Why Does the Aspect Ratio Get All Distorted During the Train Wreck?
Anyone notice that?
Applesauce, bitch.
[deleted]
MovieChat Forums > Giù la testa (1972) Discussion > Why Does the Aspect Ratio Get All Distor...
Yeah I noticed that too. Quite strange, was also a bit distracting.
shareI only noticed that it was models on one, quick, one or two second cut, otherwise, it looked looked great. Also, I wonder if that whole ending, meant to be night, was done in a studio.
Back to the point of the discussion. the ratio has always bothered me. Even when they would show this on television in the mid 80's I noticed that as well. When Juan says, "what about me?" it looks like scope film projected with a non scope lens. Image is tall and skinny. Many filmS transferred in to tape in the late 70's and early 80's had that problem, e.g. THE NEW CENTURIONS.
The miniature shots were (accidentally?) shot in 1.33:1 instead of 2.35:1 and were stretched to fit the aspect ratio of the rest of the movie.
http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=5184666
Apparently, back in the old days, aspect ratio mattered if you were going to shoot with miniatures and models. I think James Cameron on the commentary for "Aliens" mentioned that as a general rule of thumb, it was easier to shoot stop-motion and miniatures in a non-anamorphic lens than an anamorphic one... I don't remember exactly why, but it had to do with making the motion of the miniature (i.e. the dropship) look believable.
Further, when John McTiernan directed "Predator", the SFX-heavy screenplay meant that he was apparently obliged to shoot the film in a non-anamorphic lens too... so as a kind of film-making "revenge", he shot the 20th Century Fox logo in widescreen, and did the rest of the film non-anamorphic.
I also noticed lens distortion in "Escape From New York", so it makes sense if they used different camera angles for the train wreck... especially considering Leone's style of widescreen filming.
It's not particularly hard to get wide-screen model shots - the anamorphic lens would lead to distortions, indeed, but it's not hard to shoot with a normal lens and then crop - i'm sure that's how the effects in the original "Star Wars" were done. The reason it's harder to get miniature effects in anamorphic process right is that anamorphic lenses are essentially super-wide-angle (in one dimension) lenses and wide-angle lenses act differently from spherical lenses as you move in closer to get the proper size image...
Or you could do what Leone did on "Once Upon a Time in the West" and shoot in Techniscope - a wide-screen process using normal lenses, which advances the film only half as far per frame as standard 35mm cameras, shooting an image as wide as standard 35mm (24mm) but not as high - about 10mm, giving a 2.35:1 image that has no distortion. (Leone used Techniscope because anamorphic lenses couldn't give him the extreme closeups he wanted.)
More recently, a format called Super35 has become popular - James Cameron uses it a lot, and it made the cockpit shots in "Top Gun" possible because the Super35 cameras are smaller than standard 35mm cameras with anamorphic lenses. (Wikipedia article:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35).
But basically, someone goofed and the model shots were printed in the wrong format.
I'm pretty sure all of Leone's 2.35 ratio films were shot in the 2perf Techniscope format. It seems odd that the miniature effects were not shot in that format also. Or maybe they did but the footage was cut into the finished movie without being optically squeezed first so it looks stretched when projected. Presumably the original effects footage have never been located since it is not mentioned in the restoration featurette on the DVD.
The effects on Star Wars were shot in vista vision which was a large format (x2 reg 35mm), so that when it was cropped for squeezing onto a reg 35mm anamorphic print there would be minimal loss of resolution.