DEFINITION January 2020

DRAMA | CATS

440 feet, the length of the Great Windmill Street set 12 hour work days for the shoot, with an hour’s warm- up for the dancers

film, again on a variety of camera systems. With the Arri Trinity, a regular Steadicam, handheld with four different weights of camera, it was a pretty full-on test for a day’s worth of dancing. “Tom looked at it all and made the assessment that the true version of the film was just the 65. He understood that the Stabileye might allow us to do this and do that but: ‘Why don’t you just shoot as stable and handheld as possible? Why don’t we make that our aesthetic?’ So, we ended up with four Alexa 65s, three of which were in variable shooting modes, one of which was stripped down and on a Steadicam for the duration of the job. Most of the sequences I guess are shot conventionally, inasmuch as on a mixture of dollies, Steadicam and cranes. Then occasional sequences are shot handheld for a bit of visceral, first-person intimacy,” explains Ross. “It worked like a charm. When I first started on Cats when Tom asked me to join him, I did a day rehearsing with the dancers and realised that they were about 30 times fitter than me. I bought myself a treadmill to get fit and then didn’t have a single opportunity to use it, because we were working so hard. But the Alexa 65 was the exercise regime of choice! The imagery stands up for itself, it’s a phenomenal camera and there are four or five lens choices now via Arri Rental. I tested a bunch in the rental house for MTF for technical reasons and then decided against some before we shot a lens test for real.” Ross looked at the lenses on the optical bench and then shot a test for three TomHooper’s assessment was that the true version of the film was just the Alexa 65

IMAGES Prima ballerina Francesca Hayward as Victoria was hard to light as she moved so fast

different sets. He chose the Prime DNAs as his set, as “they have the lowest contrast, softest roll-off of their lens choices and they worked perfectly”. LARGE FORMAT AND CATS Despite being around for about 60 years, large format cinematography is a lens and camera system that somewhat vanished from theatrical cinematic production in the late seventies. It became the remit of the IMAX or omni-theatres, as they were the only ones who were doing any R&D on large format systems. The rebirth of the system with the Alexa 65 means many DOPs have turned to Panavision’s older 65mm market to have a look at the Ultra Panatars and other similar lenses. Ross explains: “We wanted to shoot spherically with the flatness of field that you only really get with those lenses. The eclectic mix of MTFs and lens design of the DNAs was a great mix – I tend to pick my camera and lens choices because they have an element of unpredictability about them. I’m not a big fan of the homogeneity of very high-end lens manufacture, because I think it loses some of the fun of storytelling. I quite like sitting on the edge of technical

capability, and that’s why the Prime DNAs were perfect.” When Ross shot Cats last year and early this year, Arri Rental offered a tuning service for the DNAs, but not on all the focal lengths. “One of the things that is very apparent in Tom’s previous work is that he’s a real lover of low contrast and shallow depth-of-field. I wanted to bring that sensibility to shooting on the Alexa 65, but we needed to minimise lens aberrations and a propensity for veiling flares, that kind of thing. These were things that our VFX team would struggle with,” recalls Ross. “One thing that we knew we wanted to do was to add loads of smoke to the sets, which is counter to what the VFX team was working on. So, one of the compromises that we could make was to use a cleaner lens to render the imagery. The DNAs were the right level of low contrast and fast T stop to satisfy all of the conditions.” LENS ROLES Shooting an oversized set with a scale element like the small cats is one thing, then you have to carefully choose your focal lengths on the wide end when using large format aesthetics. Ross says: “One thing you

22 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 2020

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