American Cinematographer - December 2004 - 50

A Darker Side of Fantasy
Ritter fans and a

bluescreen set
were

used to

simulate the
effects of

a

hurricane upon
Aunt

Josephine's
cliffside home.

gfp

* tl

^0m '

HM

W

T

M

..

Pff /

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JP*

who say you should shoot close-ups
with a very long lens in order to feel

edge-to-edge image sharpness in
Super 1.85, ASC associate member
Tak Miyagishima, Panavision's senior
vice president of engineering, offers,
"The 'best' part of the lens - the
center
is dictated by of the laws of
physics. As you move from the center
of any lens, there's going to be illumi¬
nation falloff. However, the longer the
lens, the more illumination you will
retain in the corners; conversely, the
shorter the lens, the greater the loss.

cinema

depth of field," Lubezki
admits, "but the storybook look we
were after is very closely related to
and dependent upon the effects of
depth of field; when you start to see
too much, you lose that quality. I

was

We took that into account when

would have loved to shoot at

telephoto lens for close-ups, accent
shots or any shot where we just
couldn't physically get any closer to
the subject. So even though we were
working at low stops, using the wide

mance

every

between

a

T2.8 and T4, but

cinematographer knows this

and works with that limitation."
"I would have loved to work

with

more

a

T2.8,

designed the Primo lenses and tried
to improve the light transmission to

just to have enough depth to allow
the actors to feel where they were

the

and tie them to their

corners.

With older, non-Primo

lenses, there is
corners

-

a

stop-loss in the

sometimes

stop-loss, as well
more
breathing

a

dramatic

distortion and
-
but we've

as

corrected that with the Primos,

46 December 2004

were

designed to offer their best perfor¬

-

we

optics: "Most lenses

so

backgrounds.

But I also liked to

separate them with
depth of field to be able to focus a
little

more on

their faces."

Lubezki shot

Snicket with

extremely wide lenses in part to
"relate the actors to

the back¬

they would be the lenses best-suited
for that use of Super 35." He adds that
working at the bottom of the lens, as

ground," but he notes that "when
you're on a wide lens but very close

Lubezki often does, will accentuate

to

the

that closeness. I

performance limitations of

any

the actors, the audience will feel

disagree with people

close

to

the

actors.

You're not close,

and it feels artificial. On Snicket,
4 inches from

were

actors,

of

some

we
our

including the babies, and it

fantastic to

see

their reactions."

The Primo 21mm became Lubezki's

"normal" lens, "but we used

a

14mm

sometimes, and we basically shot the
entire film with 21mm, 27mm and
40mm lenses. The 40mm

lenses also gave us a

was our

bit more depth."

Footage from Snicket suggests
that Lubezki sought a formal,

symmetrical look for the picture.
"It's very formal in the sense that we
never

used

a

handheld

we tried to keep the
strictly on the Z axis
very straight, with the camera just

Steadicam, and
camera moves
-

camera or
American Cinematographer - December 2004

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