American Cinematographer - February 2017 - 40

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Rebel Assault
A massive array
of WinVision Air
9mm LED panels,
provided by VER,
are positioned
around a
spaceship
interior on a
gimbal rig (left),
enabling an
interactive
hyperspace
lighting effect.

handy and useful tool on set. This is just
my opinion, and I'm happy to discuss it
with anyone over a beer!
What's it been like working with
Gareth Edwards?
Fraser: Gareth is an incredibly
strong, visceral storyteller. He does the
classic thing of painting a picture that
says a thousand words.
Gareth loves improvisation, and
the LED system worked out very well
for that, because I could stand outside a
360-degree set with my desktop operator and change levels and coloring on
the fly. I could easily change the color of
a wall mid-take or on the second take.
In fact, the first take with Gareth is
often a shooting rehearsal, and there's
nothing like a shooting rehearsal to get
everybody's blood pumping. Everybody
steps up and performs.
You were at the forefront of two
technologies on Rogue One: You used
an Alexa 65 with Ultra Panavision 70
lenses, and employed LEDs almost
exclusively. Was that scary?
Fraser: I had a mixture of fear
and excitement, and it was only possible
because of the support from Gareth
Edwards, the encouragement of
40

February 2017

Lucasfilm, my amazing crew, and our
gutsy and progressive suppliers. We'd
never done it before, but we said, 'If
there's a problem, we'll work out how to
solve it.' And we did. It wasn't all plain
sailing technically, but we got through
it. I love making movies that challenge
me and push the medium. And Rogue
One certainly did that.
Panavision vice president of
optical engineering and lens strategy
Dan Sasaki
Sasaki worked closely with Fraser
and oversaw the engineering of the
Ultra Panavision 70 lenses used on
Rogue One. AC spoke with Sasaki at the
recent Camerimage International Film
Festival.
American Cinematographer: Is it
correct that Greig was introduced to
the Ultra Panavision lenses by Gregor
Tavenner,
who
was
Robert
Richardson, ASC's first assistant on
The Hateful Eight [AC Dec. '15]?
Dan Sasaki: Yes, the Rogue One
lenses were originally reinvented for The
Hateful Eight. The Ultra Panatars were
developed in the late 1950s and early
American Cinematographer

1960s; they have a 1.25:1 anamorphic
squeeze, which yields an aspect ratio of
2.76:1 when shooting 65mm film for
70mm release.
Gregor met Greig by chance at
Panavision, and told him that he should
try out 'these glorious lenses.' Greig
immediately saw the merits, but being
vintage lenses, he was concerned they
would be difficult to focus and wouldn't
be fast enough. He also wanted lenses
with a much closer focus and a greater
choice of focal lengths. So the lenses
went through a lot of changes to meet
Greig's needs - being an artist, he
really wanted to define his look and
push the limits.
We made brand-new 65mm,
135mm and 290mm lenses. The other
lenses have the same casting but with
new primes. The lens rings were also
standardized to normal matte-box size.
It must have been difficult to
make the lenses faster.
Sasaki: It was. It was a tricky
process to keep the lens compact; right
off the bat we knew we were going to do
a lot of redesigning to achieve the T2
aperture. We had to create our own
custom spherical components to fit into
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2017
