Exploding The Frame Papers & Essays by Ben Shedd

Original EXPLODING THE FRAME article - Written 1989

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:50:35 -0600

The Exploding The Frame article covers my first view of frameless filmmaking, which has now expanded from IMAX screens to include all viewing screens where there is high resolution, wide field views, and viewers standing or sitting closer than the width of the screen. The overview has held strong over the years, even as digital wall size displays, digital dome screens, and expansive desktop screens have come on the scene. The newer screens, like the huge IMAX canvas, require a new way of designing imagery and image sequences and are part of this new expansive cinematic language. 09/09/04 Web page 08/05/08

EXPLODING THE FRAME:  Seeking a new cinematic language.  By Ben Shedd - Copyright © 1989, 1993-1997

In cinema as we know it, there is a language of filmmaking which has developed (wide shot, close-up, over the shoulder, stage line, moving shots, static shots, effective edit points, sound cuts, music cuts, etc.) which we all use, even as we bring our own individual styles to making films. As far as I can tell, all of these working rules are dependent on the image being shown within a frame. It is the common frame of reference for all of our work in film or television.

The new 70mm gigantic screen film, with projection screens 60 to 80 or 90 feet wide and 3 to 5 or 6 stories tall, and with film frames 5 to 10 times the area of 35mm film format, has created cinema projections where we can’t see the edges of the frame. The whole group of giant screen film formats have one thing in common: the gigantic images extend the edges of the projected film image to the edge of our peripheral vision or even beyond it. I believe we are not just talking about bigger films here, but a new cinematic world. It is a frameless view, an unframed moving image medium. I think the language of the gigantic screen cinema is still being invented, and I believe it is different from what we, both filmmakers and audiences, have come to know and understand.

While we are inventing this language, I think there is a key technical issue to consider throughout the production of gigantic films: all of the filmmaking tools which we use to create these giant screen images - the storyboards, cameras, viewfinders, editing machines, workprint projectors - look and work just like the tools we have become experts at using to make framed movies, to make small screen films. The idea of redefining the filmmaking tools for giant screen filmmaking is at the heart of this paper. I spent the summer of 1989 on a fellowship doing research to explore the similarities and differences between small screen filmmaking and giant screen filmmaking. I define small screens as any film or video image where we see the outer frame as part of the image. I did this fellowship research just after I had completed producing and directing my first Imax™/Omnimax film1.

I consider myself a third or fourth generation giant screen filmmaker. This whole field of large film format goes right back to the beginning of the movies, but it really became technically viable with the creation of the Imax rolling loop projector, built for the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. Moving images created from 70mm 15 perforation wide frames could be projected solid and steady at 24 frames per second on gigantic screens. In the last twenty-five years, this field of production has grown broadly, supported in large part by an extensive group of large screen theaters [mostly Imax and Omnimax theaters] in science museums around the world. Now what might be considered fifth and six generation filmmakers are joining in the production of these films, and theaters are spreading to all sorts of venues and these projection systems are now an expanding part of the motion picture business.

I think one of the quickest ways to describe this new cinematic world comes from Roman Kroiter, one of the founding members of the Imax Corporation and a first generation giant screen filmmaker. Roman suggests putting a cardboard box over your head with a rectangular shaped hole cut out from its bottom. Look through that rectangle. That is the view of the movies, of TV, of small screen cinema as we have come to know it. Then take the box off your head. That’s the gigantic screen view. Unframed cinematic visual space.

I'd like to expand that frame of view. Imagine watching a film shot on a TV set. Imagine it's an image taken from a helicopter flying over the scenery tilting left and right. What effects of motion do we feel when we watch this shot on TV? The horizon line that grounds us is the floor where the TV is sitting. The movement is seen as happening inside the TV box - beyond the screen. But what happens when we see an aerial - that same aerial shot - projected on a massive screen five stories high and 80 feet across, where there is no outer frame, where the image extends beyond our peripheral vision? Our horizon line, the visual horizon which completely fills our view, is now the horizon line inside the image, and when it tilts, we feel as though the whole theater is tipping and tilting - like the theater is moving. What is the difference from the TV shot? The horizon line in the gigantic unframed image becomes our ground, our floor, rather than the floor supporting the TV, and the perceptual experience moves onto the audience’s side of the screen.

I believe that this sensation - this audience sense of movement - is at the core of developing a new cinematic language for frameless filmmaking. I have concluded that, for the sake of consistency, the sense of audience movement needs to be applied to everything seen and experienced in any gigantic screen film - not just flying shots. The movement sensation of the theater must be accounted for throughout a frameless film, in shots and from shot to shot. Either the audience is having a first person experience or it isn't. This idea represents a complete shift of approach in filmmaking, where the audience experience is the first order of focus, where all of the action occurs on the audience’s side of the screen.

In accounting for the sensation of movement, the filmic experience has moved from passive, from being held in a frame, to active, to becoming the engulfing reality with the audience present within the filmic events. In frameless film the audience becomes the main character in the film.

The idea that all the film events are happening on the audience's side of the screen is a complete reversal in design and composition from standard production. And it is from this new filmic outcome that the creative work of filmmaking takes a radical turn. From the moment I, or any of us, get an idea for a gigantic screen film until it is showing in such a theater, every production tool we use along the way has a frame around its image. The sketches, the storyboards, the cameras, the editing machines, all present images seen within frames. These tools are all practical and cost-effective for filmmaking, but throughout production the entire film crew must dive through those constantly present frames and be on the other side where the viewing audience's frameless experience will occur.

All of the filmmaking equipment we use during production gives a view that is like putting that cardboard box frame cutout back over our heads. All through the stages of production we see small framed images. Not only are the images framed, but also if the cardboard box were a camera or editing table, I would be seeing an image that is greatly reduced in size, compared to its projected size on the giant frameless screen. Working rule #1 for me throughout frameless film production is that the massive size of the projected image must be considered first and foremost, and that every aspect of the production must be reverse-designed, reverse-engineered from how the image will appear and be perceived when projected on the gigantic screen.

For the giant screen frameless film, everything in front of me is a part of the shot. I have changed my former style of making a telescope-like circle with my hand for rough framing to holding the back of my hand flat across my nose. This view gives me a clear sense of the design of a frameless shot. (I noticed this framing method while yawning one day.) This technique helps me unframe my shots for the entire production team.

I have made a rule for myself that everything should be perceived as in focus from the foreground to the mid-ground. For images on the gigantic screen, I think that out-of-focus foreground imagery creates cues of falseness for an audience. In the real world, we can focus at will on any object, close or far. The frameless space of giant screen cinema can almost seem like the real world, and filmmaking artifacts such as soft foreground focus can work against the illusion.

In the American Cinematographer Manual, the section on depth of field reads, "The depth of field of a lens is the range of acceptable sharpness before and behind the plane of focus obtained in the final screened image. It should be understood that the determination of depth of field involves a subjective sensation that requires taking into account the condition under which the final projected image is viewed." [Page 161, 7th Edition]. Depth of field is inversely proportional to the size of the projected image, and becomes foreshortened as images are projected larger and larger. The depth of field is an artifact of the optics of the lens and is only viewable through the camera to a degree. The technical specs of lenses need to be used for judging the actual available focus.

