British
Cinematographer
In
an era of increasing digitalisation it is reassuring that organic,
analogue materials reside at the heart of filmmaking. Indeed, glass
hand-milled a century ago is coveted and commands a premium for use
on top of the range productions today. Yet cinematographers would
have had this choice severely limited, or even extinguished, were it
not for the man who resurrected Cooke.
Lenses
made by this heritage British manufacturer recorded Ernest
Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic exploration, were selected by the
brilliant B&W stills photographer Ansel Adams,
plus many glamour photographers during the 1940s including British
photographer Cornel Lucas, and were used on the silent Hollywood
films of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. By the 1980s, however,
Cooke's parent company – the precision instrument maker
Taylor-Hobson – had been sidelined within the even larger Rank
Organisation and its glass was gathering dust.
Enter
Les Zellan, an enterprising lighting specialist turned camera and
lens distributor based out of New York. A business visit to Cooke's
Leicester factory in 1981 tripped a switch in his mind that here was
a gem waiting to be polished.
“I
said to my wife, 'I want to buy this company' and for no good reason
– simply a feeling of the history of the building,” relates
Zellan. “With all the brick, concrete and dust you wondered how
anyone could make optics there.”
Zellan
reveals he always had a yen for the technical side of production, but
the road to Cooke was, he admits, by one accident after another. In
middle school and high school he would gravitate toward the lighting
and projection rooms. After gaining a master’s degree in Technical
Theatre from Carnegie-Mellon University he worked variously as a
designer and installer of theatrical stage lighting systems, sales
director for New York film kit rental outfit FERCO, and then founded
his own company to sell the Aaton 16mm camera exclusively in the US.
After adding Cooke’s 16mm lenses (as well as Canon and Optex) to
his distributorship,
Zellan made a first trip to Leicester, but it took another seventeen
years to realise his ambition.
“I'd
love to tell you that it was my passion for lenses and overriding
love of movies that drove me, but in reality I had a burning desire
to be more than a middle man,” he says. “Distributors are a vital
part of the chain, but ever since studying Adam Smith's The
Wealth Of Nations
at high school, I understood that,
while necessary,
being a middle man was not necessarily satisfying for me. My dream
was to be somebody who creates the product that generates wealth and
inspires creativity.”
Investing
his own money, backing from minority investors and convincing a bank
to loan him the balance, Zellan took over the company, renamed it
Cooke Optics Limited and erected a new 21,000-square-foot plant to
produce the S4 lens.
“The
company was gasping for breath at the time,” he says. “I couldn't
buy it as an ongoing business, but rather as a 120-year-old start-up.
I was, though, the fortunate beneficiary of six years of R&D on
the S4.”
Few
people other than Zellan understood the S4's potential, let alone how
to market it. At the time Panavision was renting the acclaimed Primo,
the only modern cine prime around. When film camera rental companies
sought a company to develop a new lens to rival the Primo, but one
that would be available to sell, Cooke took up the challenge.
With
three existing prototypes, Zellan quickly put a fourth one into
development and took the S4 to market. “This was a magical time, as
the S4 was the first modern,
non-Panavision prime,” he says.
In
1921, Horace W. Lee designed the Speed Panchro for Cooke, a prime
renowned for its almost mythological 'Cooke look' but these had
ceased production as Taylor-Hobson put its energies into video lens
design with the boom in TV production in the 1960s.
“After
a 35-year gap between production of the last Speed Panchro and the
new lens, the S4 was seen as a quantum leap by the industry,” says
Zellan. “There was a great pent-up demand for Cooke primes based
around the Cooke Look and the mythology surrounding the Panchros. One
can only imagine the panic among other lens manufacturers when our
orders went from zero to hundreds virtually overnight.”
The
S4 Prime T2.0 lenses were put to immediate use on shows including The
Cider House Rules
(1999, DP Oliver Stapleton) and Angela's
Ashes
(1999 DPs Chris Connier, Michael Seresin BSC), helping Cooke Optics
to turn a profit from the very first year. The lenses won Cooke a
Cinec Award in Germany in 1999 and a Technical Academy Award for
mechanical and optical excellence the same year, followed by a
Technical Emmy in 2000.
At
around the same time, Zellan initiated research into lens metadata, a
concept at least a decade ahead of its time. “Nobody was asking for
metadata in the late nineties and few even knew what it was but it
was obvious to me it was coming,” he says.
Pausing
an internal R&D project to focus on building ARRI's LDS metadata
system, Zellan says he made several overtures to the German operator
about how to market the system.
“Any
product – but especially metadata – is hard to sell if people
don't understand it and don't know they need it; nor it can you put a
value on it. After a year working on a system for ARRI we felt we may
have found a way to do this on our own and, with ARRI's goodwill, we
went back to the drawing board.”
/i
"Intelligent" Technology, introduced in 2000, is a system
for automatically reporting precise and detailed data about the
focus, hyperfocal distance, depth-of-field, iris, lens model, and
other pertinent information from digital or film cameras synched to
timecode for use on the set or in post for VFX.
Zellan's
marketing key for the system was to open it up to the wider industry,
including lens competitors. He also began to integrate the technology
as standard into every lens leaving the Leicester factory “hoping
that at some point critical mass would be reached.”
That
vision is now coming to pass with a growing partner community that
includes ARRI, Zeiss, RED, Transvideo, Atomos, Sony, Codex, Canon,
Fujinon, Angenieux and Pixel Farm.
“The
further the industry goes into digital, the more people understand
metadata and the more important it becomes,” argues Zellan. “I'm
still not convinced anybody has seriously used it in anger or used it
all the way through production, but even with advances in tracking
software there is still 2-3 percent of any shot that cannot be solved
cost effectively without a system like /i Technology.”
A
third generation of the system is coming in 2016 and will include
inertial tracking of lenses which record movement through space, a
unique illumination table and full distortion mapping tied to each
particular lens.
“We
believe that /i3 will make an enormous difference to VFX and post
workflows,” claims Zellan. “If you shoot with a lens that has the
/i3
technology in it, you’ll save time and money because you’re not
going to have to shoot distortion maps on your lenses. You’re not
going to have to measure the illumination map of the lenses. It’s
all just information that’s going to be in the lens and can be
obtained easily.”
In
2013, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognised
Cooke with a Science and Technology Oscar for helping define the look
of motion pictures over the last century. The Cooke Look (now a
trademarked item) denotes warm colour tones and a sharp image without
harshness that is consistent to all the firm’s lenses since the
1920s. There's little danger of it going out of fashion.
“With
fixed pixels, there is no intrinsic dynamic interest in a digital
image; the image has a antiseptic quality that has today's
cinematographers looking for ways to project personality and
character into their films,” says Zellan. “We deliver extreme
resolution but the way we render it, and the way we balance the
lenses, gives that fabled warm three dimensional look and in Speed
Panchros the field falls off much faster than in an S4 so they reveal
more of it.”
Shooting
in traditional Anamorphic, using new, state-of-the-art glass and
mechanics, is another solution to add personality and texture into an
otherwise sterile format, he argues. “The 'Anamorphic funkiness'
that traditional Anamorphic lenses introduce adds visual interest
that gives the cinematographer a lot of creative freedom.”
Cooke
lenses continue to be used broadly by leading cinematographers. Ed
Lachman ASC won the Golden Frog at Camerimage 2015 and Best
Cinematographer at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards for his
work on Carol,
which was shot with Cooke lenses (also Oscar- and BAFTA nominated for
this film). Creed,
the critically-acclaimed return to the Rocky
franchise, was shot by Maryse Alberti also with S4s.
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