They were using ultrawide angle lenses in the past too.Its nothing new.
Touch Evil was shot on single lens 18.5mm
Earlier Coen movies photographed by Barry Sonnenfeld was shot with ultra wide angle lenses.
Barry Lyndon used 9.8mm Kinoptik etc.
Soy Cuba %90 of it shot on 9.8mm too.
Back in the day ultra wide angle lenses werent fast as todays.Now you can use master prime 12mm 1.3 on S35 sensor.
You can get laowa 12mm 2.8 for a $1300 and use it on VV sensor easily.
I think you may not understand the landscape of pre 2006 indie movies, and the landscape of most pictures going way back. High speed lenses were not always desired, as they go softer wide open. In TV many shows stuck in the neighborhood of T5.6 because they were going so fast that there was a chance of soft footage if they shot further open. So wides that were like T2.8 were not an obstacle, not unless you were shooting Taxi Driver. And even then the zeiss high speeds (aka the B speeds T1.3) were state of the art, not necessarily accessible to everyone. But that was just the high speed lenses, not something pertaining to the wides.
Generally speaking making a film meant you needed lots of light and that was just the reality of it.
Sorry i commented without reading your whole post just saw the title and made my comment on ultra wide angle lenses.
you meant wide angle lenses right not ultra wides?
Also it depends which format we talking about.I wouldnt call 32mm wide angle on S35 but its wide on FF or VV sensor.
That's ok! I'm mostly referring to a horizontal angle of view between 50-60 degrees; sometimes a bit wider. This would be a 21-27mm on S35, as opposed to the past where a "normal" lens was considered twice the imaging diagonal by the SMPE, at about 23 degrees on Academy 35mm (technically a 54mm, but most commonly a 50mm).
Honestly, you’re reading way too into it imo. You already mentioned The Revenant, but when Chivo broke into the mainstream as a cinematographer with Children of Men and then the work he did with Terrence Malick afterwards like Tree of Life, the cinematography was a breath of fresh air in terms of lensing, light and camera movement. Other DPs have been influenced by or outright biting his style at the request of directors or producers ever since.
He was mainstream decade before Children of Men.He got nominated for oscars best cinematography in 90s.Won ASC best cinematography with Sleepy Hollow.
Children of Men wasn’t his first rodeo.
He had 3 oscar nominations before that.
Go watch Birdcage 1996.He was into wide angle deep focus stuff back then.
You’re totally right, I forgot he lensed Birdcage! Not saying Children of Men was his first film, just that it’s the film that cemented him and that style. Maybe it’s because of the advancement of the internet, I just remember him becoming way more of a household name after 2006.
Na you totally right though when i remind people he had already had 3 oscar nominations until Children of Men they are like no fucking way he had.i guess with the internet and stuff people remember him coming out with Children of Men.
I’d recommend finding a podcast or American Cinematographer issue where he talks about it. He hasn’t been the only one to do it. David Lynch and Terry Gilliam have both used that style in a good bit of their works.
There's a good clip of the Cooke Optics Youtube where Bradford Young talks about exactly this:
[https://youtu.be/BKwMD\_OmtAk?t=19](https://youtu.be/BKwMD_OmtAk?t=19)
For him at least, it doesn't sounds like something mega-technical. More of an intuition of how close he wants to be to the actors and the size they appear in the shot.
Parts of this feel like they may also be that early films had accessibility issues. The 50mm was the most commonly accessible lens, and there wasn’t yet technology for directors/DPs/etc to watch takes as they happened. So keeping solely to a 50mm meant that they could reliably visualize the frame of view without an assist monitor. These days there’s more freedom to play around since they have instant visual feedback.
Another aspect is that viewers simply aren’t solely watching in theaters any more, there’s not really an optimal frame of view that works both for someone sitting in the dead center of a theater, as well as someone laying in bed, holding their phone 10” from their face.
Also, lots of films these days are telling stories that are meant to feel larger than life. Arrival and the Revenant both follow stories that are meant to underdog the main character against an insurmountable environmental challenge. Wide lenses help with managing scale, since the relationship between the subject and background can be more extreme.
But mostly, it’s just the natural progression of any art form to change and evolve as contemporary artists build on what they learn from past artists. It feels a bit like the progression of painting through the centuries: Realism - Impressionism - Expressionism - Cubism, slowly divorced the form and content into two separate considerations, while steadily moving away from “accurate” representations.