I think that any camera movement [dolly, pan, crane, etc.] is actually perceived in a giant screen theater as magical audience movement. A technical question arises about how fast objects can move on the screen, or how fast can the camera move, and still create the illusion of movement? Movies create the appearance of motion from lots of still frames being projected so fast that we don’t perceive the blanks between the frames. This persistence of vision is also tied to the screen size. There is greater image displacement on the gigantic screen, and "persistence of vision" breaks down if the camera or object moves are too fast.

On the huge screen, camera movement and people movement can easily translate into a dreadful strobing jitter, because of the amount of image screen shift between individual film frames. For camera movement, I estimate, from discussions with my colleagues in the giant screen film community, that a good camera panning rate to be 1° of arc per second. Such movement can seem interminably slow on the set and will create a move that looks just right when projected on the giant screen. The challenge for controlling the rate of moving objects is more demanding, mainly because the simplest of movements - such as human arms swinging while walking - can translate into a broken blur when greatly enlarged in projection. Being aware of this giant screen design constraint is the first step in getting rid of such unwanted artifacts.

Seeing the film on the massive screen really is different than even seeing it on the biggest regular screen. In the editing room, details which will be plainly seen on the giant screen are just not visible, including nuances of performance, camera platform jitter and camera starts and stops, and sometimes whole parts of a shot. It is important to make 70mm contact prints and to screen as much material full size as the budget will allow. The 35mm workprint printed down from the 65mm negative or a video transfer will not give the information necessary for filmmakers to really know what the final scene will look like.

Film making artifacts like depth-of-field details are not really visible in the editing room. While watching the film on an editing machine with a 20 inch screen, the image will appear to have more apparent focus than when it is projected on a screen which is 80 feet across and 60 some feet tall. I project the 35mm workprint copy of the film as large as possible as often as possible. I have ruled out using non-linear video for editing gigantic screen films, except for making a first rough, test edit, because it does not enough image information about detail or steadiness in video to really see what’s in a giant screen shot. A particular phenomena which I have found most interesting in frameless screen filmmaking is that cuts/edits from one image to another, rather than making a new image appear to the audience, can create a sense of an instant subtraction of the key object. On the editing table, the new incoming image may appear only an inch away from the outgoing image, but it can be 10 to 20 feet away when projected on a full size giant screen. It can appear that the thing that the audience is looking at just disappears when the incoming object is partway across the giant screen. This is the reverse of the way we expect new shots affect the audience.

The giant screen theaters all have grand six-channel stereo-surround sound systems. I have hardly mentioned sound, but it is not an afterthought. In fact, I think the sound tracks for these films should be designed first and then the pictures built to it. The power of the sound track drives the gigantic pictures. I have heard it said that sound is 50% of the giant screen film. I disagree. I think that picture and sound together create a 100% experience and neither exists without the other.

After working almost exclusively in the Imax/ImaxDome-Omnimax 15 perf (perforation) 70mm and Iwerks 8 perf 70mm film formats for the last 13 years, I still find it necessary to get into a theater at least once a month to see films projected full size. The size of the screens is really challenging to keep in mind. Sometimes I notice a five-story tall building on the street and my memory is jogged into recalling the magnificent scope and size of the gigantic screen. Even with experience, it is easy to underestimate the vastness of the screen surface.

It is a challenge and a necessity to see old films made in these unique formats, and it is a must to see them on giant screen. There is so much to learn from the over 60 films already made for the giant screen, such as framing, angles, focus, editing, sound design. It is getting harder and harder to see the older films in the theater, and there is so much to learn from every film that fits a gigantic screen. For working in the frameless film format, I have recently added the term "Designer" to my "Director/Producer" credits to take into account how I am creating the architectural experience of every shot and sequence for the audience as well as creating the filmic experience.

Exploding the frame off of the film image raises so many interesting and exciting questions about the cinema language to use in this new medium. Do any of the common rules of cinema work? What is a close-up in the gigantic cinema? What is a wide shot? Is there a "reverse angle" of the current scene, an image we see so often in TV and feature films? How do we create sound with the appropriate spatial sense? What is a sequence on the giant film screen? What happens to cuts from wide shots to close-ups, when there is no frame to contain the images? Where can people or any object enter and exit on the screen? TV or feature film sequences can visually bounce around inside the frame because it holds the images. No such safety net exists with the gigantic screen's frameless visual space.

There is such a list of questions about this expansive cinema yet to be answered, and it is quite logical to ask these questions now. If we look at the first twenty years of the movie business, there was no formal or even informal language of the screen. As the newness of movies wore off, a language of cinema was needed and it grew out of the work. The giant screen format is now only a little over twenty years old, and I think we are in that same place historically with the frameless giant screen, as it seeks its own language.
________________________________________________
1. The terms Imax, ImaxDome and Omnimax are the names most associated with the gigantic screen format and are trade names from the Imax Corporation, the largest manufacturer of these 1570 projectors and cameras. In 1997, the Imax Corporation received the sole Technical Achievement Academy Award™ Oscar™ for the creation and continuous advancement of this unique format. Other companies are also manufacturing projectors and cameras for giant screen theaters.

About the Author: Ben Shedd is an Academy Award winning director/producer/writer and University cinema teacher. He shares a Peabody Award for his film work during the first years of the long running PBS science series NOVA. Ben received his 1978 Academy Award for the Documentary film THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR, about history's first successful human powered airplane designed by Dr. Paul MacCready and his team. In addition to his film production work, Ben taught cinema courses for 10 years at his alma mater, the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/Television, as well as teaching at the California Institute of the Arts. He was the 1989 PNM Endowed Chair Professor of Media Arts at the University of New Mexico and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University.
This frameless film research was supported by an Alden B. Dow Creativity Center Residential Fellowship, Northwood University and a grant from the Science Museum of Minnesota.
Bibliography: Clarke, Charles G. ASC and Walter Strenge ASC, Editors; American Cinematographer Manual, American Society of Cinematographers, Hollywood, CA 4thEd. c. 1973.
For some inspiring ideas on creating the new cinematic language for this frameless film format, I recommend: Rudolf Arnheim's book on art The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts [University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA. c. 1988], and his now classic text Film As Art [University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA c. 1957] originally written in the 1930’s and continuously in print for over 60 years [Over 75 years now, in 2008].

Shedd lives life IMAX-size Daily Princetonian article - 1998

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:45:01 -0600

Shedd lives life IMAX-size
Article from Daily Princetonian, Princeton University 1998
By HUGO BERKELEY

Amongst the star-studded roll-call of academics that densely populate Princeton, the arrival of a new name often makes little impression. The presence of Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker and IMAX specialist Ben Shedd this year has gone virtually unnoticed by the University community. Shedd is a Visiting Fellow at the Council of the Humanities and is currently studying the theoretical discrepancies between regular and large format cinema.

