BEDLAM PRODUCTION
S et in 17th-century London’s most notorious mental asylum, Bedlam is not a film that fears the dark – in any respect. It follows a bare- knuckle fighter (played by Scott Adkins) infiltrating a hellish facility to break out his sister, wrongfully imprisoned there by the Duke of Cumberland. What awaits him is a world of damp stone, firelight and casual cruelty, where much of the drama unfolds in cramped cells and unlit corridors. “It’s both a prison film and an action film,” begins cinematographer James Butler. “But really it was people talking in the dark. We did not want it to look like a generic modern fight movie. It needed the weight and texture of a period drama as well.” To achieve that, Butler pushed for a medium format digital negative built around the Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K 65, using almost entirely anamorphic lenses: on paper, a bold choice for an independent British feature. Blackmagic’s tech was central to the DaVinci Resolve pipeline, managed by DIT Mark Kozlowski. “People obsess over resolution,” comments Kozlowski. “I was more interested in whether we could use this camera and Resolve to build a proper picture-to-post workflow that an indie could actually afford.” MEDIUM FORMAT MEETS ANAMORPHIC The decision to go medium format was, Butler admits, semi selfish. “I had shot a lot of medium format stills, and I loved the separation you get – the relationship between faces and the background, the way it renders portraiture,” he says. “Even though this is a fight film, we wanted the dramatic scenes to stand up on their own. Most movies are two people talking in a room. If that looks beautiful and has some emotional weight, you’re in a good place before anyone throws a punch.” With the budget available, there was only one realistic route to that look. “The only other option that would do what the URSA Cine 17K does was the ARRI 65,” Butler says. “And that was so far outside our world it might as well not exist. Rental alone would have eaten the budget.” The URSA Cine 17K RGBW, 2.2:1 sensor presented a different opportunity: pairing a large format body with Hawk’s 65mm anamorphic glass. On paper, the
GETTING THE RIGHT LOOK Butler chose medium format to nail scenes with people
combination sounded unwieldy, a wide sensor with a 1.3x squeeze and a lot of unused area. But for Butler, that was part of the appeal. “I just like anamorphic,” he states. “I like what it does around the edges of the frame and that you can be slightly wider and closer and still get depth. I didn’t want sci-fi blue streaks or a Star Trek look. The way good anamorphics render faces – the falloff, the subtle distortions – feels cinematic to me. Medium format plus anamorphic was something I’d only really seen on big studio pictures, and usually on film. I had never seen anyone do it digitally at our scale, so I thought, if we could, why not?” Testing at Hawk’s facility, Butler and the team cycled through 17, 12, 8 and 4K modes at different compression ratios, swapping Hawk 65 primes and zooms, and slowly arrived at a pragmatic sweet spot of 8K at 5:1 compression, constant bit rate. “Three to one and five to one at 8K were basically indistinguishable in terms of how far you could push them. Once we knew we only needed a 4K master, 8K 5:1 was the obvious place to sit,” Butler says. With the format and lens choice locked, attention turned to shaping the URSA Cine 17K into an A camera package that could keep pace with a demanding production schedule. Hawk, Horia Cojan and another operator worked with Ratworks to design a custom cage and baseplate for the URSA Cine 17K 65. The package was made to be compatible with standard AR and Steadicam plates, have space for SAM plates and accessories, and enough structure to move quickly between crane, tripod, Steadicam and AR without having to be rebuilt each time. The Hawks themselves were not lightweight. “Some were 3.5 to 4kg lumps with 140mm front elements, while some were almost stubby by comparison,” Butler explains. “Horia spent days in prep running every single lens through the AR, writing a balance chart: where the camera sat on the plate, where the batteries went, where the box was, how the cables ran. Otherwise every
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