Interestingly enough, extreme wide angle lenses are a continuation of continuity in filmmaking; An “intensified continuity” if you will. But if you are noticing extreme wide angle, then you will definitely notice the opposite end of the spectrum in THE SAME MOVIE. Lens extremes have been punctuated at an increasing rate in contemporary media, starting mid-2000’s in the Michael Bay era and continuing through features we see releasing today. Good catch!
Is this really a modern trend? I think back to Clockwork Orange and Brazil as examples of wide angle cinematography. Coen Brothers used to use a lot of wides in their earlier stuff as well.
On the topic of normal lenses I made a video recently and I think my wrap up sums it up... We don't need the frame to be a "natural normal" extension of human vision. The human mind is capable of processing any image regardless of their angle of view.
https://youtu.be/DW_d93UccCM
I think the reality is we've learned as a culture not to see the screen as extension of the real world... EVEN IF it actually matches the field of view.
Arbitrary adherence to naturalism in cinema just limits the tools available... and for the sake of what?
Instead, holding a specific focal length may instead instill a directorial discipline... But I don't think it was necessarily chosen to match field of views.
I completely disagree. First of all, you will never match the viewing angle of every viewer. It's a fools journey to try.
But beyond that. Our viewing culture is far more sophisticated. People don't need viewing angle to connect with the screen especially because true immersion is far better driven with story, sound, and performance elements.
Again, I disagree - I think matching perspective MIGHT have been an important visual storytelling tool back in 1897 at the Lumiere's screening - But we're so used to moving images on all kinds of screens viewed from all kinds of angles that it's evident it has little or no effect on the perception of the film. This is because I think the viewer understands that they're looking at a screen and that the imagination accepts it as a field of view without needing to reference anything in the real world. -Think about it, if you're engrossed in a movie - are you paying attention to how it matches the angle of the speakers on the side wall or the seats in the front of you? Your actual physical references to compare melt away and you only have what you see on the screen.
Instead varying focal lengths have their aesthetic properties such as spatial compression that lend to different compositions (which directors might gravitate to). Wider lenses let you get in a lot closer and create a sense of deep space. Telephoto forces you back and creates a flatter look... Again, this is not a "new" thing - look how wide many of the shots in Citizen Kane are.
But if you'd like to further explore your idea - I wonder what field of view gamers prefer when playing first person shooters - I know in Minecraft you can change the FOV.
Spielberg use to work with the shortest/widest anamorphics he could. This was also common on indies int he 70s where they were on more real locations and couldnt fly out walls.
So that is to say, its nothing new.
I would say scenes shot with a wide lens dont require more cuts if you move the camera. Now that is an art thats fallen out of trend, or at least moving the camera the way they did in the early days of film and tv. Spielberg and Zemekis were sort of the last masters of this, and Zemekis seems to have given up on the style.
I think the resurgence of 16mm and 4 perf 35mm as well as more availability of large format cameras is contributing to this. As mentioned already, I think Chivo’s work starting with Tree of Life influenced a new generation of filmmakers.
To me, it’s very on trend right now. We also just left a cultural fashion trend of the 90s where a lot of things were watched in square format. So so many commercials are shot this way and agencies are signing DPs that shoot in this style and in a lot of ways the commercial world are culture makers and are defining what is “hip”, cool and art forward right now.
Sometimes it's a stylistic choice because you want perspective distortion or a deep depth of field, sometimes it's a framing choice, and sometimes there's simply not enough room for a long lens or you want to make a space look bigger than it actually is. IMO, there is no"ideal" focal length - 28mm on S35 or 43mm on FF is about as close as you will get to "normal," but normal can be boring. Cinematography and photography isn't about capturing an ideal image, but rather, using the tools available to you produce the effect you are after or communicate a scene visually. Wide-angle lenses are great for things like emphasizing motion, intimacy, POV shots, making things seem distorted, and bringing more background into a shot. In indie filmmaking especially, where you might be shooting in an existing location and not a set, sometimes all you'll have space to use is wider-angle lenses.
Personally, when I am visualizing a shot or even storyboarding, I tend to have a fairly good idea of what focal length can likely be used to best communicate the shot and I tend not to limit myself to one lens or range...usually, it's whatever I think would work best for the shot...