Usually locked away in the bowels of Firestone Library, Ben Shedd emerges today to present his research and discuss the implications of IMAX – a frameless cinematic medium so all-encompassing it leaves no imagined, off-screen space.

Daily Princetonian: What has been the nature of your interest in IMAX?

Ben Shedd: In parallel with my production work over the past 12 years, I’ve been trying to understand this interesting format that I’ve found myself working with – IMAX, large format, giant sc-reens. I want to know whether the language of cinema that I learned at film school and from 15 years of working in film continues to function once the screen gets so big that there is actually no off-screen space any more.

When I was teaching at USC’s film school in Los Angeles, I lectured on the power of the frame, essentially how you only have to put what’s inside the picture frame on the screen.

In large part, the success of Star Wars, ET and Titanic depends on the imagination of the viewer to create what is outside of the screen. And these films are only showing you a portion of the action that occurs. They make an assumption that in the black, negative space around the screen, the viewer writes in the rest of the world of the film.

When I started making IMAX films – where the screen is 80 feet wide and five stories high or domed so that it extends around the edge of you head – I discovered that the screen completely fills the viewer’s peripheral vision. So, the question is, what happens to composition and design?

DP: Did you find an answer to the question?

BS: I started with all the ideas that I had learned and tried and used when I was making other mo-vies, and came to what I call my 180 Degree Rule. If I did the opposite of what I knew, I came up with an answer.

DP: Can you give explain further what you mean by that?

BS: Well, for large format cinema, the action is actually in the theater space and is not up on the screen. When making a film, this needs to be consistently remembered. For me, it means that everything must occur on the audience’s side of the screen.

For example, if I have a large close-up of something, the audience is shrunk. If I have a panning shot, the effect is the inverse – the audience is swung around. And the reverse angle shot does not really exist in IMAX.

Part of the filming puzzle is how to make this consistent all the way through. The IMAX theater must be turned into a space and time machine. When the lights go down, we are taken on an adventure and everything that happens inside of the theater should be consistent.

DP: So, you are suggesting that IMAX is an entirely different medium from the cinema we are accustomed to watching.

BS: Yes, but it is more complicated. The tools with which one makes a large format film are similar to those of 35mm film, but the effects are different. For example, at 24 frames per second [the speed at which IMAX and 35mm film is projected], there is persistence of vision.

However, the bigger the screen gets and the more people move from one frame to another, the more likely it is you might notice their breakup. Strobing images would show up all the time because you can never see what you’ve filmed until it is on the big screen.

It is one of those design issues that must be incorporated from the very beginning of the project. When you are shooting an IMAX movie in the field, you almost feel like you’re falling asleep as you pan the camera. And then you see it on the huge screen and it looks like a majestic swoop.

DP: Is IMAX just 70mm film? What is the technical difference between IMAX and 35mm film?

BS: There have been a lot of 70 mm films. What the IMAX group did is they took the film and turned it on its side, so that it is 3 frames wide and almost a 2.25 x 2.25 square. That’s where it gets its height and width from. Each frame is 9 times the size of a feature film frame and consequently there is a great deal more definition.

DP: This sounds like a very difficult topic to research. Where do you find material?

BS: Rudolf Arhneim has been very important for me. A gestalt psychologist from the 1930s and 40s, he wrote “Film As Art” at just about the same time as sound and color were being introduced in the movies. He was speculating about what would happen when things get closer and closer to being real. For example, he states that “The greater the surface of the projection, the more difficult it is to organize the picture meaningfully.”

For me, the central difference between sm-all screen and gigantic screen space (or framed and frameless space) pertains to what happens when the screen gets so large that you don’t perceive a frame anymore. I found that this book posed questions that I was trying to answer. In this work and others of his books, Arnheim is asking some of the principal questions about cinema that I need to consider.

DP: What is the goal of your research?

BS: The whole challenge in working in these new media formats is to find the best camera and editing experts (who have got really used to using frames) and then saying “Okay, let’s jump through the frame together!”

Ben Shedd will be speaking today [1998] at 4:30PM in the Stewart Theater, 185 Nassau. His lecture is titled “Exploding the Frame: Designing a New Filmic Language.”

TROPICAL RAINFOREST Behind the Scenes Notes by Ben Shedd 12/31/91 - Edited 11/24/09

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:41:31 -0600

TROPICAL RAINFOREST Behind the Scenes Notes by Ben Shedd 12/31/91
Copyright 1991

TROPICAL RAINFOREST was filmed in new world and old world tropics, including the oldest rainforests in the world, in Queensland, Australia.

Location filming was done for 8 weeks on three different trips. Five hours of film was shot for the 38-minute final film.

The film crew built a portable camera crane, which used a bicycle wheel, climbing rope, and tropical trees as support posts. A mountain climber used rope-rigging equipment to install the crane equipment in the rainforest canopy. The equipment was specifically designed to be light weight, highly portable, and non-damaging to the environment, especially in the primary rainforest where we filmed, while being able to steadily and smoothly lift the 85 lb. IMAX/OMNIMAX 70mm film camera.

The sounds were all recorded in stereo in the field, with much of the recording done in digital recording for highest reproduction of the actual sound dynamics in the forest. Recordings were done at many different times of the day and night, as the sounds change dramatically. The stereo recordings were later spatialized during the mix to the six channel surround speakers to surround and immerse the audience, as do the original sounds in the rainforest.

One of the major challenges to the location crew was that the sky is always clouding up in the tropics, thus the high annual rainfall. The film crew utilized natural light for many of the shots, and these had to be planned with the ever-changing sunny/cloudy available light. Most of the rainstorms were predictable with the assistance of our field researchers and local assistants, but we did get thoroughly rained out twice, although we ended up filming one of the rainstorms.

The film crew waited 4 hours twice with the IMAX/OMNIMAX camera all setup to film the shot of the butterfly to emerging from its pupae. We were assisted by a butterfly breeder; however, there was no way to actually know when the butterfly would emerge. And then when the butterfly began emerging, we turned on the camera and were able to capture the entire event in real time non-stop for almost 2 minutes for the IMAX screen as this blue-winged butterfly climbed out of it’s chrysalis and unfolded its wings.

The leaf cutting ant colony, which we filmed in Costa Rica, was first spotted and photographed by our science advisors several years before filming. The ant activity was basically in the same place when we returned for research and then one and a half years later for filming. The long ant trail was working day and night, every time we passed the spot while doing other filming. We set up our camera and waited for the sun shining down through a hole in the canopy to light up the shaded trail. As soon as the sun hit the trail, all the ants dropped their leaves and fled the sunny heat. Ten minutes later, as shade returned, the ants also returned and we filmed in partial sun. Those ten minutes were the only time during the day or night when the ants stopped on that many year old trail.

