Shooting live music performances in the 70s

Phil Rhodes · December 12, 2023

The following frames are from a 1977 performance by ABBA in Australia (full video).

For something more pedestrian compare this, which is presumably from within a few years of the same time, in 4:3 and much more conventional.

The first one shows pretty unequivocally that an anamorphic lens is in use, even if the aspect ratio hadn't already given it away. This makes me wonder: we can see the audience pretty clearly, and anamorphics and film stocks of the period would hardly have been fast. Depth of field is... present and correct, but it seems well exposed. The blacks are a void. I wonder what the light levels would have been like and how it would have been to operate - this is a handheld shot. Obviously, this is a modern scan, so it has potentially been cleaned up a lot. This looks archetypally Panavision to me but I wouldn't be too shocked to discover it was some other option of that period that I haven't heard of. There's also some flickering edge flares on occasion, one frame on and one frame off, which I've seen in all kinds of movies but I'm not sure if it's specifically associated with any one camera design. Presumably it's something kicking off one leaf of the shutter but not the other.

Mere seconds later, someone takes a flash photograph. This is the first frame in which any effect is visible. As this is a magnesium flashbulb, it takes about ten frames to die down to a lambent glow, and a few seconds to extinguish completely. The flare is wildly different; this is presumably a deliberate star filter, which is believable for the period, but I'm not sure why it isn't also producing an anamorphic flare as this would have been extremely intense. Some shots show eight-pointed star flares; others don't. There's another photo flash in the last shot of the video which doesn't show a star but does show a blue streak. Apparently not every camera was filtered.

Stage shots scream anamorphic, partly because there's some visible vertical elongation of out-of-focus regions, but also because the top and bottom edges flare. This big red flare is being produced by another red-gelled parcan above the one we can see, which dances in and out of frame and produces several flashes like this.

Anamorphic artefacts are clear in the sparks produced by these children's sparklers.

Joerg Polzfusz · December 12, 2023

As the aspect ratio of your images isn’t as wide as CS, but only slightly wider than 1:2, it could have also been 16mm or S8 with an attached Iscorama. … Or it’s a mix of 35mm-4perf-anamorphic and 35mm-2perf.

Mark Dunn · December 13, 2023

11 hours ago, Joerg Polzfusz said:

As the aspect ratio of your images isn’t as wide as CS, but only slightly wider than 1:2, it could have also been 16mm or S8 with an attached Iscorama. … Or it’s a mix of 35mm-4perf-anamorphic and 35mm-2perf.

I measure about 2.3:1 on my monitor. This is from "ABBA- The Movie" so it's certainly 35. I'd agree with the idea of 4P and 2P. But you might have expected the concert material all to be 2P, to get longer run times ( it would be a bit cheaper, but with ABBA in their pomp earning as much as God maybe saving a few $ wasn't so important.)

IMDB has the opening scene in 1.66 so there was clearly some optical printing along the way.

Wikipedia says the producers considered 16 but decided to go to 35.

Some thoughts. I'd say the sparks are elongated by motion blur. Coould the intensity of the flash, and the star filter, be masking the anamorphic flare- or is it because it's such a small source?

Edited December 13, 2023 by Mark Dunn

Phil Rhodes · December 13, 2023

Don't trust the exact resolution too much, here, I just hacked them out of a YouTube player with snipping tool.

I guess my main concern was what the effective sensitivity and working stop might have been on something like this. Clearly they might have compromised the lighting for the crowd in order to make it work for the camera, and there's some fairly obvious instances of large, powerful lights (not the big Xenon followspots) sweeping the crowd to make it visible, though I don't know if that was done routinely.

At least two cameras have zooms. 70s anamorphic zooms, in the dark? Ouch.

Mark Dunn · December 13, 2023

Well they sure weren't putting the flares on in post?

This would still have been 5247 at 100ISO- I don't know if '47 was pushed. Famously the whole of "Barry Lyndon" was pushed +1 but that was the predecessor stock '54.

Lots of lights methinks. Though my 1981 Panavision catalogue has a 40-250 anamorphic at T2.8.