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But weren’t those still s35 sensors? The past few years there emerged lots of full frame / 135 sensor cameras (and more fast lens options too). I definitely noticed a trend in very shallow DoF, especially in TV shows, where you’d sometimes even see wide shots with fore-/background separation.
No single technique is better or worse than another, it all depends on whether it is wielded by an artist or not — and Greig Fraser is an artist, he’s proven that on many productions.
Fraser is an artist but I don’t have to admire all of his work, and this one is too computational for me. The new tool of gaming engines being used to create worlds around the stage bares the danger of feeling like a computer game and it happened to me in The Batman too often, although I wasn’t aware of how it was shot when watching.
I also had the feeling the visuals tried to deflect me from an ultimately shallow story and endless plot holes 🙂
That scene from The Batman threw me out of the movie (and into a computer game) the most from the many scenes that were filmed in The Volume. Visually stunning but just didn’t work for me, felt too perfectly computational, too often.
The best (worst) example for shallow DoF galore I can think of is Zack Snyder’s Netflix film “Army of the Dead”, where he paired the large sensor of a RED Monstro with vintage Canon 50mm f0.95 and 35mm f1.5 lenses and shot everything wide open.
The film is as shallow as the DoF he filmed it in. I had to fast forward after 30 minutes and eventually stop. Even though making ok use of it, I think it is still exemplary for random use of very shallow DoF in modern productions.
I would say this is changing drastically though. We are seeing new, affordable lenses enter the market every year from mostly Chinese manufacturers, and these lenses get better and better every year, too. Spherical or anamorphic, photography or videography/cinema lenses. They started with terrible quality a few years back but have improved vastly at a high pace – similar to what we see in LED film lighting.
E.g. today you can get decent performing anamorphic lenses for 10 times less than equivalent lenses cost just 5-10 years ago, with quality differences being diminished with every iteration.
I would expect lenses in general to become noticeably more affordable in the future. I know lenses are a hot (often emotionally and sometimes even esoterically loaded) topic and many cinematographers disagree 🙂
Congratulations Roger, that shot is entering the territory of Ozu’s famous vase shot in ‘Late Spring’, which people try to understand until today, haha.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I never looked into it deeper, but as far as I know a camera needs the exact distortion data from a lens to perform it correctly. If a lens is not supported, correction will yield false results. Panasonic’s cheaper photography lenses for instance are much worse when not corrected in camera, usually by a Panasonic camera.
Our mind can zoom in but I still disagree that a lens zoom is ‘natural’ because that visual process does not happen in real life when our mind zooms in; the lens zoom is a creative effect to represent that process (one that can work very well). It comes down to how one defines ‘natural’. And more important, in the end it doesn’t matter if it serves the story and the audience isn’t pulled out of it.
Personally, I found zooms pull me out of the story much easier than dolly moves but they both have their place, and there they work.
I think zooms feel less natural because our eyes can’t zoom. We need to move physically closer towards objects for them to become larger, which is what the push in does.
The sun moves fast!
On the last image the actors are in the shade while unimportant objects in the back- and foreground are prominent from being in direct sun. Judging from the second frame grab, that happened because the sun had already moved away from where the action took place (unless this was intended for specific reasons).
Scheduling, blocking and time management already solve many issues and prevent others from happening.
Personally if I want it really dark but rather clean I go down to ISO 200, especially when shooting with cameras that have unaesthetic noise, to have some room to crush it in post.
Whether you put the tripod over your shoulder or hold it in front of you like a stabilizer, find the center of gravity. You can do this by balancing the whole thing on the side of your hand. Once you found it, hold it there (if using like a stabilizer) or have that be the point resting on your shoulder. You may need to attach counter weights depending on the weight of your camera setup.
