Roll camera.
Roll 1, Take 4, Mark!
Engage with her
and engage with the camera....
Yeah, that's better with the flowers....
Good, a little right.
OK, hold that....
Now move it also like two feet....
That's great, yeah.... This is perfect.
This looks great....
Let's drop our key to 75.
We're at a 5.6....
OK, let's move on....
If someone's coming to the space
with stereoscopic experience,
I'm going to say
this is the easiest stereo experience
you will have ever had.
If someone's coming
with no stereoscopic experience,
I would say
this is a terrific way
to start in the stereo world,
in the VR world,
because forever, stereo
VR was just really hard.
There were a lot of caveats.
We don't have that now.
It marries two universes.
Your cinema world and your VR world.
And now the two have met.
It basically gives me the best
out of the two worlds that I love.
You know,
which is architecture, spatial quality
and storytelling from film.
And so bringing that all together,
this is the perfect fusion.
It's not every day
that you get to define cinema
in a new way.
What makes this lens
so important is that
you don't have to redefine
the way you work.
I have the same freedom
that I would
with any other Canon L-series lens.
And that sounds subtle.
And you might say, "of course,"
when you hear that.
But that's different
from any other VR experience
I've ever had.
It's funny because it's the easiest
VR project I've ever worked on
because the camera
is actually really simple.
It's just one camera, one lens.
What's terrific about L-series
lenses is we've always relied on them
for their quality and light dispersion,
for their great speed
and for their lightweight form factor.
Not to mention through the lens control.
When you take a lens
like this,
8K is so large that now
that we have two 4K squares
that we can operate with,
we now have
a higher level of perceived sharpness
and we have a format
that is compatible
with what our display systems are.
The whole project was captured 8K DCI
ALL-I 29.97 and we shot Log 3
with a cinema gamut.
We're able to use the dual fisheye
in the way that you use every other lens.
So you have selective focus,
we can even choose left eye
and right eye,
and we're able to use this lens
in the way that we're accustomed
to use every other L-series lens.
I am literally doing nothing different
in thinking about the ergonomics
or how I take a lens on and off.
I line up the red marks,
I put it on, It clicks into place.
I'm ready to shoot in 8K.
That's a profound value proposition,
when you're trying
to figure out what equipment
do you use to tell a given story,
especially immersively.
There were no limitations.
It felt like
shooting with a normal camera,
and it's really liberating.
It felt just like normal filmmaking.
We shot the entire project at a
5.6 to an 8.
I wanted to have some fall-off in the back
and you do see that with this lens.
You get a little bit of falloff
in the back
and you get a little bit of adjustment
when people get within
that three to six foot range, so
you can actually control focus
as part of the storytelling
aspect of the film.
The fact that this lens is projecting
both image circles onto the same sensor
means that you have
greatly simplified your workflow.
In stereo VR.
You have this gigantic field of view,
and you have to know that like anywhere
that people can see
on their peripheral vision,
it's going to catch their eye
and they're going to look there.
With that spatial dimension,
you can really enhance the feeling
and the layer of storytelling.
And that's I think what's changed
is how we connect with material.
It's not just watching something,
seeing a story. We're there.
We pretty quickly came
to the idea
of introducing this little girl,
and she is taking us into her world
or the way that she sees the world,
finding
magical moments in the day to day life.
We figured it was kind of
like a nice analogy
to the new stereoscopic lens
that she shifts our way
of looking at reality.
With this project,
we wanted to really maximize
the potential of this system.
We wanted to capture the widest
range of environments,
from bright sunlight to dark as night
and see how the camera really performed.
With our character
when she's opening the show:
for that scene in the grassy field,
all we did was have a bounce board
in front of her.
With her skin tone,
we were able to shoot in a way
that I could expose for her
and also expose for the sunlight.
Basically,
the Sun is a hotspot in the sky,
but it's not flaring out
the rest of the image.
You basically are just allowing the Sun
to be a backlight,
just like you would with your actual eye.
