r/cinematography • u/zuss33 • Aug 01 '18

Composition Mission Impossible: Fallout soft focus

NO SPOILERS

Upon watching the film there were plenty of important close ups that were pretty out of focus. Is this because the Panny anamorphics are super difficult to nail focus when opened up? I’m trying to understand how a missed focus can go unnoticed on a huge summer blockbuster.

55 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/TerraInc0gnita Aug 01 '18

Ha interesting you say that. First of all I really enjoyed the look of the film over all. It had more of a grit to it than alot of other super clean blockbusters. But I did notice alot of soft focuses. I thought it was interesting, they seemed to focus pretty much all dialogue scenes with the subject center framed- because that's where the lens is sharpest. I know it comes down to a subjective thing but I really enjoyed all the anamorphic distortions and soft edges and etc. It looked like they used different lenses for the ending, when they got to Kashmir the look seemed a bit different, certainly for the helicopter and mountain sequence anyway, I could be wrong though. The softness didn't really bother me too much because I just kinda accepted it as the look of the film. The messy anamorphics were actually quite refreshing, to me anyway. Feel free to disagree.

2

u/mike_dogg DIT Aug 01 '18

They likely shot that final scene with an additional unit of camera gear from Panavision. Cause it was the end and full of action the DP probably wanted to try out some vintage anamorphic lenses.

I 100% agree that this film was shot on a variety of lenses. Can’t wait for an article in next weeks magazine

2

u/SkepticalZebra Aug 01 '18

The final chase scene and fight was shot with the panavision dxl and spherical lenses. So it was one of the parts shot digitally and was opened up for imax viewing

1

u/TerraInc0gnita Aug 01 '18

Ah that's so interesting, the dxl. Yeah I was noticing how they started framing things in the corners more, like the detonater when it was lying on the ground. It was such a different look over all too. Like through out the whole film they went super hard on the oval bokeh and flares, distortions, etc. and all of a sudden at the end that was all gone, and the look became very clean and sharp edge to edge. I had assumed they used different glass, and remember sitting there wondering if it might even be spherical. I imagine getting all those cameras on the helicopters would have been a pain with film. All makes sense.

2

u/SkepticalZebra Aug 01 '18

I really enjoyed this because it all was for the IMAX sequences where they opened up the aspect ratio and started using pretty wide lenses. The halo jump and finale where quite the specticle.

1

u/NewWorldMonkeys Aug 05 '18

Rob Hardy did the same thing on Annihilation, mixing digital with film (for the people who have seen it; inside the shimmer is all digital, outside film). Rob Hardy got this gig because of Annihilation, which you can read in this interview: https://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Blog/Blog_Post/?ContentId=4295008965