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.