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Anamorphic Lenses and Aspect Ratio - Getting the Film Look

What makes the Film Look?

There are a number of things involved in producing video that appears to be a movie. However, these days the first thing people think about is the letterbox format the film is displayed in. The problem is that online creators go about replicating this effect the wrong way. The following video goes into this more in-depth, but I'll summarize the main issues. Most film cameras shoot 16:9 aspect ratio because most screens (computer, TV, and phones) are 16:9. However, the aspect ratio that we have become familiar with for movies thanks to cinemascope (more on that later) is 2.35:1. In order to achieve this 2.35:1 ratio people have been adding black bars at the top and bottom of their footage. What this does is cover up the footage, which if done to create 2.35:1 ratio, removes 25% of the previous footage! The following video depicts this in greater detail.



Cinemascope

Cinemascope was a patented way of creating what we now know as widescreen. 21st Century Fox bought the rights to use this and first used cinemascope for a film called The Robe (1953). At this time in America, film was being taken over by TV. Back then both theater screens and TV screens were 4:3 ratio display. This is because the film strip was in that ratio so it filled the entire screen. For a while the film industry had been trying to come up with ways to create wider film. This is mostly because our eyes don't see in a box format we see more horizontally than vertically. The solution was cinemascope. What happens is the film is filmed using an anamorphic lens. What an anamorphic lens does is squeeze in more information horizontally. This allows for it to be compressed vertically later on creating a wider field of view (video below explaining history and utility of anamorphic lenses).The audience response to the first cinemascope film was immensely positive. There have been other ratios used but the cinemascope ratio is used most often.


Shooting Anamorphic

So the question you might be having now is, "can I shoot anamorphic footage?" and the answer is yes and no. Can you shoot anamorphic like it was traditionally shot when cinemascope was released, no. Can you create a more budget alternative that very closely replicates that, yes. Today there are three ways to shoot anamorphic: rent lenses that cost tens of thousands of dollars (you still need a camera that shoots in 4:3 ratio preferably HD and 24fps), buy anamorphic adapters, or fake it with filters, adapters, and post processing. For beginners I would recommend the SLR magic anamorphot-40 1.33x. The reason behind the 1.33x squeeze factor has to do with ratio. The older film cameras shot in 4:3 ratio so when there footage was de-squeezed by 2x it created 2.35:1. Most of todays video cameras (that aren't thousands of dollars) only shoot 16:9. When a 2x squeeze is applied to a 16:9 it produces a ridiculously thick letterbox. When a 1.33x squeeze is applied to 16:9 it results in a ratio of 2.39:1 which is very close to the cinemascope ratio. If you are interested in getting into anamorphic filmmaking I will provide a few videos and links below that I found very helpful.





https://www.youtube.com/user/tferradans

http://www.tferradans.com/blog/

Mon - Setup lighting

Tues - shot scene

Wed - shot scene

Thurs - EA

Fri - shot scene

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