising to hear that you wanted even more spherical aberration than something like the Canon FDs could offer. Those are extremely ‘glowy’ lenses wide open. If that wasn’t enough then I’d consider using diffusion.
I remember reading about the Bridge of the Americas sequence for the first time and it completely blowing my mind when Roger said it was shot in a parking lot. The effect really is seamless, even after knowing how it was done or seeing before and afters you completely accept the location for what it’s presented as on-screen.
To me the line cross works because there’s a change in subjectivity between the shots, first you’re seeing him as the girl on the bed sees him, and then you’re seeing him as he sees himself in the mirror. Switching his screen position removes the sense of the girl looking at him and makes it entirely about him looking at himself, a private moment away from her. Their orientation toward each other is also retained in the mirror, the point of focus within the shot, which contributes toward not making it feel disruptive. In both shots she’s still “to his left” on a 2D plane.
Yeah, the dynamic range is redistributed toward underexposure when you lower ISO, which is often counterintuitive for the bright situations where you’d do so. The reasons to do it rather than maintaining more headroom at base ISO and using ND filters as needed would be that you want the highlights to clip sooner or you want less noise.
Tak Fujimoto’s work with Jonathan Demme where the actors are staring straight down the barrel of the camera, Peter Suschitzky’s films with David Cronenberg and the use of short-sided framing and wide lenses to create a sense of the actor ‘leering’ into the camera, Steven Spielberg’s moving masters that frequently go from close-ups to wides and back again, would all be worth studying for composition.
I’m not saying it’s of tantamount importance but I’m just saying it’s there as a theoretical technicality (an ironic one at that) and it doesn’t have to be the master anamorphics, it could be any 2x anamorphic really.
What I was trying to say is that it’s worth considering these questions as part of a holistic system (the desired end result, the limitations of the production itself) and assigning relative weights to them in deciding what you want to prioritize. For instance, if the data rate of the 8K anamorphic mode is less than that of the 8K spherical mode, how and when does that become important and what is it more important than? If I asked that question and found out that the data rate was of extreme importance to the production, my next question would be why we were shooting in 8K with an extreme paucity of recording media and letting this be the deciding factor in whether or not to go anamorphic or spherical. Why couldn’t I just shoot 2.39 spherical in a lower resolution instead? And then maybe the director would tell me that the distributor had an 8K mandate, and that would open up a new question, and so on.
Realistically any production that could afford a V-Raptor and a set of Master Anamorphics wouldn’t be so stretched for budget that the data rate would become the deciding factor in something as essential to the look of the film as the choice of lenses. If you wanted to shoot 2.39 but were agnostic on whether or not it should be spherical or anamorphic, would the data rate really be what pushed you toward anamorphic before every other characteristic of the lenses themselves?
The width of the sensor is to some extent arbitrary, you could match the field of view of the Master Anamorphics with spherical lenses by using wider focal lengths. The widest Master Anamorphic is 28mm, the equivalent field of view on Super 35 would be around 14mm. As David said, if you wanted to also match the depth of field there are a number of wide aperture 14mm lenses.
A good comparison for the Master Anamorphics vs. older anamorphic lenses is Robert Yeoman’s work with Wes Anderson. The 2.39 scenes in The French Dispatch and Asteroid City are Master Anamorphics. Older films they did together like The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Rushmore are Panavision. The 2.39 scenes in The Grand Budapest Hotel are Technovision. All of these movies were shot on film and everything from The Life Aquatic onward was a digital intermediate.
It’s not quite as clean a comparison but you could also look at the recent Star Trek movies. Star Trek 2009 and Star Trek Into Darkness were shot on film with Panavision lenses by Dan Mindel, and then Star Trek Beyond was shot on digital with the Master Anamorphics by Stephen Windon.
If limited to a single prime for a documentary, a lot of what would make me go wider would simply be that I couldn’t anticipate how close I’d ever end up to the subject, or if I’d constantly be closing and then gaining distance, or trying to hold multiple subjects in frame. In that situation I would rather be somewhat wide even if it could end up unflattering in certain compositions.
Shooting digitally, you would always have the option of magnifying the image if you found that what you really needed at a certain moment was a telephoto lens and you didn’t have one, but the opposite isn’t true. If you were on a longer lens than you needed to be you’d either have to physically move away or settle for a composition that felt too tight, and then maybe pan back-and-forth depending on what was happening.
If I wanted a single prime lens for documentary work on a Super 35 sensor I would probably gravitate to something like the 25mm or 27mm Master Prime as well. The focal length would be suited to a variety of compositions from close-up to wide shot, the wide aperture & the lack of flaring would be good if I didn’t know exactly what lighting conditions would be encountered, close focus is 14″, etc. I’m still not sure if I would buy one though. I might try to find an f/1.4 lens around the same focal length that was at least half as expensive and put the rest of the budget elsewhere. Another user mentioned the Zeiss Otus and I think the 28mm would be a good compromise. You could buy a brand new one and get it cine-converted through Duclos for half of the price of the 25mm MP.
I think the main thing to keep in mind is that even though in black & white photography the separation of different elements is coming primarily through contrast and composition, color definitely still matters because of tones. If you take the example of a very deep red brick house against a very purple-violet sky, the tones of those two things will actually look fairly close in B&W and it will be a much flatter image than it is in color. If you ignore color on set and then try to window everything in the grade it might end up being a fairly long and painstaking process.
Part of what you responded to may have also been a difference in projection, if the 4k restoration was a DCP and not a film print as it would have been 20 years ago, if the screening room itself had better viewing conditions, etc.
I’ve only read Blain Brown’s book on digital imaging and that was several years ago but I remember thinking at the time that it was an excellent primer. To Stip’s point, Brown’s books aren’t really prescriptive, he’s not teaching you ‘his’ way of doing things, the concepts are much more elementary and aimed at the beginner.
