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You can purchase a copy of the two-disc Region 3 DVD that included the color version. Maybe on eBay.
Hmm…Reminds me a bit of the situation with Deakins on The Man Who Wasn’t There, though Spider-Noir handled it differently by designing for both from day one.
I’ve seen screen captures of the color version of ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ that was released in some markets and it seemed obvious that as much had been done to get it to conform to the intended B&W image as possible. It’s heavily de-saturated and has a sort of ‘bichrome’ look to maintain differences in tonality without adding too much color information, sort of reminiscent of two-color Technicolor from the 1920s and ’30s. There isn’t that much more shadow information in most scenes and it’s clear that the the film was lit and exposed one way, for B&W.
It stands in sharp contrast to Spider Noir where the color version is heavily saturated and the B&W version largely feels like grayscale and higher contrast have then been applied on top of that.
Weren’t all the technical innovations in widescreen in the 1950s spurred on by economic competition from television? Since commercial films started shooting IMAX in 2008 it’s basically been the modern-day equivalent of exhibition formats like Cinerama and CinemaScope. If there hadn’t been a studio mandate to deliver IMAX and 3D versions of Blade Runner 2049 would you have still embraced them as creative choices? It doesn’t seem like they can all be equally valid to the intended 2.39/2D version, rather their effects can only be mitigated by protecting the sensor’s lookaround so the extra headroom doesn’t create awkward compositions, the stereoscopic effects can be dialed in to not clash with the intended planar image, etc., which speaks directly to the questions raised in the original post.
There isn’t a uniform aspect ratio of 1.43:1 for every version because then IMAX would have nothing to sell, since the brand is all about the idea of a special, uniquely high quality theatrical experience that justifies a surcharge on ticket prices. A lot of people who saw Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning in IMAX expressed disappointment that it was letterboxed 2.39, for instance.
As you say, it really is about the trade-off with how quickly the highlights will clip and your ability to bring that information back in post if need be. At 200 ISO on the Alexa Classic I think you’ll have something like two stops fewer above middle grey than you would at 800 ISO? There’s also the practicality of shooting at lower sensitivity and how much light you’ll need to get an exposure. If I were shooting on a very controlled set where I could pump in as much light as needed, I was committing to a specific exposure with very little allowance in development because I was confident nothing would clip, and I wanted an extremely clean image, that’s when I would shoot at 200 ISO.
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.
