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Cinematographer Tania Freimuth was given the opportunity to try the new Canon Sumire range for her latest romantic short. Was it love at first sight? We find out WHERE ART MEETS SCIENCE
COLOUR POP “Given that the night-time exterior had a cooler, bluer light, made harsher by the fact that I wasn’t able to diffuse it, all the attributes of the lenses showed up beautifully. Almost more beautifully to my eyes, because of the increased range of contrasts created by the exterior; the light drops off around the streetlamp, decaying into the shadows and then, as if suddenly, you see highlights appear from the bokeh in the distance.” The lenses have bright T stops and an 11-blade iris, which enabled Freimuth to capture images that produced a more natural, circular bokeh effect from maximum to minimum aperture. She describes it as “an artistic act of the lens, giving an attractive shape that’s not too strongly defined”. She refers to the restaurant scene for an example of this: “We were rather liberal with our use of fairy lights!” The odd-numbered blade iris also helped diffuse the light rays, producing what is generally considered a more sought- after, artistically pleasing and cinematic look with warmer colours. “The lenses are biased towards warm, but I had strong blues and sandy colours in the frame. In the exteriors, the actress is wearing a black patent leather coat with a blue fur collar and a red hat, and when it came to the grade, I could see that the colours were already true to life because they’re my possessions.” The Sumire range also helped achieve a uniform colour balance, reducing work in post. She continues, “in the interior shots, the actress is wearing a reddish- orange dress, which came out very close to the real colour. The colourist initially made the dress scarlet red and I had to tell him not to, because it was the wrong colour. Overall, the lenses made the grading process a lot easier.”
CHANGE OF HEART is a short captured by cinematographer and Bafta crew member Tania Freimuth. It’s a four-minute tale of four people who meet at a restaurant for a blind date. One half of each couple is already seated at the restaurant, while the other half are on the way. The latter pair accidentally meet on the journey to the restaurant, spurring a serendipitous moment, where Cupid throws them together instead. The film was an opportunity for Freimuth to test Canon’s new Sumire range of lenses. Why Sumire? The word is of Japanese origin and is associated with a floral gentleness and beauty, a characteristic Canon sees in its new lens collection. Handed to her in a “secret, locked box”, Freimuth hadn’t done any prior testing with the lenses, but could choose how she used them and what she shot, giving her the chance to use them under conditions she is accustomed to. “I like having a small team of people, so I’m used to working with limited resources and in short periods of time,” she says. Freimuth was shooting interior night in the restaurant and exterior night in the street, using lighting that was only available in the image frame. Admittedly, the street lights were augmented slightly with a flyer light, which is a small, battery-operated LED light attached to a pole. Freimuth didn’t have generators or access to mains power, so wasn’t able to use anything larger. “They’ve got that USP everyone’s looking for: to retain skin tone and face shape, and to really
Freimuth was shooting 4K dci with the Canon C700 FF, so she was looking at an almost black & white image in the viewfinder. Not paying too much heed to what was happening in the monitor, she only saw the images pop into colour in post. “I thought wow, the lenses have really done it.” VELVET CRUSH Freimuth prefers to shoot wide open, using 35mm, 50mm and 85mm, but there’s also a 14mm, 20mm, 24mm and 135mm in the range. “I haven’t put them in front of a lens test chart, but what I saw to my eye – shooting between T1.5 and T2 – was a really gentle roll off from the focus. It doesn’t crush the background out of existence, and I was left with a detail of shape in the background, which is important because it gives you a sense of geography.”
give the image some ambience
18 DEF I N I T ION | JULY 20 1 9
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