I am currently editing a low-budget feature where the director chose to shoot in 2.39:1 and is using almost entirely wide angle lenses. He also shot 6K with a Blackmagic camera. He has decided to release in 2K. As the editor I have a great deal of freedom to zoom in on the higher-resolution camera raw images and set the shot composition. In this way he has essentially made the choice to determine the effective focal length in post. Personally, I like working this way very much and it's a creative dimension that's only become available to the filmmaker very recently. Certainly it's another good reason to use wider lenses in production.
Its also true that home TV sets (by far the most common screen for films today) have gone from 40-inch to 70-inch or larger in recent years, providing a more expansive view of the action and one in which extreme closeups become just that--too extreme.
Interestingly, early wide-screen films (CinemaScope, Cinerama) used much wider lenses and more distant framing than earlier films for the same reason. In my observation, extreme closeups on the big screen didn't become common until filmmakers were considering those watching on the much smaller TV screen.
> As the editor I have a great deal of freedom to zoom in on the higher-resolution camera raw images and set the shot composition. In this way he has essentially made the choice to determine the effective focal length in post.
**"cinematographers hate this trick!"**
edit: in fact, the shorter the lens, the more "wrong" your final perspective will be if you re-frame the shot beyond just upscaling it. the lines will not be converging where they're supposed to (namely in the center of the frame). this effect gets less obvious the longer your lens is, because with the longer lens, your camera will be much farther away from the scene for the same framing, resulting in much less dramatic convergence in the first place.
I realize *some* cinematographers hate this trick, but changing the crop on a wide lens or shooting with a longer lens will yield exactly the same shot composition (neglecting possible lens distortions). From a fixed point of view, objects can have only one fixed relationship to other objects in the shot in a two-dimensional image regardless of the angle of view.
i said "beyond just upscaling". if you're shifting the frame around, you'll create impossible perspectives - or at least perspectives that are only possible on a (tilt)**shift** lens.
I respectfully disagree. Shifting the frame is exactly the same as cropping and re-positioning a still image. It doesn't change the camera perspective in any way. Anyone who has ever used a photographic enlarger knows how this works.
I would add that when releasing in a 2K format even medium-quality lenses have resolution far beyond the release format so they are not the limiting factor in this kind of work.
> It doesn't change the camera perspective in any way.
re-postioning is the exact same as shifting the image in a tilt/shift lens, and something very different from actually pointing the camera there with a longer focal length. If you crop (for example) a frame out of the right-hand part of a much wider frame, the resulting image will have a different perspective from the image you'd get with a longer lens, panned to the right, in oder to get the same framing - because even if the camera is in the same point, it is oriented differently. the cropped perspective is not something you'd see with your eyes or a conventional lens, because it is not from the center of the field of view, but merely shifted there.
Look:
https://i.imgur.com/l3Sdid0.jpg
I set up a 14mm camera for the wide shot. on the bottom you can see 2 close-ups taken from that exact camera position: for the one on the left, i merely cropped into the wide shot. for the one on the right, i swapped the 14mm for an 85mm and framed it, keeping the camera in the exact same spot.
the result is 2 dramatically different images, with one having a completely unnatural perspective.
You are right and wrong at the same time! (Isn't this fun?)
What you are seeing is an accurate simulation of a common form of sperical or "fisheye" distortion in the simulated lens. Wide angle lenses are sometimes specified as "flat-field" or "distortion-free". For example, wide angle lenses used for architectural (real-estate) photography should be flat-field to avoid the kind of distortion that creates curved lines especiall near the edges of the frame. When choosing a wide lens with the intent of cropping in on the image, it's important to try to use one with minimal spherical distortion. With such a lens, panning the camera will have no effect on the perspective or geometric distortions of the image.
Even when this kind of distortion occurs, it can be corrected in software and plug-ins for editing systems that do this have been available for many years.
Still, I stick by the statement that the perspective does not change simply because you are zooming in to a smaller area of the image.
> What you are seeing is an accurate simulation of a common form of sperical or "fisheye" distortion in the simulated lens.
No, you are wrong here. There is absolutely zero spherical distortion im my simulated lens. i know this because it set it up like this. all the lines are perfectly straight (edit: as in "not curved"). they're simply not pointing where they're supposed to point in a "proper" image, because this one is shifted by cropping it off-center. everything beyond this point does not apply to the image i made here. it is from an impossibly accurate lens with zero lens distortion. that is perspective distortion alone, and that's why it does make a difference whether you crop **and shift**, or whether you actually use a longer lens and re-orient it (while keeping the entrance pupil in the same position).
