LF Examiner Essays

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.

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 when these essays were written. Ben is Professor, Digital Filmmaking/Documentary at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore [January 2014] and a Professor of the Practice at Boise State University.

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.

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.