Can this be done for 16mm?

[King J Greenspon]

I'm currently working on a production shooting 35 with a Super 35 gate. They're doing this to get the 2.35:1 aspect ratio using spherical lenses without losing the of depth of focus. I think this is a brilliant idea, being a huge fan of deep focus and spherical lenses (a la Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, Rumble Fish, etc...).

 

My question: Can the same thing be done using 16mm? Could you use say an Arri SRII or 3; shoot 16mm using a super 16 gate and spherical lenses to achieve the same result?

 

Thanks,

 

King

[Dominic Case]

Super 35 negs are squeezed during the duping or DI process, to get the anamorphic image that you need for 2.35:1 ratio. The full area of a super 35mm frame is in the ratio of around 1.33:1, so ss a consequence, only a little more than half the vertical height of the full frame is used.

 

The super 16 negative frame is 1.66:1. So once again, to get a 2.35:1 aspect ratio you will only be using a fraction of the full height of the negatve frame - in fact, it's about 3/4s of the height. This is more efficient than the super 35 approach, and more efficient than using a standard 16 gate - but you are still using much less than the full area of a 16mm negative, which is pretty small to start with..

[Robert Houllahan]

I'm currently working on a production shooting 35 with a Super 35 gate. They're doing this to get the 2.35:1 aspect ratio using spherical lenses without losing the of depth of focus. I think this is a brilliant idea, being a huge fan of deep focus and spherical lenses (a la Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, Rumble Fish, etc...).

 

My question: Can the same thing be done using 16mm? Could you use say an Arri SRII or 3; shoot 16mm using a super 16 gate and spherical lenses to achieve the same result?

 

Thanks,

 

King

 

 

On the first part I don't think DOF has much to do with the reasons, if anything shooting with Spherical lenses instead of anamorphic lenses for 2.40 can yield a potential for shallower DOF due to wider lens openings and less lighting requirements. The use of 3-perf Super35 for a "panavision" 2.40 wide aspect has to do with the use of less light, longer run times on mags, and usually the DI post workflow instead of photochemical/print workflow (You probably have to do a proper 4K DI to match the photochemical in many terms) I think many films opt for this hybrid Film/Digital workflow for any number of reasons these days...

 

On the second, Yes! well more precisely all 16mm photography (std or super) is shot with spherical lenses (there may be a few experimenters out there with Anamorphic lenses for 16mm but it's rare) the basic answer to your question is the difference between Spherical and Anamorphic photgraphy, google Anamorphic and Panavision I am sure there are plenty of good wikki pages on the subject.

 

-Rob-

[Adam Thompson]

You may want to check out the new film "I'm Not There" about Bob Dylan. The scenes with C. Bale in them were shot on S16 then cropped to 2.4 to fit with the rest. (There's a lot of formats mixed in that film)