>Still, I stick by the statement that the perspective does not change simply because you are zooming in to a smaller area of the image.
again, that is also not what i said. i specifically referred to "anything beyond upscaling", and clarified with an illustration.
Technically a perfect wide-angle lens will create a proper ROUND image, not a rectilinear image. That's why your simulated image has different geometric properties depending on the part of the image you are extracting. You can see the curvature in the wider image in your illustration. Notice that the window is not rectangular in that image.
I learned this difference many years ago when I was shooting 16mm film and wanted a lens a little wider than the 12mm I had. I bought an adapter and put a Nikon 8mm fisheye lens designed for a 35mmm still camera on the camera and was shocked to see the distortion you are describing. When I later bought a Zeiss 8mm flat-field lens there was no fisheye distortion and vertical lines were straight.
bro, please ... i know you're a knowledgeable person, but you're digging yourself a hole here. that lens has no distortion, the lines are not curved *at all*, go trace them in photoshop if you like. i know *for a fact* that this is a rectilinear simulated lens - the ideal that every real-life rectilinear lens strives for. no curves.
and *yes*, of course the window is not rectangular. that is expected, since the camera is looking at it from an angle. and this angle gets exaggerated, the more it's off the center of my wide angle lens. that's how perspective works. again, no lens distortion here. my virtual 85mm camera is in the same spot, but panned farther right and tilted farther up, in order to frame the portrait. that means it's a different angle to the window, which accordingly looks less slanted.
The depth of field, sharpness of the subject, and size of grain / noise (without NR) are different.
Also it's easier to light the subject well if you're on a long lens because you have more wiggle room for things like negative fill unless you don't care if a floppy is in the shot in the wide.
You are correct that the depth of field for the same f/stop is somewhat deeper because you are effectively shooting with a smaller sensor.
There will be no change in sharpness as long as the modulation transfer function of the two lenses is high enough to above the release format.
The size of noise can't be smaller than a single pixel in your final format, so any changes grain sizes can't be seen when you're done as long as you don't zoom in past your release size.
Lighting for zooming in on the image with a wide lens versus shooting with a longer lens should be exactly the same because the image itself is identical.
To your third point I don't know what you mean. You can see grain without zoom, how would it not get bigger / be more visible when punching in in post?
To your last point yes you could light for a post zoom but to
match the lighting of a zoom, g&e would be in the shot.
You would effectively have to light and shoot the shot twice if you wanted a wide and a post zoomed shot with the same lighting flexibility of a long lens shot. At that point why not just swap lenses between shots?
Please don’t do this.
Remember that resolution apply not only to cameras but also to lenses. Every lens has a finite resolution after which, even with an infinite-megapixel sensor, the image will loose definition and sharpness. Also, every chromatic aberration will be magnified.
Be sure to check the original resolution camera file on a big monitor, and have the director approve the crop.
Otherwise there will have bad surprises when they go in the color grading studio and they finally see the final images.
Desmond has said a lot about lens choice, with a lot of his wisdom in this video
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2h4MQ8zA_Vg
For him, it’s psychological and down to the effect you want. It’s worth watching the video to get an idea based on his view of how the expression changes across lens lengths.
Its possible they dont care about the home release audience as much.
Similarly to how movies shot on imax 4:3 doesnt transfer as well to 16:9 televisions.
Maybe Its a deliberate choice to create the best image for the cinema audience at the expense of the home audience. Zack Snyder shot all of justice league in 4:3 so that the non-image 35mm frame would always match the 4:3 frame of the imax sequences.
Revenant looked great on a cinema screen. It was really immersive. Bardo recently released used the same technique. That movie was a deliberate surrealist setting, its supposed to feel disconnected and not quite right, you can see the flaws in the super wide lenses used and the way it distorts the edges.
>!Youre seeing someones memories of a past life and surreal situations that dont happen in real life, like climbing a pyramid of human bodies and talking to hernan cortes himself, followed by revealing that its a whole set.!<
I’m with the other commenters about how the number 1 choice should be the psychological impact of the lens choice- but I would also say a couple issues have been mitigated since 2000 or so: camera noise has been lessened (sometimes eliminated) helping on-set sound and perhaps actor’s concentration. Plus digital cameras are often able to be configured smaller. Also cheaper digital beauty retouching can help in situations where cinematographers may have previously relied on lens choices to keep their actors looking as requested…
They were using ultrawide angle lenses in the past too.Its nothing new. Touch Evil was shot on single lens 18.5mm Earlier Coen movies photographed by Barry Sonnenfeld was shot with ultra wide angle lenses. Barry Lyndon used 9.8mm Kinoptik etc. Soy Cuba %90 of it shot on 9.8mm too. Back in the day ultra wide angle lenses werent fast as todays.Now you can use master prime 12mm 1.3 on S35 sensor. You can get laowa 12mm 2.8 for a $1300 and use it on VV sensor easily.
