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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Contagion- Soderbergh...

Terrific interview with Soderbergh about Contagion on Ain't It Cool News at this link. A couple of quotes:

"...when we started to shoot I had my rules about what I was doing with the camera and what I wasn’t doing with the camera. The whole movie is shot with two lenses, basically an 18mm and a 35mm. Very clean compositions, very symmetrical, very unobtrusive, nothing that calls attention to itself, camera can’t move unless an actor is moving… I really wanted the style to be really, really simple. Not boring, but simple. Clean."

On the color filters:

"It’s more subtle. We were doing stuff, but in a much less obvious way. We had different color temperatures and filters for each of the environments, but I didn’t want it to be as extreme. ...It’s much more subtle, like color temperature in Minnesota is different, the saturation is down, Hong Kong is very warm with a lot of saturation, San Francisco low con filter with a little bit of a bloom on it, London tobacco filter, Geneva lime green… I didn’t want to have it feel like TRAFFIC in that regard. But I did want to do stuff to make you feel like you knew where you where even if you couldn’t articulate why."

Soderbergh is a fascinating guy, and there's some terrific insights into his creative choices in this piece, particularly on the use of handheld shots vs. tripod (no handheld shots in this film), helicopter shots (no helicopter shots), among other issues.
 
Marc Wielage said:
Terrific interview with Soderbergh about Contagion on Ain't It Cool News at this link. A couple of quotes:


Soderbergh is a fascinating guy, and there's some terrific insights into his creative choices in this piece, particularly on the use of handheld shots vs. tripod (no handheld shots in this film), helicopter shots (no helicopter shots), among other issues.
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Not to break balls but in the video i posted on the last page of some b roll footage you can see him doing handheld work. I think its part of the scene where Gwyneth is partying in Hong Kong. Either way its cool to see him talking about filtering etc.
 
I felt Contagion was a decent movie but I honestly thought it looked awful. I don't think it's a reflection on the camera, just how the film maker decided to shoot. It's almost as if he didn't want to light anything. I mean it really really looked awful.
 
Christian Simpson said:
I felt Contagion was a decent movie but I honestly thought it looked awful. I don't think it's a reflection on the camera, just how the film maker decided to shoot. It's almost as if he didn't want to light anything. I mean it really really looked awful.
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I second this!! I was thinking this the entire time while watching. I noticed some "Yellowish" shots in the trailer, and honestly took that to be an aesthetic as the "world is contracting a global disease", however some shot interiors looked this way and then the alt angle was reddish skin tones and poorly balanced. The transitions from outside shots to inside scenes were abrupt in color and didn't flow. It looks REALLY BAD in my opinion, but I have to assume Soderbergh's DP knew what he wanted. I mean, I hate the washed out look and overexposed highlights in almost all of his films.

I get the idea of "realness" but it looks amateurish on a technical standpoint in some shots. When he did "FULL FRONTAL" on the XL1s SD cam, it is acceptable but to have such poor latitude is either a bad DP (just noticed he DP'd the film), poor dynamic range in the sensor (which probably isn't the case) or bad decisions on the director.

Either way, obviously I'm not one to judge everything here, but I mainly saw this film in 4K DLP projection to see what the EPIC could do and honestly I've seen better looking films out of the Alexa recently. This is the first EPIC film so lets give the others coming a change. From the look of "The Amazing Spiderman" the EPIC footage looks amazing. It makes you wonder if 5K is necessary or if a better overall picture or look could have been achieved out of this camera? Either way, it doesn't make me long for an EPIC like I did previous to this. I would expect however that this look was a bad judgement call on the director/producers rather than the capabilities of the camera.

I do have to say, the resolution and sharpness in the interior close ups were insanely good and sharp, however the wide angle shots looked poor and most importantly what I kept noticing was the extremely selective depth of field in the flashback scenes in the casino that looked very bad.
 
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Eric - Contagion was shot with Red MX and Soderbergh has been the DP on his films for the better part of the last decade. I can't speak for his choice of aesthetics, but I can't believe a director of his caliber is making choices without careful consideration. I'll see it this week and hopefully it's great!
 
The first thing you have to realize is that the film looks as it was intended to look. Now you might want to begin thinking about WHY it was orchestrated to look this way. Once you have come to grips with Soderbergh's intentions, and discarded all notions that the movie's form and style were born out of anything but mastery, then you will be in a better position to asses it, accept it, or reject it.
 
Adrian Correia said:
Eric - Contagion was shot with Red MX and Soderbergh has been the DP on his films for the better part of the last decade. I can't speak for his choice of aesthetics, but I can't believe a director of his caliber is making choices without careful consideration. I'll see it this week and hopefully it's great!
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I agree Adrian; he is a careful thought out director and a very talented director. As far as cinematography goes, I don't see the visual appeal of his films. All I'm saying is in Full Frontal, Che', Contagion, etc he seems to care less about overblown highlights & color. I agree the storyline is important, but I can tell you the first thing I thought and the first thing my wife mentioned (an outsider with no film experience) mentioned was why does the image look so bad. I asked what she thought and she mentioned the color was messed up. I agreed entirely. If it was consistent, I would have taken it as the concept. I know Soderbergh mentioned for different sequences he wanted the color temp to change depending on the time in the world, however it looked different in the same sequences in between shots and was very distracting.

His directing and character action was great, the story flowed well except for the transition between the second act and third at the second plot point, which IMHO should have been a bit more dramatic, but overall the film flowed, actors did their part. My only complaint, for what it is worth is that someone who is going to see the film for the quality of the camera, I was disappointed, but honestly what I expected from him as a cinematographer.
 
