I usually try not to nerd out too much on our website about the techbabble component of what we do, but I’m throwing caution to the wind today.

This is a still from some footage shot recently for our Sacramento Works campaign.  I’m obsessed with the background in this image – I love it.  It was shot with a 70mm anamorphic lens which, because of the way the anamorphic format works causes objects in the distance to go out of focus in a very interesting way. It’s a subtle detail, but adds a kind of hyper-real feeling to film footage that I really connect with. This format is kind of hard to work with for a few different reasons:

We have only 3 different lenses for this format – they’re hard to come by, quite expensive, and renting them in northern California is not likely to happen. Maintaining good focus is trickier – depth of field is small and in a closeup, normal actor movement can potentially make the shot go soft. Every shot shows a lot more background than the same shot with normal spherical lenses would. With a bigger viewable area you need to worry about lighting more space. In shooting this format handheld (like this spot is), care has to be taken to keep the camera movement smooth and level or the background will go all distortowonky (that’s a technical term.)

But the end result is so worth it.  Yay for having cool clients that let me nerd out and play with fun stuff!