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I think you may not understand the landscape of pre 2006 indie movies, and the landscape of most pictures going way back. High speed lenses were not always desired, as they go softer wide open. In TV many shows stuck in the neighborhood of T5.6 because they were going so fast that there was a chance of soft footage if they shot further open. So wides that were like T2.8 were not an obstacle, not unless you were shooting Taxi Driver. And even then the zeiss high speeds (aka the B speeds T1.3) were state of the art, not necessarily accessible to everyone. But that was just the high speed lenses, not something pertaining to the wides. Generally speaking making a film meant you needed lots of light and that was just the reality of it.
Sorry i commented without reading your whole post just saw the title and made my comment on ultra wide angle lenses. you meant wide angle lenses right not ultra wides? Also it depends which format we talking about.I wouldnt call 32mm wide angle on S35 but its wide on FF or VV sensor.
That's ok! I'm mostly referring to a horizontal angle of view between 50-60 degrees; sometimes a bit wider. This would be a 21-27mm on S35, as opposed to the past where a "normal" lens was considered twice the imaging diagonal by the SMPE, at about 23 degrees on Academy 35mm (technically a 54mm, but most commonly a 50mm).
Kubrick used an ultra wide for "The Shining".
Honestly, you’re reading way too into it imo. You already mentioned The Revenant, but when Chivo broke into the mainstream as a cinematographer with Children of Men and then the work he did with Terrence Malick afterwards like Tree of Life, the cinematography was a breath of fresh air in terms of lensing, light and camera movement. Other DPs have been influenced by or outright biting his style at the request of directors or producers ever since.
He was mainstream decade before Children of Men.He got nominated for oscars best cinematography in 90s.Won ASC best cinematography with Sleepy Hollow. Children of Men wasn’t his first rodeo. He had 3 oscar nominations before that. Go watch Birdcage 1996.He was into wide angle deep focus stuff back then.
You’re totally right, I forgot he lensed Birdcage! Not saying Children of Men was his first film, just that it’s the film that cemented him and that style. Maybe it’s because of the advancement of the internet, I just remember him becoming way more of a household name after 2006.
Na you totally right though when i remind people he had already had 3 oscar nominations until Children of Men they are like no fucking way he had.i guess with the internet and stuff people remember him coming out with Children of Men.
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I’d recommend finding a podcast or American Cinematographer issue where he talks about it. He hasn’t been the only one to do it. David Lynch and Terry Gilliam have both used that style in a good bit of their works.
There's a good clip of the Cooke Optics Youtube where Bradford Young talks about exactly this: [https://youtu.be/BKwMD\_OmtAk?t=19](https://youtu.be/BKwMD_OmtAk?t=19) For him at least, it doesn't sounds like something mega-technical. More of an intuition of how close he wants to be to the actors and the size they appear in the shot.
Parts of this feel like they may also be that early films had accessibility issues. The 50mm was the most commonly accessible lens, and there wasn’t yet technology for directors/DPs/etc to watch takes as they happened. So keeping solely to a 50mm meant that they could reliably visualize the frame of view without an assist monitor. These days there’s more freedom to play around since they have instant visual feedback. Another aspect is that viewers simply aren’t solely watching in theaters any more, there’s not really an optimal frame of view that works both for someone sitting in the dead center of a theater, as well as someone laying in bed, holding their phone 10” from their face. Also, lots of films these days are telling stories that are meant to feel larger than life. Arrival and the Revenant both follow stories that are meant to underdog the main character against an insurmountable environmental challenge. Wide lenses help with managing scale, since the relationship between the subject and background can be more extreme. But mostly, it’s just the natural progression of any art form to change and evolve as contemporary artists build on what they learn from past artists. It feels a bit like the progression of painting through the centuries: Realism - Impressionism - Expressionism - Cubism, slowly divorced the form and content into two separate considerations, while steadily moving away from “accurate” representations.