A second leaf cutter ant film story: We were trying to locate the leaves which these ants were cutting and could not spot them on any of the trees for a 1/2 mile around the ant colony. Meanwhile, our camera crane rope rigger was 90 feet up in the rainforest canopy rigging and yelled down that some leaf cutters were cutting the leaves up there. Our science advisors asked him to drop down a canopy branch with leaves. We laid that branch across the leaf cutter ant trail and immediately the ants started cutting these particular leaves. We put this branch with ants busily at work in a camera stand and filmed the cutting close-ups.

The many translations of the words TROPICAL RAINFOREST were found by calling every multi-language speaker we knew, university foreign language departments, and finally, the United Nations. We were questioned by several people who came from tropical countries about whether we meant the trees nearby, as the phrase TROPICAL RAINFOREST did not actually have a direct translation in certain languages: of course, the forest was in the tropics and, of course, it rains there all the time, but it was just the forest to them. Our office fax machine was very busy receiving typed and multi-alphabet hand written versions of the title in numerous languages. The main title was hand lettered because of the many alphabets and the final title copy was double-checked with assistance from the United Nations Environmental Programme.

TROPICAL RAINFOREST Science Content Script Synopsis 1992 by Ben Shedd
Copyright 1992

The TROPICAL RAINFOREST film is about the process of evolution as found in the tropics, the rapid rate of change on the planet as the result of growing human population, and the scientific efforts to understand the rainforest, even as it is disappearing worldwide.

My working process as a science filmmaker is to examine and a research film idea, such as the tropical rainforest, and to build a film story from the reality of the subject. I work to draw the story out of the science rather than impose a story on top of a subject. I start from a reductionist's view and then seek to synthesize science reality with good filmic storytelling. A film story needs three acts - a beginning act is an introduction, the middle act is the crisis, and the last act is the resolution. At each act change is a major plot point, an event which inexorably changes the course of the film story. My goal is to combine the needs of dramatic exposition, the visual/aural interest of a subject, a film's budget constraints, and the core of a subject's science.

The story line of the TROPICAL RAINFOREST film draws its structure from the very heart of the world-wide tropical rainforest issue -- the rapid rate of biological change/destruction taking place on the planet. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it is critical to attempt to understand the machinery of evolution and vast epochs of time in order to have a perspective on the current biological crisis of this 50-year period.

One of the very strong technical and emotional tools of filmmaking is its ability to collapse time - through dissolves, editing juxtapositions, evocative sounds and music. Through these techniques, a film can give a sense of time scales other than our familiar human time.

The film is divided into three slices of time, grouped by the events of evolution and present history -- which are also the three acts of this story. This ability to collapse time while showing the forest in real scale on the giant IMAX/OMNIMAX screen can give viewers a new framework to imagine and understand what often seems to be the unfathomable workings of nature.

Act I is about the rainforest on its own terms - nature in an equilibrium from the thousand million interactions constantly shaping the environment over vast periods of time. In classic dramatic structure, this is the introduction. Following a 400,000,000-year-old prologue, this act covers almost sixty million years, from just after the extinction of the dinosaurs up until approximately the last two million years.

The tropical rainforest, with its complex biological equilibrium - and without humans, - can be viewed as existing in any or many periods during the last sixty million years. Many of the plants and animals of the rainforest are old biological artifacts, not quite living fossils, but representatives of survival strategies from many different epochs of the planet's biological history. The flora and the fauna represented in the TROPICAL RAINFOREST film were chosen in part because of their representative evolutionary age, from ferns to early flowering plants to leafing trees, from insects and spiders to reptiles to birds to primates.

One of the primary goals of the first section of the film is to saturate the audience in the biology of the rainforest, not as a place where scientists research or tourists visit, but with its own rhythms, shapes, patterns, and colors. In the TROPICAL RAINFOREST film, the camera is always seeking views other than human. For instance, the audience hovers just over the forest canopy, bird-like, or becomes the size of insects and sees them on their own scale.

Act II begins the crisis. It is set in recent evolutionary time - the two million years up to the present - as primates, including humans, move through the forests. Primates, with opposable thumbs and tools, entering the rainforest is the first plot point in the film story.

On the sixty million-year time scale of the first section of the story, we humans arrive in the film much as we arrived in evolutionary time, rather suddenly. We, like other creatures in the rainforest, try to make a niche for ourselves. Now, as our world population rapidly expands, humans as a species are utilizing the resources of the tropics on a scale as never before. Through our technological tools - including particular science tools such as satellites, computers, laboratories, and through popular technology such as television, radio and books - we have expanded our vision of the world. With our recently acquired global view, we are now seeing the cumulative effects of millions of individual actions which are resulting in the massive destruction of our planet's biology.

The film's second plot point is that we, and the biology of our planet, are at a crisis point and we must do something about it.

Act III seeks a resolution, through the examples of curious humans - tropical biologists - searching to understand the complex biology of the equatorial regions, even as the tropical forests of the world are being cut at an ever increasing rate. The last portion of the film takes place in present time with a view to the future. It shows what has actually become a race by scientists to, at a minimum, fill in the equivalent of the periodic chart of the life sciences, before the biological artifacts of the tropics disappear. By examining, studying, and thinking about the tropics, perhaps we humans can use one of our unique traits - foresight - to understand our niche on the planet and preserve the tropical region - and its grandly unique expressions of DNA - from decimation in the next twenty years.

One of the major goals of the TROPICAL RAINFOREST film is build a general science vocabulary of biological concepts for general audiences, including evolution and deep time, speciation and niche theory, and competition for resources.

Shooting Videotape Film Style - ASC magazine article in American Cinematographer May 1982

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:35:14 -0600

Background: The Dream of Don Guadalupe article, from American Cinematographer Magazine May 1982.

This article is my first published piece of writing. I was teaching at USC School of Cinema/Television at the time and liked mixing my teaching with my production work. I initiated this article while we were in production and came up with the idea of a discussion with the three key technical crew members. I wanted the article to create a sense of how we solved the problems and also wanted to provide many technical and creative details which I, as the director/co-producer, would normally get from my colleagues. I asked H.J. Brown, the program's cinematographer, and Matt Brown, the video technical supervisor, to write up several comments about various scenes and then I edited the final article into the following piece, which was published the month this program was broadcast on national PBS.

The article captures an interesting period in film and video production, just when video technology first provided the capability to photograph a broad light range. At that time, there was a distinct difference in quality from film and video productions, and video was mainly used for studio programs such as the news and variety shows where the shooting stage could be filled with bright lighting. Only a few video shows showed any visual subtlety and design as was common in film productions. Now, looking back at that period, I note that it was a time when electronic equipment was going through a significant change. I think it was the effects of Moore's Law: Intel cofounder Gordon Moore's posited the idea in 1968 that computer chip density would double every 18 months while costs would remain flat, which has happened continuously through the present. Moore's Law has brought a variety of useful tools to market. Within two years after this article was written, the personal computer arrived in the marketplace with the IBM PC and the Macintosh.

