American Cinematographer - January 2018 - 71

have to wait for dailies, and I don't have
to explain things in theory and then
hope he will be comfortable. The look
should belong to him."
Porter notes that although the
lens inventory was substantial, each
package was selected for a specific
purpose. "When Phedon and Alexander
began referencing the 1970s films of
Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, we
organized a comprehensive lens test at
Panavision Woodland Hills, where we
basically tested every spherical lens in
the Panavision inventory," he says. "After
the first test, Panavision Standard
Primes - the oldest spherical lenses in
Panavision's line - were the clear
favorite. Having debuted in the late
Sixties, the SPs were obviously made
with film cameras in mind, and while
they looked beautiful for medium shots
and close-ups on digital, too, the Alexa's
sensor in Open Gate/ArriRaw mode
out-resolved the wider lenses, causing
fine details to look 'mushy.' [At this
point] it was immediately obvious to
Phedon that we would have to cherrypick lenses from different eras to assemble Downsizing's main lens package.
"Knowing Alexander's penchant
for wide lenses, Phedon chose
Panavision's PVintage series for wider
focal lengths," Porter continues. "The rehoused Ultra Speeds, which made their
debut in the mid-Seventies, cut beautifully with the Standard Primes.
Following Phedon's mandate to assemble a vintage set of lenses that could
resolve details in wide shots, I spent
weeks working with [ASC associate]
Jim Roudebush and Brian Mills
[Panavision's vice president of marketing
and lens-department manager, respectively] to schedule and shoot additional
lens tests that ultimately led us to our
final lens package. Our go-to lenses were
handpicked PVintage 24mm, 29mm,
35mm and 40mm. We used Panavision
Standard Primes above 40mm - and
for super-wides, to resolve fine details,
we carried a Panavision Primo 17.5mm
and 21mm."
He adds that for day exteriors, to
soften the image captured by the Alexa's

Top: Dr. Asbjørnsen introduces a group of people who have scaled down their lives. Above: A
separate greenscreen set was used for the downsized people on the cart.

digital sensor, "we found a vintage
Cooke 20-100mm zoom that was magical. Initially, it exhibited vignetting
around the edges due to the Open Gate
format, but Panavision's Mike Hibarger
was able to fit an expander on the back
element, making it good to go for our
shoot. In the beginning, [visual-effects
supervisor James E.] Price preferred
Primo Primes for his visual-effects
plates, but in the end, even he agreed
that many of the shots were better suited
for the Cooke 5:1 zoom - and he was
talented enough to pull off challenging
visual-effects shots, irrespective of the
lenses we used."
The production was shot in Open
Gate mode, captured in ArriRaw, and
framed for the 2.39:1 aspect ratio. As
Danler reports, the common resolution
www.ascmag.com

was 3414x2198 "with a 5-percent
[padding] to allow for reframing and
stabilization" in the edit, digital intermediate and visual-effects processes.
Software Update Package 4.0 for the
Mini, "which allowed for Open Gate,
came out during preproduction, just in
the nick of time," Danler recalls. Alexa
XT material was captured internally on
512GB Codex XR Capture Drives,
while Mini footage was recorded on
256GB Lexar CFast memory cards.
Media was offloaded via Silverstack to a
fast SSD RAID, then encrypted to a
larger RAID 5.
Downsizing was shot in Los
Angeles, Omaha, Toronto and Norway,
and Danler acknowledges the benefit of
working with an international postproduction house like Technicolor, which
January 2018

http://www.ascmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2018