Leo Anthony Vale

---Not really the same Panavision lenses. 'the carge of the light brigade' was shot with uncoated lenses. Panavision supplied anamorphic attachments. Tony Richardson made two other pictures with uncoated lenses, 'Ned Kelly' and 'night must fall'. Each with a different DP. ---LV

---See 'The Saddest Music in the World'. It' shot in S16, 16R & S8. Mostly B/W with 30s lighting and fistfulls of vaseline. It's alot like the Firesign Theatre without the puns. ---LV

---That would be a Debrie Parvo. I can't give a specific model number. Some have ground glass, some don't Some have registrtion pins, some don't. Viewing while shooting was directly through the film, which is not feasible with modern stocks, particularly color. & the film needs to be on a special parvo core raather than the standard 2" core. They show up on German auction sites. The Russian Rodina is basically a reflex knock off. ---LV

---Not this one, but 'Les Carbiniers. To give it a newsreel look, or more likely a photo journalism look. Mostly natural light with the occassional clamp on light above the windows as a booster. ---LV

I would like to make a correction concerning the Todd-AO 35 system. There are two generations. The first was designed by Richard Vetter for Todd-AO. The focusing system is patanted. They were manufactured in Japan by NAC, a division of Kowa for Todd-AO. The second generation, which are the high speeds, 24mm T1.6, 35mm T1.4, 55mm T1.4 and 85mm T1.4. Cinema Products, which was the US distributer of the Canon High Sreeds, bought the Todd-AO 35 name. These are basicaly the same as the Canon Xtal Express, only with the first generation Canon High Speeds. ---LV

---Deep focus gives depth to the picture. Having something in the background gives a context to a close up. It can comment on or reenforce the foreground action. That's the way to make wide screen close ups work. Thus making widescreen work for small intimate dramas. Even Eisenstein was a fan of deep focus. Look at 'Que Viva Mexico' and 'Aleksandr Nevskii'. A lot of "Ivan the Terrible' is staged in depth, & probably would have been shot in deep focus if it were not for war time electrical restrictions. In some essay, Eisenstein calls deep focus "in frame montage". The "eisensteinian montage vs. bazanian deep focus" argument is a phoney academic dichomaty. Think of all that amazing Orson Wells, Hitchcock and Kurosawa deep focus. & Kurosawa was using long lenses. In minDV it's naturual to the format. The small cameras make it easy to fly to the camera like in 'i am Cuba' and be very inconspicuous. The mini35 throws that away. & shallow depth of focus does not eliminate digital artifacts. ---LV

---The numbers in Iscorama model names refers to the diameter of the rear element. The 42 MC is the middle sized model. MC is multicoated. The Iscorama screws into the prime's filter threads. The prime is set at infinity and all focusing done on the Iscorama. The most convenient thing would be to have a set of primes with identical threads, such as Nikkors. I don't think the LOMOs have a standardized thread size. ---LV

---In the chapter on'Scipio Africanus' in 'The Golden Turkey Awerds' there is a photo of Benito Mussolini peering through an amazingly long viewfinder of a B&H 2709 which has a cooke Varo mounted on it. The shorter US TV version has at least 5 zoom shots in it, mostly in the scene where Scipio's army sails for Carthage. The Mussolini photo seems to have been taken on this set. At first glance this appears to be a reflex camera, but the finder is viewing the image directly on the film. This was common in European cameras, particularly the Debrie Parvos, until the 40s. Anti-halation backings and color stock made viewing through the film impractical. I'm surprised noone in this thread mentioned that the director would be calling for the zooms. Carthago delenda est. ---LV

---Not really an apperance, but in the 'corpus earthling' episode of 'The Outer Limits',one of the creepier episodes, Robert Culp and Salome Jens are holed up in a seedy apartment. There's a noise in the hall. Saolme Jens peeks out the door and says: 'It's Billy Fraker. He's drunk again.' Billy Fraker,of course, was Conrad Hall's operator on the series. Hal Mohr photograhed 'The Last Voyage' entirely on an ocean liner which was partially sunk for the movie. No miniatures or mock ups in atank. One of the last shots which has the main characters running on the deck which is already cover with water is quite startling. Anyway, early in the picture, R.Stack and D.Malone are walking down one of the main staircases. Behind them is a white haired man with a camera around his neck. That's Hal Mohr. Some teenagers run up the stairs and bump into him. He says something on the order of: 'Young people today have no respect.' An entertaining cameo. ---LV

---Also in '2001' during the TMA-1 sequence: After the long shot of the astronauts walking down the ramp into the excavtion, there's a handheld medium close up following the astronauts walking toward the slab. Toward the end of the shot, Kubrick operating the handheld camera can be seen reflectled in the faceplate of one of the astronaut's helmet. Can't recall howmany times I'd seen the movie before noticing this. this was in a theater. ---LV

---That would be the Foton-A/Voskhod. 37-140mm T4.5. Looking through Russian film books and magazines, I often came across pruduction photos of this lens mounted on Konvas. Even hand held while mountain climbing. It was so ubiquitous, I came to think of it as the symbol of 60s Sovscope. In the west and Japan, since the 25-250mm Ang. came out in the early 60s, the Ang. 35-140mm zoom with a front anamorphic was usually used. TotalScope also had an anamorphic PanCinor. ---LV