In 1982, I probably learned about the newer video cameras from a demonstration at USC or at a trade show. I do remember there was - to my mind - an artificial division between film and video at the time, which was primarily based on how final programs looked. It was as much about how much light video needed for effective exposure as anything else. One of things that was likely happening at the time was that very few skilled lighting Directors of Photography had applied their skills to video. I had just recently met cinematographer H.J. Brown and was knocked out by the exquisite lighting in all of his film work. We both wanted to see if we could apply our interest in making beautiful pictures to videotape. The following article captures our first adventure into this technology.

Shooting Videotape Film Style
in American Cinematographer May 1982

By Ben Shedd, H.J. Brown and Matt Adams

This article is copyright by the ACS Holding Company 1982 and reprinted by permission of the publisher.

"I believe there are no real aesthetic differences between film and tape-just attitude differences. It's all really just pictures and sound-and working to capture the images we see in our minds. We approached 'The Dream of Don Guadalupe' with this attitude and it worked." - Ben Shedd

"The Dream of Don Guadalupe" is part of the public television series CALIFORNIA DREAMS. This particular segment features Alejandro Rey at actual historic locations in Northern California and combines archive graphics and stills from the life of Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo as Rey recaptures California's history from 1770 to 1890. "The Dream of Don Guadalupe" will be shown on PBS May 18 (1982) nationally.

In the half-hour telecast, budgeted at $80,000, Patrick Griffin, writer and executive producer, called for voiceovers of excerpts taken from Vallejo's own five-volume history of the period. The series was made possible by a grant from First Interstate Bank of California Foundation. CALIFORNIA DREAMS and producing station KOCE-TV had committed to shot and edit the series on videotape when Ben Shedd, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, joined the production. The script called for lots of locations, quick setups by a small crew, and lighting situations normally associated with the latitude of 7247 (16mm color) film (ASA ***).

H.J. Brown, Director of Photography, recommended film be used, but the hard and fast decision had been made. Brown was cinematographer on the award-winning PBS 13-hour (Carl Sagan) series COSMOS. The filmmakers accepted the challenge with eagerness and went to work. Following is a discussion by Shedd, Brown and Matt Adams, video technical supervisor.

BEN SHEDD: Because I supervised all aspects of location production, almost immediately I joined Patrick Griffin and another CALIORNIA DREAMS production crew to shoot aerials of the sweeping countryside before the summer browning (of the California hillsides) occurred. It also made good budget sense, as the other crew was already planning helicopter shots of San Francisco.

I've done over thirty hours of aerial photography from helicopters, but this was the first time I'd had a TV monitor in my lap to watch. I was able to reposition images as we went along, spotting upcoming terrain, comparing it with the monitor image and giving cameraman Tom tucker and Spirit Airways pilot Ken Chase more of my ideas to constantly improve the shots.

We used a tall grove of eucalyptus trees across the road from the adobe house to fly over and tilt up from, wiping the image of the house into the frame. However, just outside the Adobe House State Park grounds are a highway, and next to the grounds are a mass of telephone and power lines which I didn't want in the shot. By watching the monitor and giving Tom and Ken update instructions as we flew and taped, I was able to coax a high spinning shot of the old adobe so that it seemed to be sitting in a huge filed with no sign of modern civilization around. With the monitor I saw what we had, "printed it," and went on to the next location.

Following this one-day shoot in Northern California, and having only seen three of he seven locations in person, I set about storyboarding all the sequences from ideas in my head. The location shoot was scheduled to be five days long with a travel day at each end. A long middle Wednesday was planned for the crew to travel three hours from Carmel north to Sonoma after taping in the morning.

H.J Brown and I flew to Northern California three days before the shoot for a practical look at all the locations.

H.J. BROWN: We planned the precise shooting schedule around the sun and how it would affect each of the six locales at a particular time of day. The California State Parks locations were going to be open to the public and we had to include that fact in our schedule planning. The crew consisted of key people only. Gaffer (and SuperGrip inventor) Ken Phelps, Grip Jeff Bains, Assistant Camera Paul Sherwood, Videotape recorder Operator Al Lugo, Production Manager Bill O'Neill of KOCE-TV, Sound Person David Dobkin, Associate Producer Barbara Hiestand, Production Assistant Christine Denny, and one of Ben's University of Southern California Cinema/Television Doctoral students, Don Schroeder, who took most of the production stills. We soon added Video Technical Supervisor Matt Adams of Video by Design

BEN SHEDD: We started at the Old Mission in Carmel, Calif., Vallejo's birthplace. Each sequence was designed with everything moving, the actor against the background, the camera in concert with or in opposition to the actions, always expanding, always growing, revealing new images as the story content moved us ahead. As often as possible, I planned to do long takes covering whole paragraphs of dialogue, with no coverage or safety in or out points.

The first few setups were fine, but when e put Alejandro Rey under the eaves of a Mission corridor (an easy shot with color negative), we saw streaking and "comet tailing" in the playback. I had H.J. shoot this sequence outdoors as a static close-up of Alejandro Rey, which still looked terrible on video.

After a frustrating 14-hour first day with great delays because of the streaking and other technical problems, I wanted to do the rest of the shoot on film and transfer the negative, without workprinting, directly to tape for editing. H.J reminded me that we had decided on videotape, and that it had to be possible to shoot what we had in mind or the whole "tape explosion" was junk. Production manager Bill O'Neill fond an available alternative video camera in the San Francisco with a Tech, Matt Adams of Video by Design, who arrived the second morning.

H.J. BROWN: The first of shooting was with a video camera deigned and built ix years ago. The second day was with a IKEGAMI HL 70 built in late 1979 or early 1980. along with the IEGAMI came technical advisor Matt Adams, who was priceless. Let it suffice to say that the six-year-old camera was unable to perform to the standards of Video: 1981. It was never seen again.

MATT ADAMS: When I arrived in Monterey to help an ailing video crew (because of a less than acceptable shooting day), I sensed that Ben and H.J. would gladly have traded in the video gear for a film camera. With this level of negative energy I probably should have turned around and gone home, but I just couldn't resist the challenge, or rather, opportunity. The crew wanted to make high quality images and this was an opportunity to prove that there are more complex uses for video than shooting clips for the six o'clock news. The IKEGAMI HL 79 color video camera was the only piece of equipment, which I substituted in the already existing one-inch video package.

As we began to set up the first shot. I was relieved and excited to sense that careful attention was being given to lighting, composition, exposure, and picture image. In film shoots these important components are given time and attention, but often neglected in video, the instant gratification medium. This neglect is the primary reason video fails to look as good as film. H. J. brown was treating this location soot as if there were film in the camera.

BEN SHEDD: The new camera captured the images we were trying to create. The foggy, ple-grey sky looked wonderful over the ocean. In the early afternoon, the fog and crew raced each other to a Carmel Valley ranch location. I needed the fog in the morning, now I wanted sun for the opening shot. The sun, with a steamy mist, held throughout the shooting, just as we'd planned. Sometimes you can't beat the gaffer in the sky.

