GEAR. SENSORS
“Given unlimited resources, perfect lenses, infinite room sizes and lighting, you can make Super 35 look like large format. In the real world, that’s no argument”
“Some DOPs like that, they talk about increased intimacy between actor and audience,” Shipman- Mueller goes on. “You can tweak one parameter – put more light in – but the producer’s going to be upset. You can move back, but the room may not be big enough. DOPs look at opportunities. Given unlimited resources, perfect lenses, infinite room sizes and lighting budgets, you can make Super 35 look like large format. In the real world, that’s not an argument.” RESIZING ON THE FLY It’s not often a single project uses many of these approaches all at once, but one example of just that is cinematographer Eric Bader’s
work on a series of music videos for LA-based singer Brendon Urie and his project Panic! at the Disco, which released the studio album Viva Las Vengeance in August 2022. With the album’s tracks linked in a loose storyline, Urie and director Brendan Walter planned six related music videos that would play with the relationship between the Sony Venice large format camera and, for the majority of the work, Cooke’s Anamorphic/i lenses. Each video would evoke a time period, with the album’s title track presented as a 4x3 live television broadcast from the sixties. Don’t Let the Light Go Out would look like a monochrome mid-century thriller, with a Cinemascope-aspect feature look for Sugar Soaker . An almost Kubrickesque, wide-angle seventies style was used for Sad Clown , with Do It to Death feeling nearly modern to anyone who grew up in the eighties and nineties. Bader selected the Special Flair variant of the Cooke Anamorphics to establish a consistent visual style which would unify the project, but set the Venice up for aspect ratios and frame sizes to individually suit each piece. “We had about two months to prep it, which is pretty cushy as far as music videos go,”
Bader says. “Usually, you get a week before shooting. We had a very loose treatment that [director] Brendan and [singer] Brendon had cooked up, and we spent a month honing down our style and trading images back and forth, how we could make them all feel like one.” EXPANDED AMBITIONS Using lenses built for Super 35 on a full-frame camera only caused one moment of confusion when, as Bader says, “my AC was going over the package. He assumed we needed an expander for the lenses and I said no!” To avoid problems communicating desired framing to post, given a schedule requiring material for several pieces shot on the same day, traditional framing charts were used.
GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE BEST Arri’s Alexa 65 offers a huge canvas to work with – and has been picked up on flagship Netflix shows
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