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Camerimage 2025 brought together filmmakers,
cinematographers, and technology vendors for a week of screenings, seminars,
and hands-on demos in Torun.
The art and craft of cinematography is centre stage at
CamerImage in Torun, a small Polish town which the late David Lynch was so
enamoured of when he first visited in 2012 that he lived there for several
years. Lynch, his work and key collaborators including the cinematographers
behind Lost Highway, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, were
showcased across the week.
Peter Deming, who shot Lost Highway and Mulholland
Drive perhaps gets closest to Lynch’s subversive spirit. “There’s a
line in Lost Highway when Bill Pullman’s character is
being questioned why he doesn’t own a video camera and he says, ‘Because I like
to remember things the way I remember them, not necessarily the way they
happened.' That is David in a nutshell.”
We wonder what Lynch would have made of the Cyclops, a
head-mounted POV rig for actors or operators.
“The main thing with POV is authenticity and that means
getting a camera as close to your face as possible,” explained its inventor
James Medcraft, who likens the look of Cyclops to an autocue system (though to
our mind more like a Stranger Things Demogorgon).
The operator’s view is reflected into the camera system with
nothing obscuring the operator from interacting with their subject. This means
Cyclops captures exactly what the actor sees with their fellow cast looking
directly into the lens.
“From the outside, the operator’s eyes remain visible,
allowing eye-to-eye contact between actors for a better performance. It’s
straightforward for a focus puller to assist with flexibility on Mattebox, iris
control and filter options.”
F1 Cameras
Also exhibited on the Sony stand was one of the small
cameras installed onboard race cars for the Apple Original blockbuster F1:
The Movie. As requested by DP Claudio Miranda ASC, the cameras don’t just
record POV but enable the remote operation of pan and focus control even when
traveling at high speeds.
“The system had to very compact because there’s barely space
under the car’s halo to put the pilot,” explained Sony specialist Jean-Yves
Martin (above). “We designed this camera from the body of the PTZ FR7 and added
compact Voigtländer and Zeiss Loxia primes for shallow depth of field. The
focus motor is modified by Panavision with an existing Preston remote control.”
A copper wire connects the camera head to a recorder which
was also onboard. Video was transmitted over RF to Miranda at trackside where
he could adjust framing and exposure.
The result, seen multiple times in the film, is the ability
to capture an overtaking car and then pan to see Brad Pitt’s face in one shot.
Blackmagic: 17K and Apple Immersive
In contrast to the staples of camera technology from ARRI
and Panavision on display at Camerimage, Blackmagic Design arrived with
something different.
This included its URSA Cine 17K 65mm which has just been
used by DOP James Butler paired with Hawk65 anamorphics to shoot the
feature Bedlam, albeit at lower resolution.
“The beauty of these cameras is that the sensor technology
allows you to work in a scale mode where, when you're using the 8K or 4K, you
don't crop the sensor,” explained Blackmagic’s Michele De Benedetti (above).
“Technically you can shoot at 8K without having the toll of that massive data
rate and the 2.2: 1 aspect ratio stays the same.”
The same RGBW sensor technology appears in the Pyxis, a 12K
camera with an L mounts that can be adapted to PL and EF to works with the
latest full frame lenses. “It’s ideal as a C-cam next to Ursa Cine or as
principal camera for portable rigs,” he said.
The vendor was also showing a DIT cart solution complete
with BMD kit from recorders and audio monitors to ATEME switcher down to
converters and a streaming box. This was shown running with the URSA Immersive,
a fixed focus dual lens 8K imager “for stereoscopic and 3D shooting without
using massive rigs,” said James Townend (below), Technical Sales Specialist at
Blackmagic.
One delivery scenario is for Apple Vision Pro and the stand
demo included the headset loaded with impressively immersive and nausea-free
video of alpine scenery and of rally cars in the desert.
“There are a lot of sports action and concerts captured for
immersive displays like Vision Pro and few dramatic pieces to date but that is
why we are here, which is to intrigue storytellers with the possibilities of a
new film style. It’s not a direct replacement for film but it could be
complementary.”
Zeiss Gets Into the Action
ZEISS hosted a seminar on Immersive Action Cinematography
with the ‘Godfather of parkour’ turned ‘movement specialist’ Daniel Ilabaca.
The British born freerunning pioneer has accumulated a set of skills which
enabled him to pursue a second career as a stunt performer (on 28 Weeks
Later) and second unit camera/gimbal op (including on The Marvels)
and founder of Stunt Camera
Crew. This group of specialised action photographers capture energetic,
“hard to get” action scenes—often by filming while rollerskating, running and
jumping around set themselves.