H.J. BROWN: The Ikegami functioned without fail. However, operating a video camera is somewhat different than operating a film camera. You are looking through, or at, a tiny black-and-white video monitor in the eyepiece which would be suitable for framing if the lines within it were at all accurate. I drew my own in with a Magic Marker. The eyepiece is not very sharp and is otherwise worthless for seeing lighting setups. It does work as a light meter, but I found that very distracting. Our attention was therefore drawn to the larger and more colorful Sony Monitor which was with the other video electronics in the gray KOCE-TV shipping case. What you see it what you get. I grew accustomed to looking at the monitor on set-left or set-right while operating the camera.

MATT ADAMS: Concerns about the video camera's reliability slowly faded as the Ikegami camera consistently produced excellent pictures. I sensed H.J. was looking for some guidance on the rules of shooting video and this need helped to expedite a good working relationship between us.

BEN SHEDD: H.J. and Matt immediately began what became a constant conversation between them as H.J. lit the shots, and Matt, sitting at the monitor, tweaked the exposure while watching the waveform monitor and the picture.

MATT ADAMS: The color monitor provides the key image on the set. What you see (on the monitor) is what you get. There is no need to bracket exposures or change filter packs. Color correction can happen in real time. The image is immediately available for instant feedback and freer, more efficient experimentation.

To give H.J. the best possible "view-finder" image on the monitor we had Ken Phelps fabricate a wide-angle sunshade out of black showcard. It was affixed to the monitor, completely cutting out extraneous reflections, and was used throughout the production.

BEN SHEDD: We returned to the Mission to reshoot the first days "impossible in video" under-the-walkway shot, partly because it's what I wanted, and partly out of stubbornness and determination to believe that videotape could do this shot just like film could, and it did.

We found a wonderful room inside the mission to redo an exterior shot, which on videotape (with the old camera) had made Alejandro Rey look like a TV variety show host. With the new camera and H.J.'s lighting, the scene worked an Alejandro became part of the environment. We used original pages from Father Junperio Serra's diary as props, probably worth $10,000 a page.

H.J. BROWN: The historic homes were an art director's dream, completely propped with antiques from the period. However, the rooms were small and we couldn't move many of the furnishings. There were no fly-away walls either, just doorways and halls.

"The Dream of Don Guadalupe" was shot entirely with a #1 fog filter, with two exceptions. Once, the combination of other filters made the #1 unnecessary, and the second exception when a net or nets were used. The nets I use are homemade in black, beige, and white. They were used to add more of a period look to the Vallejo dialogue point-of-view shots. The net gave a pleasing sort of half-star effect along with a general softening of the image. A lot of candles were used burning in the shots as they were the natural light source of the period.

BEN SHEDD: From our pre-shooting research, H.J. planned to shoot the Petaluma adobe house in the very early morning to pump sunlight under the eaves, and also to match the helicopter material. On the scheduled morning it was all fogged in. We shot the adobe interiors, while waiting for the sun. The lighting made these rooms look like it was a gorgeous sunny day outside. When the sun did come out t was too high in the sky for the overhanging porches they were designed to keep the sun out) and Ken Phelps, the gaffer, needed every reflector in the grip truck to fill in the deep shadows.

H.J BROWN: The exteriors consisted of daylight, fog, dusk, and firelight. If the day was overcast, some kickers were added for punch because a too flat image is really too flat on video. If the situation was close-up bright sunlight, large silks were used for the actor's eyes, and a cutter was used to take the board reflection (too strong for video) off the actor's chest. Exterior day long shots needed some rather interesting filter combinations. I sued a combination of polar screens and one or more NBRA (Natural balanced ratio attenuators) - I just call them neutral density graduates. I was mostly using a one-or-two-stop NRBA to cut the overly bright areas and even out the video gain. Sometimes it took all three NBRA filers to achieve the desired effect.

MATT ADAMS: It is a given that the contrast ratio in video is nowhere near the contrast ratio in film. the idea is to light in such a way that you fool people into thinking video has a better contrast ratio than it does. You must make video appear to be holding more shadow detail than it can actually hold. On "The Dream of Don Gaudalupe" we were continually looking for ways to compress the contrast ratio, especially with filters on portions of the image, to keep the final image what Ben and H.J. had in their minds.

H.J. BROWN: The dusk sequences were lit with single fay key light through soft frost, a western exposure sky light fill (one minute after sunset) and 1-Ks and 2-Ks for the windows of the house in the background. With video you just keep cranking up the gain as the day or scene gets darker. This didn't seem to change the quality of the image for the first couple of stops, but after that it becomes noticeable and finally a definite effect appears.

BEN SHEDD: We did the sequence in the Vallejo vineyard just after sunset and it looked like color negative-not pushed.

MATT ADAMS: H.J. shot the videotape with low light levels throughout the production. Low level light can turn into muddy video very quickly. I was extremely conscious of maintaining critical exposure in the camera to avoid this possibility, riding the edge most of the time. The Ikegami camera was carefully set up at the beginning of the shoot as was the color monitor.

H.J BROWN: The interior lighting environments were the Mission, Fort Sutter jail, Benicia State capital, Vallejo's Sonoma dining room, and the adobe house's dirt floor kitchen. Because of our schedule one of the interiors was shot at night, but lit as though it was fully day outside. This was done by tissue papering the windows and using 2-K's and fays outside. The interiors were lit by bouncing 2-K's and 9-lights off foam core and adding hard cross lights and kickers where necessary.

I found that colors which were close together did not separate from one another very well in video so using hard rims and kickers were crucial for modeling and creating the look of the shot. Sometimes we balanced the interior to exterior in color temperature and density, and sometimes we didn't. At ties we put tungsten lights outside windows we could see through, and other times we used reflectors outside to pump daylight into the interiors. It was just a matter of considering the look we wanted and the sources available. Last year I did a documentary on the police department night work and I lit the whole show with two large flashlights.

BEN SHEDD: We lit all the candles in the Bencia State capital building, even though it was day. The room was filled with beaver top hats and quill pens, and reeked of the historical period. Alejandro Rey's outfit was such a perfect color blend with the room's wall that H.J. ad to add a heavy cross light, motivated by the sun through the windows, to create good separation from the background.

MATT ADAMS: I changed the color balance of the camera only a few times during the production. Once, when the script called for a period warm feel to the image, I white balanced the camera for daylight and then we shot the scene with an 85 filter on the lens.

H. J. BROWN: I didn't need a light meter at any time on the entire show. I had three or four other meters instead. One meter readout appears in the video-camera's black and white viewfinder and is distracting as hell. It registers as a series of moving diagonal lines in the image highlights or hot sky, and it sort of changes to a negative image as well-and that's when the light reading is correct! Another readout was the green scale near the monitor and recorder in the gray box. The third meter was Matt Adams. Matt and I kept a steady discussion going on between us regarding exposure, trying to find ways to make the video accept the image we gave it, but never compromising the look of the image. The video techs will tell you every time you need to open up or stop down.

