David Mullen ASC

But also our understanding changes with time. There's a lovely moment in "12 Monkeys" where Bruce Willis' character is in a movie theater seeing "Vertigo" and he says he remembers the movie but that somehow it had changed, but then he says that the movie can't change so he must have changed over time.

The correct aspect ratio is the one the filmmaker’s composed for, so I’m not sure what “true” means. We had movies shot for decades on 4-perf 35mm, which is 1.33 : 1 full aperture, but that area hasn’t been projected since 1932 for the most part, ever since soundtracks were put on prints. So is the “true” aspect ratio of 1.85 35mm films actually 1.33? What about 1950s VistaVision films? That format has a full aperture of 1.5 : 1. If you actually projected that area, you’d things not framed to be seen, like off the tops of sets. As for IMAX, I don’t know why the inventors chose to crop the full aperture a little, more at the top & bottom. Since the film runs horizontally, maybe they wanted to leave the option for a soundtrack on the print, I don’t know. Maybe when they built their first theater, it just worked out that the projector gate had to crop a little to fit the screen that they could build.

Looks like the lens you need, the new 40x 25-1000mm Fujinon!

Yes, though there may be other factors. If your 7D recording is fuzzier, softer it may seem to have more apparent depth of field. It’s not really more depth of field but if your 5D image has more sharpness and edge contrast, the fall-off into the out-of-focus area may seem more rapid in comparison to the 7D. So if you feel 2-stops is a better match just to be safe, that’s fine.

Technically the difference is 1.5-stops in depth of field if comparing a 24mm wide sensor to a 36mm wide sensor, the same as the crop factor.

Same sensor in both, same dynamic range.

HBM is a combo filter of a mist diffusion (1/8 Black Frost) and a softening diffusion (degrees of HD Classic Soft). GlimmerGlass is a mist diffusion like a Black ProMist / Black Frost. The equivalent to a Schneider HBM is the Tiffen Black Satin filter, which is also a combo filter (light GlimmerGlass for mist diffusion plus degrees of Diffusion/FX). An interesting diffusion is the Schneider Radiant Softs. They basically use black particulates of a certain size to diffract (soften) detail but create almost no halation. Sort of like a particle version of a black net.

This is really a matter of taste. The horizontal field of view of 2-perf Techniscope is the same as 1.37 Academy and standard 1.85, but much shorter in vertical view. Because of the shorter vertical view, there is a tendency to compensate by going with a wider horizontal view. Sergio Leone shot a lot of his Westerns on a 25-250mm Angenieux but this was an era where movies generally did not use super wide-angle lenses. However, I'm sure he carried a few lenses that were wider than 25mm, like an 18mm. You could also think about the fact that the go-to wide angle lens for 4-perf 35mm 2X anamorphic is the 40mm, which is equivalent to a 20mm in 2-perf Techniscope. So I would probably carry an 18mm or 20mm for my wide-angle shots. But it also depends on your locations, if you're going to find yourself in small rooms. I think you're better off carrying five focal lengths than just three unless you can commit to a generally wide-angle look, like a 20mm, 28mm, 35mm.

Overexposing does not make the grain smaller since the grain size determines the sensitivity. What overexposing does is expose the smaller, slower grains in between the large ones, creating a tighter grain structure. You might also expect the overexposed 200T to look a bit lower in contrast than the 50D.

For the 20:1 zoom shots in "Barry Lyndon", Kubrick used a 12-240mm Angenieux zoom for 16mm photography with a 2X extender to create a 24-480mm.

Let's say you use something near a 30-300mm 10X zoom and your camera has enough resolution to crop in half at the start to create 600mm out of the 300mm end of the zoom. Then you feather a digital zoom out throughout the optical zoom out to get to 30mm. You'd have to be about 7 meters from the subject to get an ECU at 600mm. So you'd have to live with the wide shot of the room being at 30mm at 7 meters, not 25 meters as you'd like. Otherwise you'd have to lay 18 meters of track (54 feet) to keep pulling back to 25 meters and somehow feather the dolly move during the zoom out. At this point, if you didn't want to erase the track, you could use a Technocrane like a 45' one, with a Libra head, if you could even get something that big into the room. And you won't get back 18 meters / 54 feet to that 25 meter end goal but you'd get close. You could try a B4 super-zoom made for 2/3" ENG cameras, just keep in mind that it's very hard to keep the lens steady when you get super telephoto, so you'd need a geared head, or a Libra head, if you couldn't lock-off the head. I'd also say that if you had to dolly back anyway, you don't need a big zoom, you could use a short one like a 15-40mm and start tight at 40mm very close to the face and pull back and zoom out, so most of the pullback is a camera move and not a zoom. But of course that's almost 24 meters (72 feet) of dolly track! But maybe on a stabilized head and a short zoom, you could dolly on the floor itself if it is smooth enough. If you can mount into the wall, you could also try a Cable Cam rig and the short zoom.

