Hey guys, Tito Ferradans here. Are you ready for chapter 3 of the Anamorphic Cookbook?
In chapter 1 I explained the course structure, how it works, and the mad advantages of being
a member of the channel - if you’re not a member, click the Join button below to unlock more videos.
In chapter 2 we looked at how the anamorphic look transpires high production value for audiences,
even if they *don’t know what anamorphic is*. Let’s just say anamorphic is *cinematic*.
If you missed those videos I highly recommend going back for them.
If you’re not a member of the channel, you’ll be watching this video right
before our Q&A with Atlas’ founders Dan Kanes and Forrest Schultz on Wednesday,
to cover this first module. So, come back and we’ll have a blast! If you’re a member,
start thinking about the questions you want to ask and submit them on the Discord server!
In this chapter we’re going back in time to the birth and popularization of anamorphics in film.
It’s a story with more twists than you imagine. So far we all agree that this anamorphic thing is
awesome and that’s how we want to shoot. Films were not always like this. In fact, there were
plenty of obstacles in the anamorphic road to mainstream. How did we get to where we are?
EARLY HISTORY
The word anamorphosis comes from the Greek, and it means “to reshape”. In our case,
we’re reshaping the image from the real world into a squeezed version that lands inside the camera,
either on film or the sensor. Patents don’t go as far back as the Greek empire though.
The first patent for an anamorphic lens is from 1898 in Germany, by Paul Rudolph,
and it’s about using cylindrical lenses to convert a circle into an ellipse. There were
issues regarding the quality of the lenses at the time and the project didn’t go forward.
In 1910 Ernesto Zollinger, in Italy, had another stab at it, this time directly related to film:
his anamorphics aimed to squish the image onto the film. Wait, what?! Oh, they aimed to do that
vertically, effectively using *half* the amount of film for each frame. He’d then reproject the
images through a decompressing lens. He got so close! Just missed out ninety degrees in rotation…
A few years later, during World War I a French scientist by the name of Henri Chrétien
was using anamorphics to widen the field of view for military tanks. The war was over, the Triple
Entente won. That is France, Russia and Britain, and Chrétien’s tanks had to chill for a bit.
It was only ten years after the war, in 1928 that he patented another anamorphic invention.
His new invention had the same idea as Zollinger’s, squeezing image onto film,
this time in the *proper* orientation, making it so a wider field of view could be compressed to
the same size of film in the camera, just the way we like it. Then stretched back out on projection.
This amazing lens system was called Hypergonar, but we’re gonna say Hypergonar. Familiar name, no?
It was presented to the Optical Society of America later in the same year, but it
didn’t catch on back then. Chrétien’s mistake, you see, was not showcasing how his lens could
be used to increase the screen size, but just boost the film area.
It was sort of like watching an anamorphic epic story on your phone. The size of the
screen does matter and all that epicness doesn’t look that big of a deal in such tiny screen.
In 1930 the Goerz American Optical Company started making the Cine-Panor for 16mm cameras
and this could’ve been it, but the world was going through the Great Depression and
everything that was not really a hit right off the bat was discarded. When put up against the
advent of sound in Hollywood - in 1927 -, the Cine-Panor was just too tiny (pun intended).
WIDE ASPECT RATIOS SAVE HOLLYWOOD
After World War II, in the 1950’s things were changing up in America. Television was everywhere
and there was a lot more entertainment options besides the classic “going to the movies”. This
time was also marked by the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood, which severely impacted the
profitability of films, making studios much more selective of what they’d produce. Several small
studios went broke at this time and Hollywood’s lifestyle was staring down the barrel of a gun.
During the first few years, a lot of things were tested out: we had the first run-ins with 3D,
the extra weird smell-o-vision, and eventually, “This is Cinerama”, in 1952.
Cinerama was a super convoluted process that involved shooting three times more film and
stitching it all together to create a screen that was much wider than what audiences were used to.
“This is Cinerama” was the promo for the format
and it yielded the second largest box office revenue in that year. Can you imagine that?