The most frustrating thing I found about shooting one-inch video was he inability to resolve subtleties the way film does. It doesn't see subtle changes in color, texture, or lighting. Correcting for this usually means adding one more kicker or eye light, doubling the gel color, or spotting or flooding a unit much more that I would have expected.

MATT ADAMS: The waveform monitor was my absolute light meter. There is no way to tell how the image looks (from an artistic viewpoint) from the waveform monitor, but it gives the output of the video camera in absolute terms.

The evolution of video took a giant step forward two years ago with the introduction of second generation self-contained video cameras. These high performance cameras allow video to be shot without aesthetic constraints and technical limitations. Combined with portable one-inch video recorders, video now has great location flexibility. If the scene requires very low light levels, it can e recorded without concern for noisy video or banding. Remember, the color monitor is your reference. It must be set up correctly or it can be very deceiving. Video, like all other tools, requires skilled people to operate it.

BEN SHEDD: By the third day, the crew was working very effectively, wasting little time with each set up. Crew movement and job co0rdination are slightly different on a video crew than on a film crew, especially in the assistant camera department. The video monitor needs a power supply. At each setup the white balance on the camera and quickly checked the camera registration. This camera prep needs to be organized into the rhythm of prepping a shot or it can create downtime, especially for the actor.

H.J. BROWN: I think it currently takes a little longer to shot videotape than film on this kind of production. From my perspective, shooting videotape took about five to ten minutes longer per major shot to move, set up, light, cable, and shoot than film set up takes to ready.

Ben's storyboard called for a period point-of-view shot for Vallejo with me riding horseback.

I climbed up on the horse. The crew handed me the video camera with 50 feet of coaxial cable attached to the one-inch recorder. Well, the horse didn't care much more for he whole arrangement than I did and it bolted. It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn't such a terrific idea. If I and the $45,000 electronic camera were to hit the ground we'd al be going home. We tried, but I shot this sequence with a 100 foot load of 7247 in my Beaulieu (16mm film camera).

By the time we arrived at Sutter's Fort in Sacramento on the last day, one of the fort sequences had been eliminated. Sutter's Fort is large and carefully preserved, and Ben wanted to see as much of it as possible in one shot. I plotted a diagonal dolly move, pushing forward to reveal Alejandro Rey while showing the western courtyard, and then panning a following him back along the dolly track showing the eastern courtyard. We saw the "printed" take as we shot it and didn't even watch the playback.

BEN SHEDD: I wanted to do firelight shot at night to add drama. This kind of shot was certainly possible on film. We could have done the whole show like this against a stage cyc in a studio, but how dull.

H.J. BROWN: Video responds just fine to fire. I put a 1-K with some spun and M2 gel under a portable barbecue with a wood fire. A tree branch being swept up through the 1-K light added the flicker. The flames acted quite natural on video and the faint skyline silhouette was crystal clear.

MATT ADAMS: Video technology can now deal with imagery like the night fire scene we shot. Older cameras would have produced comet tails or lagging, or electronic noise which never looks good. Sometimes film grain is ok because it moves about randomly. However video grain is not random and appears redundantly in the same place and always the same size. We had no noise or comet tailing from the fire. It looked great!

BEN SHEDD: As we started the postproduction we had all the stills and graphics left to put on tape. Videotape editor Barbro Semmingsen and I shot sample stills for the rough-cut with a cheapo black and white video camera directly on 3/4-inch cassettes.

We couldn't find a video camera animation stand to shot pre-programmed stand move (from point A to point B in a specified time). I didn't want to use a video camera on a tripod because the barrel rotation on the zoom lens is too short for slow starts and stops. We decided to shoot the stills on film.

H.J. BROWN: For the stills I shot with ACL (16mm film camera) with 1050 Angeniex lens equipped with an a. Chrosziel Munchen fluid zoom ring. I shot material of every size and shape, from slides, photocopies, prints, paintings, old books, and artwork to historic maps on loan from the library. There were over 150 different pieces of art, all shot on 16m 7247 and then the negative was transferred directly to one-inch tape on Compact Video's Rank Cintel fling spot scanner. Camera moves were timed and counted in our heads during filming. Many moves were designed to be combined and dissolved together during the on-line videotape editing session. In the final program they look like stand-animated sequences.

MATT ADAMS: In no way do I see video in its present form replacing film. However I do see video as a solid alternative to 16mm color negative, especially if the final distribution medium is television.

BEN SHEDD: A note t our old film friends: Don't worry, H.J. and I haven't by any means abandoned film. I found working with videotape was very much part of the whole business we work in, and not a second class part of it. Is just one of the tools, like film.

H.J. BROWN: Each medium in which I've worked, be it 35mm wide screen, 16mm, or videotape has its assets, limitation, and restrictions. Each medium can be made to look very good if it is presented in the format for which it was shot. There is no good or bad film or video, only the necessity to see and understand the capabilities of each, and work with those capabilities. its still just sound and pictures, light and shapes. It's just a matter of seeing.