That was a very impressive feat.
A big part of making
this film was making a film
that was like a visual feast,
and Tino's direction was like,
"Please do that more.
I want more of whatever
you can put out there in the 180
because more is better."
It's brought to life through a lens,
you know?
And so we
we had those big mirror
balls that created the caustics
in the scene with the horse.
So we were just trying to add that layer.
So, shadows are behind us,
and we're using the Sun as backlights.
With that in mind,
putting any atmosphere in the space
around us was going to give us
a lot of really great sunrays
and volumetric space elements
that I thought were just going
to be really fun to watch.
Light makes it magical, right?
I think everything that touches you
with an emotion
is something that is a success.
When you see that huge beam of light
coming through a window
or through the trees,
it looks glorious and everybody loves it.
And when you shoot that in stereo,
it's like mind blowing.
We had a lot of fun
kind of like crafting the day
so that we would get the max effect.
The funny thing
with the night scene was that
it wasn't
going to be a night scene
in the beginning, but we ran late.
And then it was a night scene.
So we actually got lucky
because it looked so much more magical.
In the effort
of retaining the best quality
out of the sensor and out of the lens,
I kept it at an ISO 800 and shot
at a 2.8,
and that's
also a big advantage of this lens is that
you have a 2.8.
My favorite thing about this shot
here was the disco balls everywhere.
We kind of tweaked the curves
a little bit
so that we could really accentuate
the volumetric light
that was used on set.
So if you see here
these rays
look amazing in stereo,
but they also just look good in mono.
We really wanted to kind of like, create
something that looks beautiful
as an image.
The scene with the golfers, for
example, is way more
about choreography and dynamic movements.
We were able to put blue
light deeper in the pagoda, and skip
some HMI's off the water
and get some water reflection
on the front of the building.
Adding smoke effects underneath
the bridge was really fun to play with,
and build a huge key light
that was up and over the camera
to create like this
incredible dynamic
between the tungsten and a blue backdrop
with just as many effects
as we could figure out.
The last scene was the most
dynamic, because it incorporated
choreography, music,
obviously performance
and camera movement,
so it displayed
all the assets of VR in one shot.
Really, what we're going for here
is the end of our ethereal dream,
and we're just trying
to bring all the elements
that we visited in the past shots
and bring them back to this one.
We quickly realized, OK,
it's also all about the
the way that the actors engage
with the camera,
the way they engage with each other.
And it again, kind of like
makes us even more so part of the story
or the content that's being shot.
Canon has made the editing workflow
really easy to use.
This lens makes VR totally accessible.
We're on the same sensor,
so we've got one card.
And there's no confusion about syncing
or matching or mismanagement of media.
It all comes out
and it all goes into the computer
as one card.
Using the Canon plug-in
with Premiere Pro is really easy
because I was able to seamlessly import
the raw footage
and then convert it to equirectangular,
and then work
as if it was any other project.
If you have Photoshop,
After Effects and Premiere,
you have all the tools you need to make
really compelling content.
It's never been a better time
to be a filmmaker.
I didn't have to learn any new software.
Once I had the plug-in,
it was just really easy
and it actually saved us
time in our post-production workflow.
The color
workflow for this camera
is really no different
than any other system.
It's very important to do
no harm to the pixels.
You never want to clip or crush.
So by shooting in Canon Log
what you're doing
is you're maintaining
all of the dynamic range
that the camera captured on the day.
You really can do
anything with these tools,
and it sort of opens it up to filmmakers
to really explore
different storytelling techniques.
Now we have a tool that can
actually represent
something that's accessible
for the next generation of filmmakers.
This lens rewards viewing
the real world
in a way that I've never seen before.
The equipment changes
and the displays change,
but the creative process?
Exactly the same.
We're just at the beginning of developing
this cinematic language.
There is a quality here that really turns
storytelling more into an experience.
This is it.
This is another game changer from Canon.