Bill Anderson said:
The first thing you have to realize is that the film looks as it was intended to look. Now you might want to begin thinking about WHY it was orchestrated to look this way. Once you have come to grips with Soderbergh's intentions, and discarded all notions that the movie's form and style were born out of anything but mastery, then you will be in a better position to asses it, accept it, or reject it.
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I agree as well. I was stating my opinion and the choices I would have liked to see. In some fashion the off color works, as does the overexposed highlights in his films, but IMHO this is very distracting. Not my cup of tea as a cinematographer but he is the one making the money. He is a great director. I would simply have liked to see overall color (whichever balance he chose) across the majority of the film and not misbalanced from shots in the same scenes. Well worth seeing regardless of opinion of the camera.
 
Eric J said:
I second this!! I was thinking this the entire time while watching. I noticed some "Yellowish" shots in the trailer, and honestly took that to be an aesthetic as the "world is contracting a global disease", however some shot interiors looked this way and then the alt angle was reddish skin tones and poorly balanced. The transitions from outside shots to inside scenes were abrupt in color and didn't flow. It looks REALLY BAD in my opinion, but I have to assume Soderbergh's DP knew what he wanted. I mean, I hate the washed out look and overexposed highlights in almost all of his films.
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fyi, Steven Soderbergh is Peter Andrews
 
Colin Bradburne said:
i.e. Epic was not used on this movie.
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I stand corrected. I guess imdb gave me bad info:


Technical specifications for
Contagion (2011) More at IMDbPro »

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Camera
Red Epic
Red One MX

Film negative format (mm/video inches)
Redcode RAW

Cinematographic process
Digital Intermediate (master format)
Redcode RAW (4.5K) (5K) (source format)

Printed film format
35 mm (spherical)
70 mm (horizontal) (IMAX DMR blow-up)
D-Cinema

Aspect ratio
1.85 : 1
 
I posted this in a different thread but this one is probably a better fit.

I saw it projected digitally, although not in IMAX. I agree, it looks better on the big screen than online. I think the look of the film, as you watch it, becomes less jarring for two reasons.

Firstly, regardless of how it looks, if a movie is doing its job properly, you get pulled into the story and the way it looks from a technical standpoint becomes less of a factor (i.e. The Blair Witch Project). I felt this way about Contagion.

And second, the more I thought about it, I feel the look of this movie is quite integral to the storytelling (i.e. The Blair Witch Project). Contagion is literally about exposure.

Over exposing the image was probably a very deliberate visual metaphor. Certain parts of the image are "protected" while other parts are subject to contamination (from light). It's a visual reminder of the situation the characters are faced with...some people will be infected and some won't, but you don't know who or when. It's unsettling.
 
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Just saw Contagion last night. It was an engrossing film and interesting to watch, but it was one of the more technically infuriating experiences I've had at a theater. Besides the theater's issues with a buzzing sound, soft focus, and a continuous scratch down the center of the screen for most of the movie (should have seen it at a digital projection), the movie itself hardly seems like something a camera company would want to be connected with. I was a bit surprised to see a G&E dept in the credits since the movie looked like it was shot entirely available light. Perhaps they just rigged the locations with common, non-film light fixtures to give it that available light look with just a little extra control?

The 35mm print I saw projected seemed a bit soft but it may have been out of focus, and a lot of scenes had harsh blowouts and weird stuff going on in the highlights. Maybe it was the grade or the print, but the blacks were more crushed than expected (maybe to minimize noise from shooting high iso in available light?) and the blowouts were quite harsh especially in certain scenes. I kept thinking "this was shot on RED-MX? What did they do to the image to make the black level and highlights look so bad and why?". Perhaps they were going for that HD video look to make things feel more real and immediate and harsh.

Anyway, interesting film, but not one that I would look to if I was thinking about shooting a feature on RED-MX... I guess you still need a good camera AND a DP to make a movie look good :)
 
Contagion

Contagion

I saw a double feature on Saturday night: the Arri Alexa shot Drive and Contagion.

I should prefice by saying I am as big a RED fan as they come. I'm excitedly saving my cash for the chance to buy an Epic-X.

So I saw Drive first and... I have to be honest...I thought it looked superb. The color rendition, the filmic and pleasing highlights, the filmic motion. It was all very overwhelming to me to see something look so filmic. I was so proud of all the people, regardless of company, who have pushed digital film to this point of, in my eyes on, that projector, on that particular night, indistinguishability with film.

Then I excitedly rushed to Contagion...and while I enjoyed the film, it was jarring and distressing to see the contrast between the two. It's not so much that it looked awful (as others have, in alarmist fashion, pointed out) it's that it looked like HD video. Really good HD video, but HD video nonetheless. Which hurt to observe because I've seen Red look so filmic and equally, if not more so, gorgeous than the Alexa.

I know it's taboo to mention Alexa here. But I have to echo the disbelief in Damon's eyes when his wife is found dead, "What happened!? What happened to her!?"
 
It's not taboo to mention Alexa here. I was also struck by Drive's look. I went in not knowing it was shot digitally and was shocked afterwards- not just that it was Alexa, but that it was digital at all. The scene in his apartment where just the single work light was on was amazing. Wonderful highlight preservation, etc. You have to remember though that Steven Soderbergh shot Contagion as with Girlfriend Experience and CHE using available light. On this film he shot with two wide primes (18mm and 30mm I think). He also is a big fan of crushing blacks and high contrast environments like casinos for some scenes... intentionally degrading the footage to an extent. In the rest of the film, he went for the more flat feel. So to pit Drive against Contagion as a comparison between Arri and Red is just not realistic at all. And, remember, Drive... as much as I like it, will always be stuck at 1080p.

A great example of the ability of all these cameras is Transformers: Dark of the Moon. That project used film, Alexa, Red, SI-2K, and F35. Who can tell which is which? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1399103/technical
 
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