LF Examiner® Newsletter Essays - Written 1998/1999

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:30:45 -0600

LF Examiner® Newsletter Essays
Exploding the Frame. An occasional essay by Ben Shedd
featured in LF Examiner®
The Independent Journal of the Large Formant Motion Picture Industry
Published originally when James Hyder's magazine was called MaxImage!
The independent newsletter of the Large Format (LF) motion picture industry, edited and published by James Hyder.
Copyright © 1998, 1999 Cinergetics, LLC. Reprinted by pemission from MaxImage! and Cinergetics
My Strange Uncle at midnight in Sydney, presented by the Splinter Group. Oct 98
Letterboxing on the Giant Screen: Everything is different one more time. Sep 99
MaxImage! October 1998 Issue
My Strange Uncle at midnight in Sydney, presented by the Splinter Group.
Since the early 1990s, very few films without immediate booking value have been screened at the International Space Theater Consortium conferences, making it harder, if not impossible, to see and learn from the early works of the LF medium. I think there is much to be learned from early LF films such as My Strange Uncle (1981), which many of us late-night filmgoers had the opportunity to see in Sydney as part of the Splinter Group's Big Shorts Down Under festival. I first saw My Strange Uncle in 1986 at my first ISTC meeting, in a midnight screening at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. I was working on my first LF film, Seasons, and wanted to see as many films as possible, to learn and learn and learn. My Strange Uncle taught me so much.
Let me give an example of why I think viewing films like My Strange Uncle can be useful today. Although the last time I saw this film was in 1987, I vividly remembered an interior scene by a fireplace, with a series of two-person shots of Cloris Leachman and the other actors. The focus throughout most of this scene is quite soft. Seeing it again in Sydney, I realized again the soft focus was not intentional, but the result of what happens to depth of field on the giant screen. And it reminded me that we still see many soft-focus shots in new LF films, despite faster film stocks and better lenses.
The American Society of Cinematographer's Film Manual has a clear explanation of depth of field, with a direct implication for the giant screen. "The depth of field of a lens is the range of acceptable sharpness before and behind the plane of focus obtained in the final screened image. It should be understood that the determination of depth of field involves a subjective sensation that requires taking into account the condition under which the final projected image is viewed." (7th edition, page 161. Emphasis added.) The Manual was written long before screens got to be the size of those in today's 8/70 and 15/70 theaters, but I think that the converse of its statement becomes an important LF production rule: the range of acceptable sharpness (for any given shot) decreases as the screen size increases.
In other words, the giant screen requires much greater depth of field than smaller formats. Therefore, while filming, depth of field must be considered with great precision. The problem is that we can't see depth of field in the camera's viewfinder. We can't see it at the editing table, either, or even in a 35mm reduction-print screening, because what appears to be an acceptable depth of field on a 35mm screen will seem too shallow when blown up to 60 by 80 feet (18 by 24 meters). The image's clarity (or lack thereof) can only be properly evaluated when seen on a giant screen. There are plenty of technical solutions to maximize depth of field, as long as we understand the basic inverse rule.
One thing I found interesting about seeing that sequence in My Strange Uncle again is the realization that it would probably work just fine on TV and maybe even in a feature film theater. But on the giant screen it just doesn't work. At each cut I was left looking at a fuzzy empty space on the screen.
In the LF medium, unlike in smaller formats, the viewer does not always take in the entire screen image, but may focus on only a portion of the whole. When the scene shifts at a cut, if the central element of the new shot is sufficiently far across the screen from the previous shot, the viewer must quickly scan the giant screen to locate the new focus of attention. This process, which is instantaneous and automatic on smaller screens - including editing tables! - can take a small but noticeable amount of time in an LF film, seriously distracting from the narrative flow.
That's what was happening in My Strange Uncle. My field of view was suddenly going out of focus on every cut because I was continuing to look at a part of the image which was not where I needed to be looking. On the editing table, these two centers of focus were probably only 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) apart. But on the LF screen, they ended up being about 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 meters) apart. Size makes a difference! I was glad the Splinter Group showed this film, especially now that there is so much talk about making LF dramas. It would be a real waste of time and money to reinvent the wheel, rather than study the early films that fashioned today's LF techniques through trial and error. I think filmmakers new to the LF world would be wise to rent a LF theater and screen as many old films as they can find, before venturing into production. The Splinter Group is making a significant contribution by screening films like My Strange Uncle. And showing it at midnight was in keeping with a great ISTC tradition.
Ben Shedd is a director/producer/designer of giant screen films at his company Shedd Productions, Inc., and was a visiting senior research scholar and lecturer at Princeton University 1998-2003.

MaxImage! September 1999 Issue
Letterboxing on the Giant Screen: Everything is different one more time.
In an almost unannounced technical screening at the recent Large Format Cinema Association conference, a test print was shown which I think changed everything about the giant-screen format. Short excerpts of several widescreen Hollywood movies were projected in 15/70 with the top and bottom areas of the screen blacked out. This letterboxing is often used in video to show the entire frame of widescreen films within the narrower shape of current television monitors. We saw clips from several films, including Independence Day, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and letterboxed scenes from the LF films Mysteries of Egypt.
What struck me immediately was how well the films worked as dramatic pieces on the giant screen. The giant screen seemed wider than Cinerama and Cinemascope, with the scenes stretching across our field of view in the high resolution of 15/70. With the letterbox framing, the audience was no longer inside the image as we are in full-screen LF. Aerial shots didn't pitch us around as they usually do because they were held by the frame. By adding a frame bar at the top and bottom of the image, we were suddenly back in a movie theater and watching a big, high-quality, widescreen movie.

The experience was much like that of seeing Lawrence of Arabia in 5/70 at the LFCA's closing event a few nights later, only with much higher image quality. As Chris Reyna Imagica USA and president of LFCA) pointed out during the technical presentation, letterboxing on the giant screen offers a whole new set of options for LF. We can see beautiful movies and we can see giant screen films.
The letterboxing demo showed something else as well. It showed that when we see full-screen LF films - on flat or dome screens - we are in a different filmic space, unlike anything in conventional movies. I've been calling this "frameless film" for several years now, and trying to develop an aesthetic set of production rules to work in this distinctive format. (For a longer discussion on the "frameless film," please see my paper, "Exploding The Frame," posted here.) Movies made for the full giant screen need to be designed knowing that the audience won't have the image edge as a frame of reference.
We all agree that when we watch an aerial shot in an LF film, we feel the whole theater moving, tilting, pitching around. For me that means the action is on the audience's side of the theater, not up on the screen. There's a completely different aesthetic once the frame is out of sight. And one of the biggest challenges in making full-screen LF films is that all of the production tools we use - storyboard sketches, camera, editing screen - all constrain the images within a frame. Our tools show us images and sequences that look just like the TV and movies we see everywhere.
These framed tools are certainly the most cost-effective for production, but the result is that the production team and the full-screen LF audience are getting two different - and quite opposite - film experiences. With a frame around the image, we don't experience the motion sensations or scale changes that we would in an LF theater.

I've developed a rule of thumb - that I've nicknamed the "180-degree rule of opposites" - to keep me alert to this production puzzle. For instance, in LF a camera pan creates the effect of the audience moving, swiveling - in effect setting the theater in motion. So a pan is not a camera move, but the opposite: it's the theater moving in the opposite direction to the pan. And once this shot gets the audience moving, what will come next? A cut to a static shot will create an abrupt halt for the audience. But the problem is that the production crew won't see this effect on the editing table. It's only experienced on the frameless full screen.
This first struck me while cutting my first LF film, Seasons. We had edited a sequence of hot-air-balloon aerials that looked great on the editing table. Director of photography David Douglas, noticing that the shots had been cut quite short, commented that the sequence hadn't "let the theater settle back down."
As I have studied LF film after LF film to teach myself the giant screen format, I have often noted how much a frame would help here and there. Do it yourself: try to see where sequences that might have looked fine on the editing table within a frame seem peculiar on the full screen.
The letterboxing demo clearly shows that the full-screen LF image is a new and different cinema that calls for new and different techniques and terminology. Because the full-screen LF film doesn't have a frame, the common language of cinema needs reworking for giant screen movies.
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A note: Letterboxing affects not only the medium, but descriptions of it. Even to write this essay, I have had to come up with the somewhat awkward phrases "full giant screen" and "full-screen LF" to describe what we have been watching for 30 years. Long ago my daughter urged me to think up a name for this new cinema and suggested that full-screen LF be called "agora-cinema," the cinema of vast spaces. Synonyms for vast include: enormous, immense, huge, gigantic, colossal, mammoth, tremendous, stupendous, gargantuan. Some options. Maybe we should call it MaxImage? Oops, that's already taken.
Ben Shedd is a director/producer/designer of giant screen films at his company Shedd Productions, Inc., and was a visiting senior research scholar and lecturer at Princeton University 1998-2003.