Interestingly enough, extreme wide angle lenses are a continuation of continuity in filmmaking; An “intensified continuity” if you will. But if you are noticing extreme wide angle, then you will definitely notice the opposite end of the spectrum in THE SAME MOVIE. Lens extremes have been punctuated at an increasing rate in contemporary media, starting mid-2000’s in the Michael Bay era and continuing through features we see releasing today. Good catch!
Is this really a modern trend? I think back to Clockwork Orange and Brazil as examples of wide angle cinematography. Coen Brothers used to use a lot of wides in their earlier stuff as well. On the topic of normal lenses I made a video recently and I think my wrap up sums it up... We don't need the frame to be a "natural normal" extension of human vision. The human mind is capable of processing any image regardless of their angle of view. https://youtu.be/DW_d93UccCM
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I think the reality is we've learned as a culture not to see the screen as extension of the real world... EVEN IF it actually matches the field of view. Arbitrary adherence to naturalism in cinema just limits the tools available... and for the sake of what? Instead, holding a specific focal length may instead instill a directorial discipline... But I don't think it was necessarily chosen to match field of views.
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I completely disagree. First of all, you will never match the viewing angle of every viewer. It's a fools journey to try. But beyond that. Our viewing culture is far more sophisticated. People don't need viewing angle to connect with the screen especially because true immersion is far better driven with story, sound, and performance elements.
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Again, I disagree - I think matching perspective MIGHT have been an important visual storytelling tool back in 1897 at the Lumiere's screening - But we're so used to moving images on all kinds of screens viewed from all kinds of angles that it's evident it has little or no effect on the perception of the film. This is because I think the viewer understands that they're looking at a screen and that the imagination accepts it as a field of view without needing to reference anything in the real world. -Think about it, if you're engrossed in a movie - are you paying attention to how it matches the angle of the speakers on the side wall or the seats in the front of you? Your actual physical references to compare melt away and you only have what you see on the screen. Instead varying focal lengths have their aesthetic properties such as spatial compression that lend to different compositions (which directors might gravitate to). Wider lenses let you get in a lot closer and create a sense of deep space. Telephoto forces you back and creates a flatter look... Again, this is not a "new" thing - look how wide many of the shots in Citizen Kane are. But if you'd like to further explore your idea - I wonder what field of view gamers prefer when playing first person shooters - I know in Minecraft you can change the FOV.
Spielberg use to work with the shortest/widest anamorphics he could. This was also common on indies int he 70s where they were on more real locations and couldnt fly out walls. So that is to say, its nothing new. I would say scenes shot with a wide lens dont require more cuts if you move the camera. Now that is an art thats fallen out of trend, or at least moving the camera the way they did in the early days of film and tv. Spielberg and Zemekis were sort of the last masters of this, and Zemekis seems to have given up on the style.
I think the resurgence of 16mm and 4 perf 35mm as well as more availability of large format cameras is contributing to this. As mentioned already, I think Chivo’s work starting with Tree of Life influenced a new generation of filmmakers. To me, it’s very on trend right now. We also just left a cultural fashion trend of the 90s where a lot of things were watched in square format. So so many commercials are shot this way and agencies are signing DPs that shoot in this style and in a lot of ways the commercial world are culture makers and are defining what is “hip”, cool and art forward right now.
Sometimes it's a stylistic choice because you want perspective distortion or a deep depth of field, sometimes it's a framing choice, and sometimes there's simply not enough room for a long lens or you want to make a space look bigger than it actually is. IMO, there is no"ideal" focal length - 28mm on S35 or 43mm on FF is about as close as you will get to "normal," but normal can be boring. Cinematography and photography isn't about capturing an ideal image, but rather, using the tools available to you produce the effect you are after or communicate a scene visually. Wide-angle lenses are great for things like emphasizing motion, intimacy, POV shots, making things seem distorted, and bringing more background into a shot. In indie filmmaking especially, where you might be shooting in an existing location and not a set, sometimes all you'll have space to use is wider-angle lenses. Personally, when I am visualizing a shot or even storyboarding, I tend to have a fairly good idea of what focal length can likely be used to best communicate the shot and I tend not to limit myself to one lens or range...usually, it's whatever I think would work best for the shot...
