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NEWS INTERVIEW
LARGE-FORMAT PIONEERS With the arrival of ARRI’s LF 4K camera, we unveil the explosion of new aesthetics that the company’s large-format ALEXA 65 camera brought WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL
ARRI’s ALEXA 65 has garnered 72 feature film credits in three years, with 41 of those films using ALEXA 65 as the main unit A camera. Also since 1950 there have been roughly 160 theatrically released 70mm films of which ALEXA 65 now accounts for 33%. Since ALEXA 65’s inception 70mm analogue film production has also grown, illustrating an overall growth in the larger format in general. The ALEXA 65’s arrival on the ARRI Rental camera list piqued the interest of some major DOPs, including Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki who was one of the first to call ARRI to get a camera. “When the camera was announced, we immediately got a couple of calls,” says Andrew Prior, Head of Cameras and Digital Systems at ARRI Rental UK. “One of them was from Chivo and he said that he would test a camera for us. He was shooting The Revenant and wanted one on set. We, of course, said yes but kept in mind that it was -25˚C and snowing
he trouble with a collective or generic term like large-format is that it doesn’t tell the full story. Everyone understands the term full-frame as its heritage is from film and it is now set in concrete as a recognised measure. But large-format unfortunately bundles everything together, from full-frame to VistaVision to large-format to 70mm. There needs to be some demarcation especially when you’re dealing with such different experiences and ways of working.
IMAGES The ARRI ALEXA 65: responsible for an explosion of new aesthetics in cinema, including for 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. © Disney
in deepest Canada and he had a prototype. “The other interest came from Robert Elswit who was shooting Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and was doing an underwater sequence with Tom Cruise that involved Tom holding his breath for a long time. They were doing it in a tank and there was going to be a lot of CGI and so he wanted to use the 65 format’s resolution to be able to reframe. They could shoot Open Gate and then they could punch in and move around. Also the VFX team would be quite happy about the resolution. THE ALEXA 65’S ARRIVAL ON THE ARRI RENTAL CAMERA LIST PIQUED THE INTEREST OF SOME MAJOR DOPS
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