hey everyone it's Robert Macfarlane here and today we're going to be taking
this lens and giving it the anamorphic look
ah the anamorphic look what's more commonly known as the JJ Abrams look flares flying everywhere
anamorphic squeeze beautiful organic bokeh background everyone just going ooh isn't that
a gorgeous image so why would you even consider changing your lens into an anamorphic lens well
i say anamorphic lens what we're going to be doing is giving it the same bokeh shape as an
anamorphic lens as well as giving it a color characteristic like a warm glow or a cool glow
if you want to as well this does give a lot of what people are looking for in anamorphic glass
for the price of 20 on Ebay so this actually can be really really good and and there are products
that you can buy online where you can uh get an insert for your lens but there aren't always
inserts built for the particular lenses that you have so i thought this would be a really cool time
to be able to show you guys how you could do it yourself and get a really beautiful awesome look
well there's a really good reason for giving a lens an anamorphic look because it really could
benefit the character of the lens it can add to that lens maybe you've got a lens which it's just
kind of a bit meh and it needs some extra oomph or maybe you have a project coming up
that could really utilize a warm or anamorphic look but you don't necessarily have the budget
to rent those types of lenses in so i thoroughly recommend this as a particular choice to be able
to have that created choice in your back pocket when you need it now what's beautiful about this
is once these are built they don't have to stay inside the lens you can take them out store them
put them back in when you need them again so when you make the choice to actually have an anamorphic
look but you don't have the budget for it you can pop you can pop your little lens filter in
and you're good to go but the lens has a huge impact on the way the light enters the camera
and lands on the sensor so anamorphic lenses and for those of you who don't know about this
have incredibly unique looks compared to their standard lens counterparts probably the most
notable difference between normal lenses and anamorphic lenses is the way in which it squeezes
the image and then the image would go through a process called desqueezing and it stretches
the image back to a shape where everything looks normal again well in the process of doing that
you elongate and change the shape of the flares and the light that's passing through the glass
now based on which anamorphic lens you go for will actually change entirely the look of the
anamorphic that you end up having so you can get Kowa lenses Schneider lenses Carl Zeiss
anamorphic lenses so there are lots and lots of choice out there but you have even more choice
of vintage lenses out there that are very cheap to buy and unlike their modern lens counterparts
vintage lenses are actually quite easy to open and don't require that much expertise
to understand exactly how the lens goes together and because this process is actually relatively
simple there's there's very little chance of you breaking the lens in this process now i'm gonna
put a disclaimer on this unfortunately i can't take any responsibility for any damaged lenses
during this process i myself through the years have ended up damaging some lenses with all my
tinkerings so please be careful be warned and do this at your own risk so first things first
i have got what is known as a torsion tool this is specifically used for vintage lenses
now you could also use two screwdrivers that you have for glasses to do this but there is a chance
of the screwdriver slipping and going straight across the glass or scratching the metal and no
one really wants that so i do thoroughly recommend these tools they are honestly about a tenner so
they're not expensive um and they really make life a lot easier so we are going to put our filter we
know we're going to put our filter on the inside of the lens it's not just something you stick on
it needs to stay in position so what we're going to do first and foremost is open up the back
of the lens not the front the back of the lens right and there's an important reason for that
so first things first i'm going to
get this open now i don't know if you noticed i'm actually turning the lens before i'm turning
the tool that is because it's far easier to do that and it makes a lot more sense and you'll feel
once it's totally loose that you can pull your back ring out most vintage lenses have a back ring
it's the innermost ring on the lens now i'm using a Helios 44m i know a lot of you have these lenses
and this is a very very easy lens to open up clean and maintain this is actually as far as
you need to go with deconstructing your lens it's as simple as that now what we need to do however
is create our filter now another option i have is a black piece of paper now it's got a white
backing but it's an opaque piece of paper the reason for that is this is not going to give me
a tone where this is going to create a lot of warm light refraction inside the lens the filter made
from this won't change the characteristics of the light entering the lens so you can try out
various filter materials to see what you like but of course they have to be very very thin
and they have to also not be able to scratch the lens on the way in don't put steel wool
inside it's probably a good idea what we're going to do is we're going to need a pen or
a marking device so you're going to use the back piece of glass that you've taken off your lens
as your template and then what you're going to do is you're going to draw around it
to understand how big does my filter need to be now the next thing you need to do is
to create an oval shape within that circle now it can't go too close to the top of your circle
but at the same time you need to you need to have a you need to be pretty close otherwise you might
cause an a little vignetting to your image now this is just a sketch you don't have to be too
careful at this stage but you want to get a pretty good idea of your circle shape now that oval shape
once cut out once the light passes through that it acts as a sort of shaping tool
for the light and creates more oval long shaped bokeh that is exactly what
a anamorphic lens ends up doing to bokeh shapes in the background so this is where
you're starting to get that creative anamorphic look in your image so first things first you don't
cut out your circle you cut the inner section out first my very large very useful scissors here
okay not bad not bad it's not as good as my drawing now next i'm going to cut out my shape
i feel like i'm on a Blue Peter show what art attack here's one i made earlier for all of those
of you who grew up on that show big shout out ah so there we have it we have our filter handmade
custom crafted and ready to go what we then do is we pop this inside our lens like that
you see how easy that is that is literally all that's required so at least with the Helios 44m
the back piece of glass that we've taken out is round on one side and flat on the other the
rounded side will be the one that faces out from the lens and the flat side will be what you place
down on top of your filter you're going to clean the back of this glass don't clean the front of
the glass because you're going to end up putting fingerprints back on it anyway now what you can do
is you're going to drop him in place right as you can see he's in position he's very happy there and
we're going to put our ring back in place now we haven't actually cleaned our back glass yet that's
fine we're going to do that as the very very last thing we do and you see we've got our torsion
tool back again and we're getting our ring back in place being very careful not to scratch the glass
on some modern glass you won't need to take the back lens out because you'll be able to utilize
the piece of metal at the back of the lens as a way of holding your filter in position once it's
just taut it doesn't have to be super tight remember these lenses they are
very very well made don't ever really over tighten lenses even in modern or vintage
glass and now we're going to take a look at what our new lens filter has done to our image
so it was as simple as that basically cutting a circle with a slightly smaller oval shaped circle
through it and we were able to create some really awesome effects with the glass we already have
this is a really easy way to upgrade your lens now as i said before please please please be careful
although this is a relatively simple procedure i really could not warn you more about the
dangers of opening the lenses and potentially damaging your lens beyond possible repair
however if this is something that you either have a little bit of experience in or you're willing to
give it a go by working on it very slowly over time i thoroughly recommend this as an option
to be able to spruce up some glass that you have and maybe get some new and interesting looks from
your lenses please see my previous episode where i go through why you would even use lenses with
interesting characteristics or not because it's actually really important to understand why we
are using the lenses we're going to use but having another tool in your pocket having another choice
that you can easily go to when you need to is a great way of improving your filmmaking the more
creative choices that you have the more ways you can tell your story in the way you want to tell it