![]() As the National Association of Broadcasters Engineering Handbook laments, "Film has a wide variety of aspect ratios, nearly all of them considerably wider than 4:3." One option is letterboxing, retaining the original width of the image the other option retains the original height of the image. In order for movies to be broadcast on television, or, later, recorded onto VHS, a film, often a second-generation 16mm print, would be run through a telecine machine and transferred to videotape. Can these choices ever make a positive contribution to our experience of a movie?įirst off: until the end of the twentieth century, as every schoolboy knows, television screens were wider than tall at a ratio of 4:3 this is perfect for broadcasting films in the “Academy” aspect ratio in which all Hollywood features were shot up until the fifties and sixties-when competition from television, as well as more diverse production circumstances, fostered a variety of wider aspect ratios. But surely it also involves aesthetic choices, even if made under less favorable, less free conditions than those made by a Fincher or an Östlund. Pan-and-scan, the frame-by-frame rerecording of a selection of a film image matching the proportions of a standard television, is generally acknowledged by right-thinking people to be a “butchering of the director’s vision,” with huge swaths of the cinematic image bartered away in exchange for posttheatrical profits. But when this decision-making process happens after the process of “image capture,” Fincher or Östlund, attending to the essential content within a photographed image, become analogous to the anonymous technicians behind that much maligned format, pan-and-scan. ![]() For me, it’s helpful because I’m picking the performances that are the best, not the camera work that is the best.” Similarly, Ruben Östlund has spoken of his preference for shooting dozens of takes in a single fixed master shot with a hi-def digital camera: he can dedicate his on-set attention to performance, and then find the frame in postproduction, through a process of digital pans and zooms (like Ken Burns!).Ĭonceptually, this sort of process is not so dissimilar to the digressive zooms in a Robert Altman long take, or the responsive handheld camerawork of DPs like Eric Gautier and Yorick Le Saux, in their collaborations with Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas: the eye roams freely within the staged activity, alighting on the crucial moment or telling detail within the whole narrative word. So, Baxter continued, “We can move shots around later, reframe, stabilize, and perfect a shot. That is, your modern digital movie camera records more pixels than are necessary for the resolution of state-of-the-art 4K digital theatrical projection. “When shoots in 6K there is so much extra space in the frame,” Gone Girl editor Kirk Baxter recently told. Mark Asch on The Claim, pan-and-scan, and the space beyond the TV screen
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