That was a 1200mm prime lens I put into the calculator. I think you're going to have to work backwards from what is the largest ratio zoom you can find that ends up wide-angle enough and then decide where to compromise, do you want to get tighter at the start but see less of the room at the end or the opposite. Canon makes a 20:1 zoom that goes from 50mm to 1000mm: https://thecinelens.com/2014/10/16/canon-announces-worlds-longest-cinema-zoom-50-1000mm/ But you'd have to live with the 50mm view at the wide end, which won't see the whole room, and the 1000mm view at the long end, which would probably be waist-up. There maybe a 20X ratio zoom out there that is more like 25-500mm. Or maybe a broadcast 2/3" HD zoom that could be adapted. Today if a director suggested such a shot, I'd probably use a 10X or 11X lens like a 24mm-290mm and lay dolly track and combine a dolly back with a zoom out, and then erase the track in post, because it will be seen in the middle of the floor when you get to 24mm at the end of the shot. I'd also plan on post stabilization, so I'd lose some of the view at 24mm. Or use a Libra head on the dolly. Or shoot with an 8K camera so one could turn a 10X zoom shot into a 20X zoom shot at 4K.

Using Albion's link, if shooting in Super-35 (APS-C) on the longest lens in the database, a 1200mm Canon, at 25 METERS, this is as tight as you can get:

Why are you mixing meters and feet? You said you wanted a view that was 25 meters wide and 25 feet high? And the subject is 25 meters away? But where the the subject in the room? It would be somewhat helpful if you actually gave the dimensions of the room and were specific as to where the subject was in that room (and I assume the camera would be against one wall?) Maybe a drawing would help. At 25 FEET away, a 1000mm lens would give you a field of view of 8" wide on Super-35 more or less, which is an ECU of a face. So for 25 METERS away, that's like 3X farther, so you'd be talking about a 3000mm lens???

The ghost reflections I’m talking about can’t be fixed by using a sunshade. It’s the double reflection of something bright in the image itself, like a hot rim light around a person or a bright lamp in the frame. Normally you solve it by taping the two filters together to get rid of the air gap, which gets rid of the double image, and then if there’s a flare you can tilt the two taped filters if the matte box allows it. Neither of these two tricks work with screw-on round filters stacked together — you can’t tape them glass-to-glass and you can’t tilt them.

Most of the time you’re fine but if you have a bright edge on something you might see a ghost reflection of it.

One of the last giants of 70's cinematography; now there is just Storaro, a few others.

Yes, it's basically a 2-camera 3-D mirror rig but the optical path is lined-up instead of offset by the space between two eyeballs. Not a prism, just a partial front-surface mirror.

VistaVision cameras were either designed with "butterfly" magazines so the horizontally-running film could go straight through, or "elephant ears" magazines which requires a twist to turn sideways.

If you want less halation you should use the 1/8 instead of the 1/4, of any of those filters. The Schneider Hollywood Black Magic is a combination of two filters — a 1/8 Black Frost base plus degrees of HD Classic Soft. So a 1/8 HBM is a 1/8 Black Frost + 1/8 HD Classic Soft. The HD Classic Soft also creates a bit of halation but it is more of a blurred shape of the highlight instead of a misty hazy glow around the highlight, which is what the Black Frost does. So you have two types of halation in one filter with the Hollywood Black Magic. It really comes down to whether you just want that little bit of misty glow from the 1/8 Black Frost or an additional bit of softening from the 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic.

There is a lightweight black plastic tablecloth material that is useful for skirts because it is so much lighter than duvetyn, though not as perfectly opaque.

Spielberg has been using lens flares almost from the beginning of his career -- "Close Encounters" is a really showcase of flares, both spherical and anamorphic. Certainly he has been influenced by Kubrick, particularly "2001". I think the little bit of horizontal flare in that shot in "The Fabelmans" was created on the filter (GlimmerGlass I believe) by just smearing a little of something oily across the filter -- there is a similar shot in "Lincoln" with this smear, an insert of a glass photo of some slaves that Lincoln's son is looking at with a fireplace in the background, both spherical movies (unlike "West Side Story" which was anamorphic.) I've actually gotten a more subtle version of that effect by accident in my recent show just because we've been cleaning the same filter for so many seasons that it was a faint abrasion on the surface.

Thanks for appreciating what we did, I can't say it was all intentional -- the wet lawn that glistened in the moonlight was because this was shot in Vancouver and it was always raining! Yes, "The Shining" was an influence, as was 1980s horror like "Nightmare on Elm Street". I used a lot of blue for moonlight as a homage to 1980s lighting. Yes, that was a split-diopter shot. A lot of the color schemes have to be attributed to production designer Arv Greywal, who unfortunately passed away recently at a relatively young age. He and director Karyn Kusama picked colors like purple for a number of scenes.

I haven’t used teleconverters much — and the last time I did, 8 years ago, I discovered I had rephotographed dust inside the teleconverter so much sure they are clean!