Wachowski Brothers and the Speed Racer Movie

Steven Weintraub writes "Susan Sarandon talks about the Wachowski Brothers Speed Racer movie and confirms the revolutionary way the brothers are making the film — the entire frame will be in focus like a cartoon."

Comments

Newfangled Oldfangled?

[Anonymous Coward]

Goodness. That revolutionary way of composing a shot called deep focus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_focus and used as far back as 1922? Pull me up a chair and pour me one of those newfangled qahwat al-bnn all those crazy kids are drinking these days!

Re:Newfangled Oldfangled?

[Eivind]

There's two ways of getting a larger focused area with a single camera and a single lens. Both involve getting less ligth, so both will give higher noise, or force you to film at brigther light.

First, like you say, go farther away and use a tele-lens to pull the foreground to the wanted size. This has the side-effect that, as you say, the background becomes bigger and appears closer to the foreground. (because what matters is the *relative* distance, having the actors 5 meters away and the explosion 50 meters away means the actors are 10 times closer. Having the actors 50 meters away and the explosion 100 meters away means the explosion is only twice as far away, so if you compensate by zooming until the actors are same size on screen, the end-result is a explosion that is visually 5 times larger than in the first case)

Second, use a smaller aperture. With an infinitely small aperture, you get everything in focus, with a small aperture you get a very large focused area.

Re:Brothers?

[Phybersyk0]

Who cares. What's really cool is that:

1.) Kym Barret (The Matrix,Reloaded,Revolutions) will be doing the costume design.
2.) John Gaeta (The Matrix, inventor of Bullet Time..) is the visual effects supervisor.
3.) Owen Patterson (The Matrix, etc) is the production designer.
4.) Peter Fernandez (The original American voice of Speed Racer) will have an appearance in the film.

Re:Deep Focus?

[PhunkySchtuff]

From what I can understand of what they're going to be doing in this movie - they're using CGI to compliment deep focus effects.
Deep focus will still give you a depth of field, you just play around with everything in the frame to ensure it's within the hyperfocal distance of the lens.
With this new one, they're taking it one step further - if two things need to appear in the frame, but it's not possible to have them both in focus, they'll be filmed separately and stitched together so absolutely everything is sharp and crisp...

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[Professor_UNIX]

Does anybody still pay attention to these guys? I mean, okay, people seemed to like The Matrix (although I never understood why) but everything since then has been uniformly awful.

"Everything since"? According to IMDB they've done the Matrix trilogy, a few Matrix related anime and video games, and then V for Vendetta which was a fucking awesome movie. What are you smoking?

Re:Depth of Field in Games

[Bazman]

Its not just game devs. Animators try real hard to make their animations have that 'film' look. I think Nick Park did motion blur in some of his early stuff - possibly the early Wallace and Grommit shorts. Since then I think he's taken every trick in the cinematographer's book, even borrowing from Spielberg with the crash-zoom shot where you zoom out whilst tracking the camera up to the subject, keeping the same size and making the background do crazy things. I bet there's some lifts from Citizen Kane in his work too. Marvellous.

Re:Focus is a tool

[ajs]

Read TFA:

They're doing something where they're layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon [...] so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background. So first off, it's not what the Slashdot summary says. It's going to have multiple planes of focus, but the entire frame will not be in focus. Think of an old cartoon where you had a foreground plane, an action plane and a background plane. It may look something like that, but of course, the real world has more in it than those three planes, so some things won't be in focus. No camera has an infinite depth of field, but it can be simulated by using multiple images, digitally composited. This is something like a focus bracket, which you can see a good example of in Wikipedia's picture of the day from April 18, 2007 (I just happen to have remembered this because it's where I learned about the technique).

The "Revolutionary New Camera"

[DJCacophony]

The camera in question is oakley's spinoff camera brand, Red Digital Camera.

Re:Focus is a tool

[Sparohok]

No camera has an infinite depth of field

A pinhole camera has infinite depth of field. Of course it has some other problems, diffraction, sensitivity, etc.

If you have enough light, fast film, and shoot with a tight aperture, you can get very wide depth of field. Just two or three "layers" would be enough for effectively infinite depth of field even at film resolution. However compositing the layers would be a bit of a chore. For a feature length film, the compositing process would need to be automatic, perhaps assisted with something like a scanning laser rangefinder.

Martin

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[itchy92]

I want a flick that does for movies what "Peaches" by TPOTUSOA did for rock'n'roll: offer a brief escape from the standard sex/drugs/violence routine

What? Didn't you ever pay attention to the lyrics? The whole song is ABOUT sex and violence.

/Ouch, something is poking the inside of my cheek

Re:Focus is a tool

[jafac]

personally, I think she misunderstood the technology they're shooting for; I think what they're probably doing is HDR cinema - where they're not doing infinite depth of field, (which is actually fairly easy to obtain with a wide aperture), but rather, a high dynamic range, which is a fairly new technology in digital photography, and some automatic cameras with this feature are just starting to appear. It wouldn't surprise me if there weren't people experimenting with it in cinema. The color effect would very likely be very Anime-like, from some of the HDR photography I've seen.

Almost every camera has an infinite depth of field

[TechnicolourSquirrel]

...if you set it to its widest angle and find the right focal point. My cheapo Powershot A75 for example, is in focus from 3 feet to infinity whenever I set the focus to 7 feet on the widest angle. Longer lenses can also achieve infinite depths of field quite easily, as long as you add more light. Also, the smaller the diameter of the lens, the more easily it can achieve infinite focus (and conversely the more difficult it is to achieve focal separation), which is why 16mm films use focus-shifting effects so much more rarely than 35mm films. In fact, infinite depth of field is SO easy to achieve these days (unlike in the days of Citizen Kane, when Orson Welles had to borrow every light on the studio lot to achieve it), that this stuff Sarandon says about layering different films simply makes no sense. This would definitely NOT be required to achieve infinite focus in this day and age. She must be confusing two different goals. I suspect that the layering is going to be used to have much finer control of exactly how much focus or motion blur they put on separate elements (exactly what you would need, BTW, to mimick the sorts of 'motion effects' you see in anime) -- which means this the-frame-is-always-in-focus-for-the-entire-film stuff is probably just not true. I could shoot a film exactly like that with a hi-def camera TOMORROW with absolutely no extra equipment. So something just does not add up here.