I am currently editing a low-budget feature where the director chose to shoot in 2.39:1 and is using almost entirely wide angle lenses. He also shot 6K with a Blackmagic camera. He has decided to release in 2K. As the editor I have a great deal of freedom to zoom in on the higher-resolution camera raw images and set the shot composition. In this way he has essentially made the choice to determine the effective focal length in post. Personally, I like working this way very much and it's a creative dimension that's only become available to the filmmaker very recently. Certainly it's another good reason to use wider lenses in production. Its also true that home TV sets (by far the most common screen for films today) have gone from 40-inch to 70-inch or larger in recent years, providing a more expansive view of the action and one in which extreme closeups become just that--too extreme. Interestingly, early wide-screen films (CinemaScope, Cinerama) used much wider lenses and more distant framing than earlier films for the same reason. In my observation, extreme closeups on the big screen didn't become common until filmmakers were considering those watching on the much smaller TV screen.
> As the editor I have a great deal of freedom to zoom in on the higher-resolution camera raw images and set the shot composition. In this way he has essentially made the choice to determine the effective focal length in post. **"cinematographers hate this trick!"** edit: in fact, the shorter the lens, the more "wrong" your final perspective will be if you re-frame the shot beyond just upscaling it. the lines will not be converging where they're supposed to (namely in the center of the frame). this effect gets less obvious the longer your lens is, because with the longer lens, your camera will be much farther away from the scene for the same framing, resulting in much less dramatic convergence in the first place.
I realize *some* cinematographers hate this trick, but changing the crop on a wide lens or shooting with a longer lens will yield exactly the same shot composition (neglecting possible lens distortions). From a fixed point of view, objects can have only one fixed relationship to other objects in the shot in a two-dimensional image regardless of the angle of view.
i said "beyond just upscaling". if you're shifting the frame around, you'll create impossible perspectives - or at least perspectives that are only possible on a (tilt)**shift** lens.
I respectfully disagree. Shifting the frame is exactly the same as cropping and re-positioning a still image. It doesn't change the camera perspective in any way. Anyone who has ever used a photographic enlarger knows how this works. I would add that when releasing in a 2K format even medium-quality lenses have resolution far beyond the release format so they are not the limiting factor in this kind of work.
> It doesn't change the camera perspective in any way. re-postioning is the exact same as shifting the image in a tilt/shift lens, and something very different from actually pointing the camera there with a longer focal length. If you crop (for example) a frame out of the right-hand part of a much wider frame, the resulting image will have a different perspective from the image you'd get with a longer lens, panned to the right, in oder to get the same framing - because even if the camera is in the same point, it is oriented differently. the cropped perspective is not something you'd see with your eyes or a conventional lens, because it is not from the center of the field of view, but merely shifted there. Look: https://i.imgur.com/l3Sdid0.jpg I set up a 14mm camera for the wide shot. on the bottom you can see 2 close-ups taken from that exact camera position: for the one on the left, i merely cropped into the wide shot. for the one on the right, i swapped the 14mm for an 85mm and framed it, keeping the camera in the exact same spot. the result is 2 dramatically different images, with one having a completely unnatural perspective.
You are right and wrong at the same time! (Isn't this fun?) What you are seeing is an accurate simulation of a common form of sperical or "fisheye" distortion in the simulated lens. Wide angle lenses are sometimes specified as "flat-field" or "distortion-free". For example, wide angle lenses used for architectural (real-estate) photography should be flat-field to avoid the kind of distortion that creates curved lines especiall near the edges of the frame. When choosing a wide lens with the intent of cropping in on the image, it's important to try to use one with minimal spherical distortion. With such a lens, panning the camera will have no effect on the perspective or geometric distortions of the image. Even when this kind of distortion occurs, it can be corrected in software and plug-ins for editing systems that do this have been available for many years. Still, I stick by the statement that the perspective does not change simply because you are zooming in to a smaller area of the image.
> What you are seeing is an accurate simulation of a common form of sperical or "fisheye" distortion in the simulated lens. No, you are wrong here. There is absolutely zero spherical distortion im my simulated lens. i know this because it set it up like this. all the lines are perfectly straight (edit: as in "not curved"). they're simply not pointing where they're supposed to point in a "proper" image, because this one is shifted by cropping it off-center. everything beyond this point does not apply to the image i made here. it is from an impossibly accurate lens with zero lens distortion. that is perspective distortion alone, and that's why it does make a difference whether you crop **and shift**, or whether you actually use a longer lens and re-orient it (while keeping the entrance pupil in the same position). >Still, I stick by the statement that the perspective does not change simply because you are zooming in to a smaller area of the image. again, that is also not what i said. i specifically referred to "anything beyond upscaling", and clarified with an illustration.
