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INFINITY WAR SHOOT STORY
f you're even a little bit invested in the MCU, Marvel Cinematic Universe for all you non-believers, you would have already seen Infinity War and maybe more than once. The idea here in play is basically more - more action, Super Heroes, plot twists, deaths (sorry) and of course cameras and camera data. As I write this, the film is touching on a billion dollars income worldwide and we’re not even passed a week yet. Everything is maxed out in the MCU. We’re also on the edge of the newest Star Wars movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story . Shot again with the ARRI Alexa 65 by DOP Bradford Young but this time with ARRI’s Prime DNA lenses. Infinity War was shot with Panavision's Ultra 70 series. Bradford was poetic with his love for the ARRI glass on Solo, “Lenses and format have to be ready to adapt to my particular taste. DNA glass is a revelation and revolution in my journey to anchor my artistic residue into a particular story – truly my way of seeing, thus my way of feeling. No other glass has afforded me this opportunity. It’s a true game- changer!” Marvel has always been big fans of the ARRI Alexa 65 look and lens choice, it’s the biggest camera sensor out there after all. They demand of their suppliers like Pinewood Digital that the amount of data is dealt with, that’s over 30MB per frame and of course with digital you always shoot more than you need. Pinewood have been here before and well versed in scaling up what they already have. That mainly means more ways to transport and receive the data and then to process the data and pass it on, it’s a data factory. But ironically beating that 30MB per frame is the way Pinewood manage their film scans which now come out at over 100MB per frame being scanned at 4K 16-bit. The great thing for Pinewood here was that much of the shooting was done at Pinewood Atlanta so having control of the process inside their own studios made it that much easier, it was just more data than they had ever processed before. 65 THE MAGIC NUMBER Here are some interesting facts that show that the Alexa 65 is doing its bit to keep cinema alive. The 65 now has 72 feature film credits in three years, with 41 of them 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. Also Ant-man and the Wasp is also using Alexa 65 and ARRI DNA lenses and there’s a new Spiderman movie coming next year. As the number of large format cameras increase you may think that productions would look elsewhere for their new camera aesthetic especially as the number of lenses out there are huge now. But if you have seen previous Alexa 65 productions like The Revenant or Rogue One: A Star Wars Story you will appreciate the medium format look and that shallow depth of field that someone at Marvel and LucasFilm is so in love with. So who is the winner here? Probably ARRI Rental as Infinity War’s main camera unit shot with 14 Alexa 65s and the other unit shot with nine. For Infinity War nearly half the Alexa 65 cameras in existence were in use. Hold on, weren’t there only around 30 cameras in the whole world! “That day was the biggest on-set data shoot ever,” commented Thom Berryman from Pinewood Digital, “The biggest day that we had was getting on for 40 TeraBytes for the two units. But we had planned for this as we could see there were
ABOVE The latest Star Wars, Solo , shot on the Alexa 65 camera and used the ARRI DNA lenses. LEFT Infinity War at one point used 23 Alexa 65 cameras across two units.
THE BIGGEST DATA DAY WE HAD WAS GETTING ON FOR 40 TERABYTES FOR THE TWO UNITS
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JUNE 2018 DEFINITION
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