Bokeh

[Joe Hemsani]

In the wachowski´s Speed Racer, They crated a heart shaped Iris so they could get Heart shaped Bokeh.

 

You can see it in the scene when speed racer wins the final race and he is kissing the girl. It looks pretty awesome and creatively opened a whole new world for exploration.

 

You can read about it in May 2008 article of AC.

[Karel Bata]

I had a look at the online archive http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/archive.php but unfortunately that article's only available in print (they seem to have cut back on what they put up online).

 

I take it you mean the effect shown here

? Which was achieved using a star shaped cut-out. Very tantalising...

 

It looks useful, but I bet it has some serious drawbacks. The fact that the videographer in that clip can focus on the cut-out suggests to me that it's too far from the lens to be usable, and to get that effect normally it would need to be a lot closer. Would on the lens be too close..?

 

Any thoughts? Or examples?

[Joe Hemsani]

Hi karel. That´s a pretty nice video example, it looks very interesting and seems it can lead to very creative choices and experiments.

 

The star cutout does in fact seem to far away from the lens and wouls seem impractical for film use and I also think in his case it didn´t matter that much because he was still going to use all his zoom in order to get close enough to the city lights and de-focus them sufficiently to see the bokeh. His video camera has much more depth of feild than a 35mm film camera so he had to reduce it by zooming in more.

 

But judging from another video on there ---http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaA-8p9EScw--- using a 35mm still camera, she attaches the cutout directly on the lens and still gets a nice defined bokeh.

 

Im guessing (could be wrong, if so someone please correct me), if you attach a cutout directly on the lens, the quality and definition of your bokeh shape will depend on how large or small the opening actually is. Kind of like depth of feild in function to the T-stop. The interesting thing is that you could even control the definition of your bokeh.

 

Will definately have to test this sometime.

 

As for the AC article, im sure it will eventually and hopefully be available online sometime soon.

 

What do you think?