HVX 2.35 Anamorphic film print

[Alexis Vanier]

I'm currently working on a feature film that's strongly aesthetically influenced by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and I'm noticing how much he and Dean Cundey used the 2.35:1 Panavision anamorphic process (and no real use of lenses under 35mm) to restrict the vertical field of view and keep things "boxed" and "pressed down upon".

 

Now we've got ourselves a small budget and a potential distribution deal which could lead to theatrical release. This makes a lot of questions pop up.

 

So... 2.35 anamorphic... intended for film print... on an HVX-200.

 

We're going to be shooting with the HVX200. I opted out the whole DoF adaptor deal since I think we're not going to play that much with depth of field. In my opinion, the genre seemed to call for more depth of field actually. So, well, no anamorphic Lomos for me.

 

My guess was that using a 16:9 adaptor as described in this thread would yield better results than cropping/masking. I haven't decided decided yet whether to shoot 1080iPA or 720p. I think we can afford the storage, so that's not exactly an issue.

 

The thread doesn't talk about what happened on the field and the real end result. Has anybody tried it, poked around with it? Monitoring and framing doesn't bother me, so does rigging and fitting filters on the rig. My concerns are more in the lines of seeing blown up stretched video grain on a fifty feet wide screen, aberration and the such.

 

I've called my rental house already to try the actual shooting and editing part out with them. But I can't really spend our budget to explore the viability of a remote possibility of film print, so I'm looking for your input and experience to try and figure this out.

[David Mullen ASC]

The only way to be sure is to shoot a test and film it out. Many of the D.I. facilities will do a one-minute test pretty cheaply, and that should be long enough for you to make up your mind about the quality. Shoot 30 secs with with adaptor and 30 secs without it, framed from cropping & stretching, and make sure you tell them to transfer it to 35mm anamorphic (scope).

 

Short of that, go look at the anamorphic footage in HD at a D.I. facility on their 2K projectors on the big screen. Talk to the folks at Laser Pacific, for example.

 

You're only talking about a 1.33X squeeze, so I don't think the stretched pixels will be noticeable or distracting, anymore than the 2X stretched grain in super-35-to-anamorphic looks distracting, or even Super-16 blown up to anamorphic.