John Brawley, cinematographer extraordinaire, goes into detail about using the anamorphic adapter on the Silicon Imaging 2K camera during the filming of CELESTIAL AVENUE. Here’s an extract from the article:
Celestial Avenue is a short film and was always going to be significant as one of the last short films to be funded by Screen Australia, who have decided to no longer fund
short films.Cath is looking for love. She’s even prepared to try online dating and is on her first date with Joel. Always the culinary adventurer, she’s chosen an authentic Chinese restaurant but all Joel’s interested in, is the springies and some chicken with sweetcorn with special fried rice. It’s not really going well for Cath when she hears a siren song and is drawn to a beautiful singing voice in the rear lane. Here she meets Ah Gong, who doesn’t speak English and is busy washing cabbages for Chef Wong. Cath’s in love. She returns the next day and sets about wooing the shy Ah Gong, eventually learning how to speak Cantonese and working in the restaurant. Joel is still keen on Cath and returns for a last attempt to impress Cath with his knowledge of the orient.
Written and directed by brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, we had 5 days to shoot 18 pages. The boys were also interested in shooting anamorphic; not so much for the wider aspect ratio, but more for the anamorphic look. Anamorphic lenses do have their very own personality that’s really hard to replicate. I think of them as being flawed but in a kind of beautiful way. Anamorphic lenses usually work by applying a 2x horizontal squeeze to optically compress more information onto the film or sensor.
When the project was initially submitted to Screen Australia, a RED camera kit had been penciled into the line under camera hire. However, once the boys started talking about their love of anamorphic, I had to start thinking of other ways to achieve this. Although from Version 18, RED has software support for anamorphic lenses, the camera’s sensor is still not full height so a significant cutout is required, cropping a great deal of the anamorphic image is traditional 35mm Anamorphic lenses are used. Firstly I started thinking that 35mm anamorphic would be the simplest. At first I even fantasised about a traditional anamorphic non DI finish. Apparently this isn’t possible any more. Cinevex (now Deluxe) have mothballed their film grading equipment. So now it’s DI or bust.