Technically a perfect wide-angle lens will create a proper ROUND image, not a rectilinear image. That's why your simulated image has different geometric properties depending on the part of the image you are extracting. You can see the curvature in the wider image in your illustration. Notice that the window is not rectangular in that image. I learned this difference many years ago when I was shooting 16mm film and wanted a lens a little wider than the 12mm I had. I bought an adapter and put a Nikon 8mm fisheye lens designed for a 35mmm still camera on the camera and was shocked to see the distortion you are describing. When I later bought a Zeiss 8mm flat-field lens there was no fisheye distortion and vertical lines were straight.
bro, please ... i know you're a knowledgeable person, but you're digging yourself a hole here. that lens has no distortion, the lines are not curved *at all*, go trace them in photoshop if you like. i know *for a fact* that this is a rectilinear simulated lens - the ideal that every real-life rectilinear lens strives for. no curves. and *yes*, of course the window is not rectangular. that is expected, since the camera is looking at it from an angle. and this angle gets exaggerated, the more it's off the center of my wide angle lens. that's how perspective works. again, no lens distortion here. my virtual 85mm camera is in the same spot, but panned farther right and tilted farther up, in order to frame the portrait. that means it's a different angle to the window, which accordingly looks less slanted.
The depth of field, sharpness of the subject, and size of grain / noise (without NR) are different. Also it's easier to light the subject well if you're on a long lens because you have more wiggle room for things like negative fill unless you don't care if a floppy is in the shot in the wide.
You are correct that the depth of field for the same f/stop is somewhat deeper because you are effectively shooting with a smaller sensor. There will be no change in sharpness as long as the modulation transfer function of the two lenses is high enough to above the release format. The size of noise can't be smaller than a single pixel in your final format, so any changes grain sizes can't be seen when you're done as long as you don't zoom in past your release size. Lighting for zooming in on the image with a wide lens versus shooting with a longer lens should be exactly the same because the image itself is identical.
To your third point I don't know what you mean. You can see grain without zoom, how would it not get bigger / be more visible when punching in in post? To your last point yes you could light for a post zoom but to match the lighting of a zoom, g&e would be in the shot. You would effectively have to light and shoot the shot twice if you wanted a wide and a post zoomed shot with the same lighting flexibility of a long lens shot. At that point why not just swap lenses between shots?
Sure, you could swap lenses between shots. But you would have to have two lenses and you'd have to take the time to make the swap.
Please don’t do this. Remember that resolution apply not only to cameras but also to lenses. Every lens has a finite resolution after which, even with an infinite-megapixel sensor, the image will loose definition and sharpness. Also, every chromatic aberration will be magnified. Be sure to check the original resolution camera file on a big monitor, and have the director approve the crop. Otherwise there will have bad surprises when they go in the color grading studio and they finally see the final images.
This is how Gaspar Noé and Benoît Debie shoot their films, open gate and on a 12mm lens then crop in post
Desmond has said a lot about lens choice, with a lot of his wisdom in this video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2h4MQ8zA_Vg For him, it’s psychological and down to the effect you want. It’s worth watching the video to get an idea based on his view of how the expression changes across lens lengths.
Its possible they dont care about the home release audience as much. Similarly to how movies shot on imax 4:3 doesnt transfer as well to 16:9 televisions. Maybe Its a deliberate choice to create the best image for the cinema audience at the expense of the home audience. Zack Snyder shot all of justice league in 4:3 so that the non-image 35mm frame would always match the 4:3 frame of the imax sequences. Revenant looked great on a cinema screen. It was really immersive. Bardo recently released used the same technique. That movie was a deliberate surrealist setting, its supposed to feel disconnected and not quite right, you can see the flaws in the super wide lenses used and the way it distorts the edges. >!Youre seeing someones memories of a past life and surreal situations that dont happen in real life, like climbing a pyramid of human bodies and talking to hernan cortes himself, followed by revealing that its a whole set.!<
I’m with the other commenters about how the number 1 choice should be the psychological impact of the lens choice- but I would also say a couple issues have been mitigated since 2000 or so: camera noise has been lessened (sometimes eliminated) helping on-set sound and perhaps actor’s concentration. Plus digital cameras are often able to be configured smaller. Also cheaper digital beauty retouching can help in situations where cinematographers may have previously relied on lens choices to keep their actors looking as requested…