---Iscorama was originaly used for 35mm slides. Cinema Products at one time was going to bring out a system for making 1.85/1 blow ups, using the Iscorama-54 as an alternative to super16. It was called Todd-AO 16. But they dropped the project. Probably due to lack of interest, this was when 16mm was still referred to as spaghetti. & Super 16 was not as ubiquitous as it is today. The Iscorama-54 is the largest. all of the models screw into the filter threads of the backing lenses. There are varios adapor rings. 77mm is the largest thread for the 54, with the proper step down ring it will fit on the XL2's zoom. I was told by someone from CP that it worked on the Cooke 9-50 down to 16mm. So the widest you could use the Canon zoom would be around 8mm. Myself, I prefer deep focus. So see the Mini35 as rather pointless & adding useless bulk to a miniDV camera. I would use the Iscorama on the camera's zoom and a 2/ aspect ratio. But that,s me. ---LV

---Since it was released in early 1971 & probably shot i 1970, that's too early for the cooke, even the 20-100 Varotal. It would have to be the classic Angenieux 25-250/50-500A. ---LV

---That's right. It's meant for small formats, thus short focal lengths with lots of depth of field. Century has a focusing model, but you'll have to focus both the attachment and the backing lens. Not easy. If you absolutely need anamorphic & a Mini35, Iscorama would be the best setup. But the two of them make for a big heavy rig which negates miniDV's strongest feature a small camera rig. ---LV

---The anamorphics have a 2x squeeze. In the 16/9 mode you'll get a 32/9 image, about 3.55:1 aspect ratio. With 4/3 mode, you'll get a 2.66;1 aspect ratio. An Iscorama attachment has a 1.5X squeeze. With 16/9 you'll get a 2.66:1 image. The Iscorama needs to be used with a backing lens. However, you'll only have to focus the Iscorama, the backing lens set at infinity. !.33X attachments don't focus. they're set at a hyperfocal distance for wide angles. a 1/3" CcD is the same size as regular 8mm. ---LV

---When one considers that anamorphics have a horizontal fish-eye effect in wide angles, a 35mm anamorphic lens in the 16mm-18mm focal length range would cover about the same field. Of course it would have to be projected on a curved screen to stretch the edges. An 8-perf 65mm system using a 35mm focal length anamorphic would be swell. A 9mm fish-eye on Super35 would give the same view as the Todd-AO bug eye. A direct blow up to a 70mm print might look as good as the original Todd-AO prints. ---LV

B)--> QUOTE(Steven B @ Oct 26 2005, 03:53 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hola, And I've checked with a few but do most labs for reversal printing take tape splices or does it just depend on the lab? Steven ---The adhesive on tape splices is soluble in liquid gate printing fluid. & tape splices will stretch after a few passes. Flopping the film will make for a slightly softer print, but not grossly out of focus. Emulsion on the base side is more likely to get scratched in handling. ---LV

---The veiwing is better than Arri 35II*. No light baffles on the ground glass. If I remember correctly, the veiwfinder image is a bit larger and brighter than the Arri. If one has a16/35 model, the 16mm image will be smaller than the 35mm frame. which strikes me as less than desirable. Like an NPR, the image rotates as the viewfinder is rotated. The camera balances very nicely on one's shoulder. A joy to walk around with. The pull down claw is a ratchet. So it is noisier than an Arri. It seemed to me that Arris were easier to work on than NPRs. Though I never opened a Cameflex. ---LV

---THen it would be for the Arri 16S and 16 ---LV

---But the percentage odifference between those two lenses is 21%, about the same difference between an 80mm and a 100mm. Whereas the difference between 27mm and 28mm is 3.7%. The ratio between the lenses is what counts, not an absolute number. ---LV

---That 29mm is for the Contax rangefinder. Except for maybe Canon FD, all 35mm SLRs have a flange depth greater than 40mm. They need room for that swinging mirror. Still. Contax RF lenses from the 30s and 40s are availiable at extremely high prices, so they must be better than some cheap used Lomo made just prior to the financial collapse of the Soviet Union. Heck, an uncoated 50mm f/3.5 Tessar might be just the thing to eliminate those annoying digital artifacts. & Canon lenses aren't good? ---LV

28mm was, most probably, the shortest lens availiable to Eisenstein in the the mid30s USSR. He was, no doubt, using a 25mm on the lend lease BNC used on 'ivan groznii'. The point of the essay was teh use of wide angle and deep focus. If he were still alive in the 50s when 18mm lens were developed, he would have been enthusiastic about that focal length. ---LV

---Instead of a 1mm difference, think of it as a 3.7% difference. It won't make a practical difference. Plus the marked focal length on a lens is sometimes rounded to the nearest commonly used focal length. These days it's usually done on zooms. When Eisenstein was writing, there was not the variety of formats that exist today. & was he writing about academy aperture or silent aperture? The difference between those two formats is greater than the 3.7%, more like 12 to 14%. Say it was academy, then 28mm would be equivalent to 21mm in 1.85/1 format. I'm basing that on height, which is the more critical dimension tha width. The difference between 27mm and 28mm focal lenghth is insignificent. ---LV

---It's possible, but difficult and expensive. Newer lens won't have a lens blimp. The existing blimped zooms won't cover S16 at the wide end. You'd probably have to have a blimped 12-120 Ang. converted to a 15-150mm. More expense & it won't be quite as snappy or as fast as newer S16 zooms. Nor will newer primes fit the prime lens blimp, if one could find that blimp. Since the lens mount is imbedded in rubber, I'd be leary of using a zoom with out a blimp housing to support it. A support on a bridge plate and rods will probably work. But probably needs to be custom built. You really need the lens blimp to keep the camera noise down. Anyway aranafilm.com.au does 16BL S16 conversions. It's been ages since I've handled a 16BL, I don't believe the movement pops out as easily as a 35mm mitchell type movement does. If it can be done, it would be a permenant feature. ---LV