Janusz Kaminski: Lens Coatings, Camera Shake, High Speed & Offset Shutter

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August '98)

Saving Private Ryan begins with a truly harrowing 25-minute depiction of the carnage and chaos experienced by the soldiers storming Omaha Beach. Both Spielberg and Kaminski sought to infuse the sequence with a high degree of realism, and studied newsreels and documentaries shot by combat cameramen in order to capture a true sense of the insanity and frenetic panic of war.

"We wanted to create the illusion that there were several combat cameramen landing with the troops at Normandy. I think we succeeded in emulating the look of that footage for the invasion scenes, which we achieved with both in-camera tricks and other technological means. First off, I thought about the lenses they had back in the 1940s. Obviously, those lenses were inferior compared to what we have today, so I had Panavision strip the protective coatings off a set of older Ultraspeeds. Interestingly, when we analyzed the lenses, the focus and sharpness didn’t change very much, though there was some deterioration; what really changed was the contrast and color rendering. The contrast became much flatter. Without the coatings, the light enters the lens and then bounces all around, so the image becomes kind of foggy but still sharp. Also, it’s much easier to get flares, which automatically diffuses the light and the colors to a degree and lands a little haze to the image.

If I had two cameras running on a scene, I’d mismatch the lenses on purpose, using one with coated Ultraspeeds and one without coatings. That gave us a certain lack of continuity in picture quality, which suggested the feeling of things being disjointed.

Next, we shot a lot of the film with the camera’s shutter set at 45 or 90 degrees. The 45-degree shutter was especially effective while filming explosions. When the sand is blasted into the air, you can see every particle, almost every grain, coming down. That idea was born out of our tests, and it created a definite sense of reality and urgency."

- Janusz Kaminski

"During the tests on the backlot at Universal, Steven was talking about this one shot in Empire of the Sun in which he shook the camera to get the effect he wanted. With that in mind, the best boy, Bob Anderson, attached an electric drill to the pan handle of a fluid head and locked an oblong bolt with an eccentric washer in the chuck. When activated, it created a wobbling movement and the camera shake we wanted."

- Jim Kwiatkowski (Key Grip)

"It’s a great effect, but you certainly can’t handhold the camera with a drill attached to it. Plus, your eye is constantly bopping against the viewfinder. So for handheld work, we used Clairmont Camera’s Image Shaker, which is an ingenious device. You can dial in the degree of vibration you want with vertical and horizontal settings, and mount it to a handheld camera, a crane, whatever. It’s heavy, but my camera operator, Mitch Dubin, did some amazing handheld work with it. At first we used it very conservatively, like when there was an explosion or a tank rolling by, but after seeing dailies, we just dialed it in and out as Mitch ran with the camera"

- Janusz Kaminski

"I also used another technique that Doug Milsome [BSC] utilized on Full Metal Jacket [see AC Sept. 1987] where you throw the camera’s shutter out of sync to create a streaking effect from the top to the bottom of the frame. It’s a very interesting effect, but it’s also scary because there’s no way back [once you shoot with it]. It looked great when there were highlights on the soldier’s helmets or epaulets because they streaked just a little bit. The amount of streaking depended on the lighting contrast. If it was really sunny, for instance, the streaking became too much. However, if it was overcast with some little highlights, it looked really beautiful. The streaking also looks fantastic with fire, and that’s what Milsome primarily used it for in Full Metal Jacket... "

- Janusz Kaminski

Kaminski employed Panavision Platinum and Panastar cameras throughout the Private Ryan shoot, and had Samuelson Film Services in London prepare one unit with a purposely mistimed shutter in order to create the described streaking effect. Used in combination with a narrow shutter, however, the effect was negated as the shortened shutter interval fell within the moment that the film was in its stationary position. Due to this anomaly, however, the "streaking" camera could also be used for normal shooting provided that the shutter was set between 45 and 90 degrees.

John Mathieson: Film Destruction Techniques

From American Cinematographer, Brush With the Gutter by Holly Willis (Sept. 1998)

Mathieson tried to toy with his equipment and lights in order to alter or distort the images he was getting much in the manner that Bacon warped and stretched his own imagery. His description of techniques is a tour through the don’ts of filmmaking, and yet the results are extraordinary.

Mathieson shot some scenes using a 5x4 Sinar plate camera, which he would place in front of the Arri without its plate. Where the plate would normally go, he positioned a piece of tracing paper. "The image would be soft, sort of blurred," he attests, and this effect not only framed the subject like a still camera would, but made images that approximated the blurriness of many of Bacon’s paintings. Another technique involved removing the shutter from the Arri 435.

"We disconnected the shutter, keeping it open. Then we’d use a domestic drill with a handmade shutter in front of the camera. It would run asynchronously, and we’d rev it at different speeds to make the image flutter. If you moved it away from the camera, you’d get these great flash-frames that would stretch and tear from top to bottom, creating images that jumped at you. We did our own fogging in the camera as well, using the Arri VariCon, which enables one to fog the film using different colors. We also tried putting red gel on the side of the camera, then opening up while we were shooting to make a more ’brutal’ fogging effect."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also did a lot of double exposures in the camera. One of the film’s final scenes shows Bacon in a bathroom, where Dyer appears as a ghostlike presence. Similar images abound throughout the film, and while budget may have been one of the reasons for doing this and many of the other effects in the camera, Mathieson and Maybury felt that the old-fashioned technique lent the film a certain ambiance.

"When you double-expose [a shot], there’s something about the way it sits on the negative, with the light passing through and hitting the emulsion it just sits better than if you mix it or do CGI to it. It’s also a lot more fun, and you can relight things for different exposures or use different colors. Anyway, John would get so excited about the rushes you’d see the shot right away."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Yet another approach utilized to distort images was to shoot through large chunks of glass. "I’ve been dragging bits of glass around for years," concedes the cameraman. "Alan [Macdonald] would find these lovely pieces of glass to shoot through." Some of the glass pieces were old, heavy ashtrays, but all were simply held in front of the camera for the shot. Mathieson also used an assortment of old lenses.

"We had this odd collection. We had an old Angenieux, for example, which we did terrible things to with Vaseline. We also took the elements out of some of the lenses, and we also used a Frazier lens once. With the Frazier you have to use the Panavision camera, but the lens system has its own peculiar kind of optics. It does extreme close-ups."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also used a boroscope lens for close-ups.

"The optical quality of a boroscope is terrible, really. But what you can do with them is amazing. They are very good for doing close-ups of things like white mice building nests they’re used by natural history people for studying nature. But we used them for snooping around and looking at bad skin or stained fingers."

- John Mathieson, BSC

The boroscope is unusual in that it can both do close-ups and wide-angle shots; the image is distorted at either setting, and Mathieson used this warping effect to lend a repulsive quality to the faces of the people who hung around Bacon, making them appear as they would have had they been rendered by the artist on canvas.

The cinematographer also employed an array of gels to augment his subjects’ more hideous qualities.

"We got that Bacon dead-flesh look using old gels. They were strange correction gels for lamps that people don’t use anymore. They have very weird colors, and most have been discontinued. We also used a lot of cosmetic gels, but in a very uncosmetic way. There’s an LCT Yellow, for example, which is a weird, horrible color that makes everyone look ill or dead. Usually when you put a gel in front of a light, it looks very intense and strong, and we didn’t want that. We wanted something more subtle, something dirty, and we found that these old gels really gave us the desired waxy, dead-meat look."

- John Mathieson, BSC