MovieChat Forums > DeepFriedMovies > Replies
DeepFriedMovies's Replies
Panavision cameras and lenses were used for a lot of widescreen movies starting in the 1950s - so I'm sure you've seen a ton of classic flicks shot in their widescreen formats.
I'm not a cinematographer, but I do work in the camera department on smaller movies and I interview a lot of DPs. If you follow the link I put in the original post, you can find this interview column I write for Filmmaker Magazine. It's mainly cinematographers and there's close to 100 interviews on there at this point.
For this movie the lens switch had to do with how the lenses perform in low light situations.
The cinematographer said she likes to shoot with Panavision anamorphic lenses at around a stop of T5.6. If you open the aperture up any wider she doesn't think the older anamorphic lenses perform as well (the C series lenses used on this movie date back to the late 1960s).
Lighting a big wide night exterior of a cornfield to a T5.6 would've been very difficult and required a huge amount of light, so for those night scenes she switched to the Arri Zeiss Super Speeds because they perform better when shooting in an aperture range of something like a T2.0.