Hey! My name is Tito Ferradans and this is chapter 2 of Module 1 for the Anamorphic Cookbook.
On this video we’re gonna look at why anamorphics boost production value.
In chapter 1 I went over how the Cookbook is gonna play out,
so check that out before moving forward. The whole first module is being shot on Atlas anamorphics
as they’re the ones allowing you to have this content for free. You do get a better deal out
by being a member of the channel. So check out the specifics by clicking the Join button below.
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MAKE IT “CINEMATIC”
Alright, let’s get started. We’re gathered here today because anamorphic is a big deal for for us.
The word “cinematic” is the first one to get thrown around when the general public talks
about anamorphic. Sirui’s tagline for the launch of their 50mm anamorphic lens was “Cinematize your
shots!”, whatever “cinematize” means! They later on changed that to “Express your cinematic side”.
You can find the word “cinematic” six times on their page, as a key selling point.
Using that as a clear example and a bit of overselling,
when we think “anamorphic”, we think “cinema”, we think “film look”. The experience of going to the
movie theatre comes to mind. Getting ourselves immersed in a story for a couple of hours,
forgetting the world around us. Bliss. So by seasoning your images with a dash of film look,
or making your stories more “cinematic” puts you in the same league of production value as
the films you and I, and everyone else goes to watch in theaters.
When Hollywood started using anamorphics in the 1950’s, it was all about making the
screen bigger - twice the size to be precise - and covering the audience’s peripheral’s vision with
more of the film setting, increasing the immersion. If you look at what the audiences
had to say about widescreen, it’s always about how the screen is huge and how they
felt as if they were right there inside the story taking part in its development. Joe MacDonald,
cinematographer for “The Sand Pebbles”, said, when coming out from early CinemaScope test screenings:
“People will see things they’ve never seen before. When you look at CinemaScope
it’s like taking off blinders. It gives all the three-dimensional feeling that people want.”
The screen size was matched by stereo sound, amping the immersion component by having
sounds coming from all parts of the screen and not only the center. We’re gonna go a little
deeper into the origins of anamorphic and how it changed films forever in the next chapters.
For now we’re talking about the subconscious effect anamorphics have on you and your audience.
Alright, the size of the screen is a pretty big deal and that was only possible because
the anamorphics were expanding the camera’s original field of view through the squeeze.
So I’ll focus on what other characteristics of anamorphic lenses were baked into the audience’s
minds over the next fifty years in such a way that when we think of anamorphic now,
we have all of these qualities associated with a film experience, and not home video or TV.
THE FIVE PILLARS
Dan Sasaki, Panavision’s VP of Optical Engineering breaks down the anamorphic look into “Five
Pillars” and that’s a great way to get started here. The first of the five pillars is bokeh,
and that’s a pretty obvious one. Anamorphics have a noticeably oval bokeh as opposed to
the circles created by spherical lenses. This look gives the out-of-focus areas an almost
paint-like quality, if someone dabbled a brush over that part of the picture,
creating a greater degree of separation between subject and background. This quality is also
called “waterfall bokeh” and we’ll look into why it happens at a later module!
The second pillar of the anamorphic look is the disproportionate breathing. Due to the
squeeze factor, we end up with different magnifications in each axis. For example,
when using a 50mm anamorphic lens you have the magnification of a 50mm lens on the vertical axis
and a the magnification of a 25mm on the horizontal axis. What happens when you rack focus
is you get a unique type of lens breathing where the image seems to extend or contract much more
strongly in the vertical axis, drawing more attention to the elements that are being focused.
The third pillar is the one that’s both most hyped and criticized: lens flares. Anamorphic lens
flares are such a big deal that they’re emulated in film’s post production, in animation and
cartoons, and even video games, often to make it feel more “real”! The flares we’re most familiar
with are the blue horizontal streaks, which started with Panavision’s C-series, one of their
oldest and still in use series of lenses. Remember when I said these things have been baked into our
minds? C-series have been around since 1968, and as soon as we think of anamorphic flares,
these are the ones that come to mind! Not golden, not green. Blueish purple. We’ll go deeper into
flares later on, but it’s important to know they’re a key aspect to the anamorphic look.
The fourth pillar is magnification and perspective. Due to the different magnification
in the horizontal and vertical axis, we end up with a more natural perspective because
we're not using such a “wide-angle in a close up” framing to tell a story. Anamorphics allow
us to see the characters up close, get a good sense of their surroundings and still keep the
two things separated, also thanks to the waterfall bokeh we just talked about. When shooting scope,
the focal lengths and angles are more natural when compared to a matched framing in spherical.
In spherical we need a much wider lens, meaning not only the depth of field is much greater,
the perspective lines are stronger, making the image look distorted. The character’s shape
feels unnatural from having a wide angle lens so close to them. Many believe anamorphics are
made for the big outdoors and epic shots, but they can also create a strong intimate scene.
The reasoning for this is the tighter depth of field and more
natural perspective contribute to making the characters feel isolated from the rest.
With larger sensors such as full frame and medium format, the perspective lines
are even less angled, the magnification is more natural and the depth of field feels like what
we get from our eyes. Anamorphic photography was also called poor-man's 70mm in the past,
as it delivered similar results to 70mm film while still shooting Super 35.
The fifth and final pillar of the anamorphic look is an organic focus roll-off. As Jay Holben
explains in his Secrets of Old Glass presentation, digital sensors don’t have the imperfections of
film. This type of “perfection” combined with sharp spherical lenses and shallow depth of field
sometimes leads to the feeling that the elements in a shot have been cut and pasted
onto the background. Anamorphic focus roll-off helps blending in-focus and out-of-focus areas.
The focus roll-off smooths how our eyes transition from the subject to the background,
countering the cut and paste feeling we have from clean sphericals.
I’m sure you’ve said something like “oh, that lens is too clinical”,
or heard someone complain that modern lenses feel “sterile”, or “too clean”. Anamorphics suffer from
many artifacts such as spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, astigmatism - all to be
further discussed later -, and these artifacts make up the depth cues our eyes perceive
in a real-life situation. These cues allow us to switch focus from one element to the other
smoothly on a flat 2D image, the screen, without feeling anything has been pasted onto the picture.
PERCEIVED PRODUCTION VALUE
In the end, many of these pillars are *subconscious effects*. To give you an example
of a subconscious effect, if I just slapped some black bars on the top and bottom of this frame,
this already contributes to a more cinematic image, although technically now you have LESS
image than you had before! I know it sounds crazy, but I’m sure you can see what I’m talking about!
With the constant changes in gear, cameras, and lens-making technology,
anamorphics have withstood the test of time and are still all-time favorites.
No one wants to explain all of this all the time, and most audiences don’t even grasp at how these
characteristics affect their perception of the images we make, so everything ends up inside the
umbrella term “cinematic”. One thing we can be sure of: this different perception of the images
is what leads to a higher production value. By displaying all of these pillars, or traits
of anamorphic, when people see your films, they think of other great looking films and stories.
They think of Star Wars, Blade Runner, Indiana Jones, and associate the feelings they have for
those stories to the story you are telling. Or maybe you should just get Harrison Ford.
That’s why anamorphics boost production value. Oh, a lot of people also think of Lawrence of Arabia,
even though that wasn’t shot anamorphic, just shot 70mm and projected in scope.
Now if you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button! The next chapter is about the
origin of the anamorphic format and I have some neat stories you never heard before.
So make sure to subscribe and clock the bell to get notified about the the next video.
Also a reminder, if you’re a member of the channel you get the full Cookbook experience
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If you got any questions, shoot them in the comments below and I’ll get back to
you. See you on the next one! Tito Ferradans, out.