Black Magic lenses

The Black Magic

Lenses
85mm Lens	Although I am a big fan of Long lenses, I would usually describe myself as more of a wide lens type of person. Drew however, seemed like more of a long lens type of person, so I made an extra special effort to use this lens on The Cell as much as possible. Because of this, I would say that I actually developed a strong fondness for this lens. It is safe to say that the 85mm lens is the most difficult to use of the bunch. The long focal length means that you have to have an absolute ton of space in order to use this lens because you have to be a long distance away from your subject. When filming the interview scenes in The Heist for example, I had to set up the camera in the gallery in order to do a wider shot of both people in the interview room on this lens. This also means that you have to clear away a lot of things that are inside the space between you and the subject and wriggle things around quite a lot to make them work; often compromising on actor placement, type of angle and other such things due to not having enough space to move back into. The tiny depth of field means that the focus has to be perfect when using this lens, which means pull focuses have to be done if attempting any type of movement. On one shot in The Cell, I used this lens on a slider shot meaning I had to mark the two focus points with small pieces of duct tape that I had cut out and stuck onto the lens, then change between these two points whilst I also moved the camera along the slider. This tiny depth of field also means that sometimes you can set up a shot with actor in one place, but when they come back to it they are out of focus because of a minute difference in position that the actor does not realise. Even if their foot position is marked on the ground with tape, their head can move in and out of focus. This means that you have to be very anal about placement and it can be hard to express these concerns whilst also trying your best not to interrupt the actor’s vibe. Usually meaning that you have to repeatedly bother the director. The sheer distance between camera and subject, can also mean that the actor and director have the false illusion that the shot is much wider than it actually is and that they therefore actually have more space to move than they actually do. The slightest head movement can completely throw off the composition. Luckily, because of how much I used this lens on The Cell, our main actor David had gotten quite used to it by the end of the shoot and got very good at anticipating it’s limitations. I was impressed with David’s ability to to this and still pull off a good performance.
35mm Lens	The 35mm lens is a good compromise between the long 85mm lens and the wider 14mm lens. The black magic’s sensor is about 15.81mm wide compared to the gate size of a super 16mm camera, which is about 11.75mm wide. (See below for reference) This means that the Black Magic has focal characteristics that are only a little bit different from a super 16mm camera. The 35mm lens therefore has the characteristics of a lens slightly longer than a prime lens, when used on a Black Magic as opposed to on a 35mm camera. The 35mm lens could still achieve some of the shallow focus effects of the 85mm, but without some of the practical disadvantages. It had it’s own sort of characteristic though, that were different from the 85mm in terms of the effect it gave, so it is definitely not a lens that you would use instead of the 85mm and instead would be a lens that you would use for it’s own specific qualities.
14mm Lens	The 14mm lens is probably my personal favourite of the lenses. My favourite type of lenses are ones which range between prime and wide angle and the 14mm lens fits this category. It shares many characteristics with the human eye. There is not the level of distortion of image that there is with a wider lens, but it still has a nice large feel about it. The thing I like about wide lenses, from a visual point of view, is being able to see the subject and their surroundings. This meant that this was the ideal lens to use for the manor scenes because that location was one that I thought the audience would want to see. The 14mm lens was very practical to use as well. The shorter focal length meant that you could easily fit into smaller spaces between the subjects and walls. The deeper depth of field meant that it was very forgiving in terms of focus, which meant that you could use it for moving shots and not have to change focus too much.
8mm Lens (with slight fish eye)	The 8mm lens was the widest of the bunch. At this extreme the practical considerations begin to creep back in again. You have to pay extra special attention to things which may be on the outer extremes of the shot and it can be difficult to use this lens in situations where there are things which you are trying to avoid getting in shot. Visually a lens this wide causes much distortion of the angles of straight lines in a shot, but this can look quite interesting as well and can be used for effect. As it was in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. The fact that this lens was a bit fish eyed as well meant that this distortion was even greater; door frames and other straight lines would often end up being slightly curved. This can be see in some of The Cell shots, but Drew did not mind this effect. The 8mm lens’ depth of field is very large, meaning almost everything is in focus. This lens ended up being used for some shots in The Cell when we were wanting to create an effect of being able to see the whole set, as if the lens is in the place of the missing wall. We got that shot from every side. I also used this a bit in The Heist to imitate CCTV footage. My inspiration for this was from the feeling when you look at screen in shops that display the CCTV on a screen and the shots are all really wide and it takes some time to actually spot yourself in the frame because the angles all look strange and confusing.
Variable Lens	The variable lens is my least favourite lens. It has two main things that it can do. One of them is being a less good version of all of the other lenses. For example you can use it as a long lens, when it is zoomed it, if you don’t have the 85mm. The other characteristic it has is that you can actually use the zoom function during a shot, if that is what you want. I did actually use it for this function during shooting for a few shots in The Heist. This was to imitate the effect of a jarring electronic zoom.

References

http://www.thehurlblog.com/cinematography-the-black-magic-cinema-camera/

Camera sledge tests.

Here are Youtube links to test shots I did with turning the camera into a sledge to see if I can get dolly type shots on the grass when you can see the ground. I'd say it is only really any good for when being pulled on a string, which means you could do some reverse tracking and possibly side tracking, but not forward tracking, as pushing it is way too jerky. 

The shots where it is being pulled aren't perfect either; if you look at the foreground of the shot it looks okay, but anything in the distance shakes like hell. It could be used to quite good effect if your focal point was close to the camera (depending on the type of film), but not for landscape beauty shots or anything like that.
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Fishing wire over the camera lens

The fishing wire and elastic bands that we used to get lens flare

I’ll be honest, I found this thing kind of annoying and I think that lens flare in films has become a meaningless gimmick. However, in my capacity as a camera operator and cinematographer, it is not up to me to decide whether something like lens flare is worth using in a film or not, therefore I kept silent about this opinion when my director talked about using lens flare in the film. If lens flare was what he wanted, then lens flare was what he would get.

To achieve lens flare we used a method that Drew had practiced in his Minor Project. This method was to attach a piece of fishing wire around the lens with an elastic band. This contraption would only work on a long lens, as you could see it on the wide angle lenses.

Sometimes, if you manipulated the wire and moved it a bit, you could could change the type of lens flare you got and the direction of the beams. Most of the lens flare you see in the film is not actually caused by the studio lights, as this little piece of fishing wire did not seem to catch any light unless it was shining straight towards the lens. For this reason I often held my arm out extended beyond the front of the camera and shone a torch at the lens during shots, or balanced one on a surface nearby. The torch that seemed to work best for this purpose was the one on Tori’s phone. The only shots where the studio lights do actually cause lens flare are the ones where the lights from the set’s window are shining towards the camera. Two of these shots exist, as far I can remember, and only one of them is achieved using the fishing wire contraption. The other, a shot taken with the 8mm lens, is naturally occurring lens flare achieved using the lens by itself and without the use of the fishing wire.

In the film as a whole there are few shots which have lens flare, but there is definitely enough lens flare in there to give the film the level of Abrams Chic that is required.