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SOLO SHOOT STORY
n the beginning, Bradford Young considered the shooting of Solo: A Star Wars Story as a simple exercise. He understood the tone that had been put forward: a contrasty, cowboy- type yarn about the bad boy of the Star Wars universe, but without the stress of a revolution or the presence of the Force. He already had his reference movies – such as McCabe and Mrs Miller , the 1971 Western starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie – and images from this and many other similar movies covered his office walls as he put together his vision. “It all made sense to me as I love Westerns – the plan was that I would use film and would flash the negative and do all the things they did in the seventies.” Further to this, Bradford decided to meet fellow Star Wars Story DOP Greig Fraser on the set of Rogue One where he was using ARRI’s Alexa 65 large-format camera for the first time. “I saw the 65 and thought, ‘Wow, this is interesting’, and saw it as an option. Eventually we looked at 35mm, 65mm film, at the Alexa 65, and standard Super 35mm digital choices. I didn’t like the Alexa 65 at first, it just didn’t feel natural, I didn’t think it was giving me everything I wanted. It felt right for a portraiture format but not natural as a landscape; however, with ARRI’s help we made it work, and then I was on the hunt for the right lenses. “There’s all the 35mm glass that I thought I knew well, but you learn how manufacturers’ glass have subtle differences, then you put 65mm in to the mix and it becomes really interesting. From there I became less excited about the format; the actual sensor size became less important to me. It was more important that I was bearing witness to glass that I had literally never seen before, glass that had never been used on movies before. So we were really breaking rules – not
shooting Panavision glass was one of those, not shooting anamorphic, so that’s another rule broken. Every day was like reinventing the wheel, but the format was at the mercy of the optics.” THE ONE Bradford cares deeply about the idea of customising the look of a movie and ‘sealing the imprint of the films that you make’. “It was part of the reason that I chose the ARRI DNA glass, so I could be part of something and see it in the making. We were trying our hardest to figure out what looks best; it was getting there but, honestly, I wasn’t impressed. I started thinking maybe I should just go to Panavision, but one day Neil Fanthom (director of technology) from ARRI said to me, ‘I’ve got this lens, you’ve got to see this lens’. Also Andrew Prior (head of cameras and digital systems at ARRI Rental) said, ‘Come by and check out this lens – we think you’re going to like it’. I came in and you could tell there was a vibe about the place, Neil knew that what I really wanted to see in DNA glass was in this one lens. It was a 50mm and we put it on the camera and, literally, I was like: ‘This is it’. It was super special. It’s hard to articulate how something is different from the other thing, but I knew
COME BY AND CHECK OUT THIS LENS – WE THINK YOU’RE GOING TO LIKE IT...
ABOVE Director Ron Howard, overseeing work on set.
BELOW Brand new glass kept life interesting for DOP Bradford Young.
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JULY 2018 DEFINITION
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