He described how lightweight camera tech from DJI Ronin 4D
to the Insta360 ONE R as well as the latest ZEISS Nano primes open
creative possibilities within even the tightest budget constraints.
“Efficiency is freedom,” he said. “A lightweight setup gives
you flexibility while focusing on what you’re shooting and where
you’re going.”
He recently filmed Apple commercial The Great Escape entirely
on the iPhone 14 Pro Max in Istanbul and described “using my rollerblades,
parkour knowledge and FPV drone background” for the ad that reached over 66
million views on YouTube.
Max Eterna
Fujifilm just launched the GX5 Eterna 55 featuring a large
format 102MP CMOS II sensor, about 1.7 times larger than a 35mm one, with a 4:3
Open Gate making it the tallest sensor in the 65mm format.
“The biggest draw in the Eterna is it's incredible 4:3
sensor size,” said James Tonkin, DP, director and colorist who was commissioned
by Fujifilm to shoot a promotional short film with the camera. “As I started
doing camera prep and seeing everything in this 4:3 aspect it just became
really hard to unsee that. The extra height and way of framing in portraiture
is much more akin to photography. As well as using aspect ratio as a narrative
device it's a different aesthetic. I've spent decades seeing everything in a
2.4:1 or 2.3:9 aspect ratio so to frame with this height in a different ratio
was unique.”
FilmLight Colour Awards
It was only five years ago that FilmLight launched its
Colour Awards, a long overdue recognition of artists whose work is often
invisible to the outside world.
“We set out to celebrate the work and the art of the
colorists work that tends to happen in the dark behind closed doors,” said
Wolfgang Lempp, joint MD, FilmLight.
True to his word the awards are “not about tools but about
the colourists” who are bracketed in all other awards ceremonies within VFX.
Korean director Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave)
was on hand to set the record straight. “Few people come out of the cinema
saying ‘Wow! the colour grading in that film was amazing’ but I believe they
are deeply affected by it. It’s not simply about making the image beautiful,
it’s about shaping the character of the film itself from its genre and sense of
time to the personalities of the characters. In short, everything that defines
a film is influence and expressed through grading.”
Winners this year were:
- Theatrical
Feature: The Brutalist (above) – graded by Máté
Ternyik
- TV
Series / Episodic: Disclaimer (Season 1) – graded by
Peter Doyle at PostWorks NY
- Commercial:
Bluff Bounce, Prologue – graded by Franziska Heinemann
- Music
Video: Bad Bunny, NUEVAYoL – graded by Dante Pasquinelli
at Ethos Studio
- Spotlight: Good
Shot – graded by Connor Bailey at House Post
- Emerging
Talent: Converse x Daily Paper, Homecoming – graded by
Marina Starke
AI = Abhorrent Interpretation
Artificial Intelligence was the focus of several sessions.
Michael Goi, ASC (Glee) recognised the “legitimate concern” about AI’s
threat to jobs but argued that in the history of the film business “every
technological change” has created more positions than it has taken away.
“In the transition from silent movies to sound we lost the
live cinema piano player who played the music for the mood, but gained the
sound recorder, boom operator and sound mixer,” he said.
“The most glaring example of this today is in The
Wizard of Oz presentation at Las Vegas Sphere,” Goi said. “They
employed 800 AI programmers and coders in order to accomplish the job and most
of them had to be specially trained. We need to see where the technology is
being used and train toward those positions as they come arise in future.”
Goi, also a director on TV projects including The
Rookie, found synthetic actors abhorrent.
“Digital actors have absolutely no appeal for me. I love to
tell an actor one thing in between takes and then see how they process it to
alter their performance. I love the unpredictability of that. I like not having
to know every single detail on their face and how it would have to be adjusted
or moved to convey this emotion. I want to see the actor's interpretation of
it. That's something that AI can never do.”
While Hollywood studios and streamers are building their own
AI models, they are not using open data sets, he said. “They can't have their
IP simply disseminated to everyone and, likewise, they don't want to be
scraping stuff off the internet that doesn't legally belong to them. The major
studios and streamers have data sets of billions and billions and billions of
images and video that they've put together specifically for the use of their
productions.”
Inequality Persists
Overall, the festival was a quieter affair than last year
which was overshadowed by charges of a lack of female representation and the
controversial premier of Rust, the film on which DP Halyna
Hutchins was fatally shot.
Pointedly, the Festival handed the head of its awards jury
to New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro (Mulan) yet the films
competing for the 2025 Golden Frog still had ten male DPs to three women.
Gender inequality in the industry is not getting any better, as Caro pointed
out.
“Statistically, there are fewer female cinematographers shooting films, fewer women directing films. Those numbers are going in the wrong direction and it’s quite depressing.”
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