American Cinematographer - September 2017 - 102

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Arri's Second Century

Top: Future ASC member Vilmos Zsigmond climbs onto a car as fellow future ASC member Laszlo Kovacs
(second from left) looks on during the making of a commercial in 1960. Bottom: From behind an Arriflex
35IIC, Kovacs studies the action alongside director-actor Dennis Hopper on location for Easy Rider.

with [people shooting 3D]," Kraus
explains. "That was a time when we
suddenly stopped selling film cameras.
Younger members of the staff had
already been asking for retraining, to be
prepared for when our digital camera
came. They felt that they could build
digital cameras, because precision
mechanics of a sort still applied. After
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September 2017

all, everything in front of the sensor
needed very high precision. So that
terrible year, 2009, was a big motivator
for us to change things. I'm proud that
Arri could make that transition and
keep the core workforce that we had,
retrain them, and make high-quality
digital products."
According to ASC associate
American Cinematographer

member Stephan Ukas-Bradley, Arri's
director of strategic business development and technical marketing, the
company's work with the D-20 and
D-21 yielded experience, input and feedback that were essential to realizing the
Alexa - a camera that would feature the
next generation of sensor technology,
based on Alev architecture. UkasBradley relates, "Deploying the D-20 in
a controlled manner through our own
rentals and a selected group of rental
partners enabled us to make sure the
systems were properly maintained and
gradually improved and updated, while
[we learned] a tremendous amount
about how a digital motion-picture
camera has to perform in regard to image
quality and robustness in the field. The
next generation of the sensor technology
became the basis of Alexa, with increased
dynamic range, higher base sensitivity,
and better signal-to-noise ratio than its
predecessor. Product manager Marc
Shipman-Mueller and a team of
talented, motivated and very passionate
engineers - headed by Achim Oehler,
who had just finished the R&D of the
Arriscan - then designed the camera
essentially around the sensor.
"Nobody could have predicted the
success of Alexa, but we did end up with
lightning in a bottle for numerous
reasons," Ukas-Bradley adds. That lightning, he says, arrived precisely when "the
industry was looking for a solid, filebased workflow solution, which we were
fortunate to offer in raw, and also with
our integrated and native ProRes
recording."
The result clearly impressed many
of the industry's most influential cinematographers. Phedon Papamichael,
ASC, GSC was among them. He grew
up in Munich, watching movies at Arri's
cinema, and became a user of Arriflex
film cameras from the start of his career.
He recalls that he was "skeptical at first,
having to change my working methodology," when he opted to use the Alexa
system on a major feature: Judd Apatow's
2012 comedy, This Is 40.
"But it made sense," Papamichael
says, "since Judd liked doing very long

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