American Cinematographer - September 2012 - 64

◗

Hair-Raising Heroics
frame. This was my first opportunity to shoot animation in ’Scope, which was really lovely. The received wisdom is that stereo works a lot better with a centrally framed, square-looking picture; the idea is that if you want something to come through the screen plane, it has to be free of the constraints of the frame. But we wanted to use 2.35 properly, and we hit a few stumbling blocks along the way. You can frame in thirds very nicely, so we’d often have something, such as a prop, very foregrounded, and then have a character more central to the frame. But we found the items we were using as framing devices would really upset the stereo if they were too near [the screen], because the separation between the left and right eyes gets rather troublesome if you’ve got something too close. We had to learn ways around that. Sometimes we’d oversize the prop and push it farther back in the set. Eventually, we decided we were happy to let [the foreground object] be an abstract thing rather than a recognizable thing. That’s fine, because then your eye is looking where it should be looking. On set we noticed you were mainly using the same lens package you used on Fantastic Mr. Fox, Nikon primes and modified Cooke 5:1 zooms, but you chose the Canon 5D Mark II this time. How did that work out? Oliver: I shot Mr. Fox on the Nikon D3 [AC Dec. ’09], but I chose the Canon for this because the animators liked the image quality of its HD Live View, which Nikon didn’t have at the time. We bought 50 of them. We captured in raw format, and our 2.35 crop [from the 21.1-megapixel 36x24mm CMOS sensor] gave us an image that was over 4K, and that was busted down to 2K for visual-effects work. The Canon’s raw file has quite a lot of latitude, and I was able to do a lot with it, but the camera isn’t fabulous. We had a lot of problems with density shift and a fluctuating magenta flashing of the chip depending on the temperature in the studio and the shutter speed. Bizarrely, it was that kind of magenta shift you get with film when there are tiny, unidentifi-

Cinematographer Tristan Oliver preps some backlight for the main character.

the frame. I wanted to use it in a very specific way, just to emphasize Norman’s alienation. There are maybe 18-20 shots that use it, and sometimes the effect is extreme; sometimes only a plane of the face is in focus. Because we were at the macro end of the lens, we were actually working at the sort of stop you’d normally use to achieve a normal depthof-field in live action, around a T4. In animation, we typically work at T11 or T16!
64 September 2012

Did using focus that way complicate the 3-D at all? Oliver: It’s rather frowned upon to do that in stereo, but I found that the rulebook you get that says you have to do this or that with 3-D is actually nonsense. You just have to be careful about how you do some things. What were some of the other things you had to approach carefully? Oliver: I did a lot of testing to see what I could do in stereo with the 2.35
American Cinematographer

American Cinematographer - September 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2012