Here’s what made audiences go crazy about Cinerama: Up until this point all films had a
4:3 aspect ratio, just like television - we’ll get to aspect ratios in a little bit - and “This Is
Cinerama” starts the same way like I did just now. Actually, worse: it starts off with a 12-minute,
black and white, lecture by famous newscaster Lowell Thomas on how humans have struggled to
capture movement on pictures since the dawn of time. At the end of the lecture, he says
“this is cinerama”, and the two adjacent screens come on, full of color, expanding your measly
4:3 into 2.65:1 and going for an immersive ride along several landmarks in the world. Minds were
blown. Executives went nuts. “This is Cinerama” is what put Hollywood back on track to success.
The folks at 20th Century Fox figured that by making the screens bigger,
hence the experience more immersive, TVs wouldn’t stand a chance,
and audiences would flock back to the theatres. They were not wrong.
20th CENTURY FOX AND CINEMASCOPE
The same year Cinerama came out, Fox set their sights onto Chrétien,
whose anamorphic patents had expired. They bought all of his Hypergonar anamorphics and brought the
lenses along with Chrétien to America to shoot “The Robe”. These hastily imported anamorphic
lenses were such a big deal they had armed guards protecting them at all times on set!
They also didn’t require big changes to the filming process - films kept using the same
cameras, just throwing the scope on top of their usual lenses, and theaters just incorporated
similar lenses in front of their projectors to revert the image to its original shape. That was
the origin of CinemaScope. The slogan: “You see it without glasses” was a catchphrase deriding films
and theaters which used 3D as a competing gimmick to attract audiences at the time.
After 20th Century Fox had a handle on shooting anamorphic films they started to make more lenses
and rent them out to the other studios. Bausch & Lomb was responsible for making these lenses, and
called them Baltars. But demand was so high that many other players got into the game. The thing
is, these original lenses weren’t any better than the double focus setups we have today, if you’ve
read or heard anything about shooting anamorphic DIY. They required two camera assistants, one to
focus the prime lens on the camera, and another one to focus the anamorphic lens. They had subpar
resolution, degrading image quality significantly. They sucked at close focus, and they had horrible
artifacts such as mumps, making people look fatter - rounder - than they actually were in close ups.
This was such a big deal for the stars at the time that they’d have it written in their contracts
that they wouldn’t participate in anamorphic productions so they didn’t look bloated.
In spite of all these issues, CinemaScope pictures still drew crowds to movie theaters consistently.
D - ALTERNATIVES TO CINEMASCOPE
Needless to say that other studios didn’t love the idea of renting some piece of tech
from a competitor, so there was a lot of incentive to come up with different solutions
and alternatives to Fox’s anamorphics. Enter Panavision: originally a supplier
of anamorphic lenses for theatres. Robert Gottschalk, the founder of the company,
developed a technique to counter anamorphic mumps and their lenses got a lot of traction in 1958. In
1959 they get an Academy Scientific and Technical Award for their Auto Panatars. Ben Hur - which
was shot in Panavision 70mm - secured the company’s reputation for good in Hollywood.
Other formats also took flight at the same time such as Todd-AO and VistaVision among others.
By 1961 those other techniques and Panavision looked much better than the original CinemaScope
and, in less than a decade, Fox’s CinemaScope process was dead. The name went under for a
little bit but we brought it back in recent times as a way to refer to a specific aspect ratio
or some sort of magic nostalgia, although sometimes we just call it “scope”.
If you want more technical info about the earliest anamorphic lenses, don’t despair.
The next video is about that - which makes this the perfect moment to like this video.
The inner workings of anamorphics are gonna be covered in detail during Module 2 of the Cookbook,
also brought to you by Atlas Lens Co.
Since you’re so interested, I’m sure you already subscribed to the channel, right? If you’re liking
the Cookbook but you want *more*, become a member of the channel and you’ll unlock more
Cookbook videos, along with access to an exclusive Discord server, PDF guides and more useful tools.
I hope you learned something new today and I’ll see you on chapter 4! Tito Ferradans, out.