5 Trademark Christopher Nolan Camera

This video is brought to you by MUBI, a streaming service that screens beautiful cinema from all around the world. Get a free month at MUBI.com slash indepthcine. Christopher Nolan is probably the most well-known director working today. His movies use non-linear storytelling, practical effects, powerful immersive music and impactful set pieces to tell subjective, human-centred stories. His filmography has been split by his work with two different cinematographers, his earlier films with Wally Pfister and his more recent movies with Hoyt van Hoytema. Through these different collaborations, he as a director has carried a few visual techniques across most of his films. Let's take a look at five of those camera techniques today and break down how he pulls them off. An important creative choice when making a movie is considering what aspect ratio or dimensions it should be filmed in. The two most common ratios for cinema are 1.85 to 1, which is pretty close to the 16 by 9 ratio which you'd see on YouTube, or 2.40 to 1, which is more of a widescreen image with black bars on the top and bottom of the frame. Although other ratios such as 1.33, 1.66 or 2 to 1 also exist. Filmmakers will almost always decide on using one aspect ratio for the entirety of the movie. One trademark of Christopher Nolan's films is that he often cuts to shots with two different taller or wider aspect ratios during the movie and even sometimes during the same scene. The reason he does this is because he likes to use the native aspect ratios without cropping from the two different camera formats he shoots on. These formats are either the wider anamorphic format or the taller IMAX format. The anamorphic format uses specially designed lenses which capture images with a squeezed compression that can later be desqueezed to arrive at a highly resolved widescreen look. IMAX on the other hand uses regular spherical lenses, however captures images on gigantic pieces of 65mm film which are 15 perforations wide, providing a taller aspect ratio and wider field of view at an unparalleled resolution quality. Our film tries to take you into his experience and IMAX for me is a portal into a level of immersion that you can't get from other formats. Throughout his career Nolan has favoured wider anamorphic capture with its oval bokeh, distortion and fall off on the edges of the frame for capturing more traditional dialogue sequences. Then he switched to IMAX cameras to capture set pieces without dialogue, such as chase sequences, stunts or aerial establishing shots. Although IMAX was designed to capture vistas and expansive wide spaces with impeccable resolution, Nolan has also subverted this expectation in his recent work by also using this large format to capture intimate close-ups and personal moments, trying to convert nuances in performance into a cinematic spectacle. There are three different ways or axes to position and move the camera, pan, tilt and roll. A pan that moves the camera from side to side and a tilt that moves the camera up and down are both very common and can be done with a regular tripod. The third axis of movement, roll, is however much more unusual and infrequently used. Usually shots are framed with a level horizon, however sometimes filmmakers decide to rotate the camera on its roll axis. Many times this is done with a three axis remote head, a tool that holds the camera and can roll it over and position the camera on its side by an operator who controls it wirelessly. This remote head can also be attached to a crane or technocrane if the shot needs to push forward or move around within a space. He used this remote head and technocrane setup on Inception, but went a step further by even rolling the dream world of the film over on itself. This was done by constructing a set in a soundstage which could be rotated. An aspect of his blockbuster filmmaking that Nolan is well known for are his use of vehicles in big chase or action set pieces. When filming these sequences he'll mainly stick to using two camera techniques. Firstly he'll lock off the camera in hard mounted shots attached to the vehicle. Or secondly he'll use an arm car or some kind of tracking vehicle to get shots that move on the road with the picture car. Hard mounts are achieved by rigging the camera directly onto the picture vehicle, whether that be a plane, a car or a spaceship. This maintains the same frame on a character, letting us view their reactions and get inside their head while the background flies past. These shots can feel quite immersive and real, since, well, they are real. Audiences are placed directly in the cockpit or driver's seat and feel all the little realistic vibrations and reflections as the vehicle moves. These little nuances are part of why Nolan pushes to shoot these stunts practically rather than using visual effects. To get wider shots outside which establish the vehicle and action within the world and give a visceral speed to shots, he often uses an arm car. This is a specially equipped fast driving vehicle which has a crane arm mounted on its roof to which a remote head is attached with the camera. Operating this shot requires a few key crew members. One, a stunt driver who drives the car. Two, a technician who moves the position of the arm. Three, the DP or operator who pans, tilts or rolls the camera's position on the remote head to get the right frame. And four, the first AC who rolls the camera, wirelessly adjusts camera settings and controls where the focus is. Unlike most productions nowadays that opt to shoot on digital cinema cameras, Christopher Nolan has a deep love for shooting on film. Whether that be 35mm or large format 65mm stock. Film I think is uniquely suited to pulling an audience into a subjective experience. Film gives you a depth to the image. I find inherently more emotionally powerful and more accessible. He favours the way that the emulsion captures colour. Or in the case of black and white, how it captures monochromatic hues. He's used this on movies like Memento and Oppenheimer as a tool to delineate between the different timelines as the movies weave around their non-linear narratives. This black and white work has always been captured in different gauges of Eastman XX. From 16mm on Following to 35mm on Memento and even getting Kodak to specially upsize the film to 65mm for Oppenheimer. The rest of his colour work he's captured on Kodak Vision stocks, mainly using 50D or 250D to capture exterior scenes in natural sunlight and 500T for darker interiors or night scenes. Although the grain is a large part of the film look, because he normally captures in either anamorphic or IMAX, which both have very low visible grain, his movies tend to have a fairly clean look. With the exception being his debut feature, which he shot on the more inexpensive but grainier 16mm format. A camera technique that Nolan has used in most of his work is handheld. It may have different practical or emotional purposes depending on the context it's used in, but I'd argue that one of its key uses is as a tool to tell the story from a particular point of view. I'm really interested in cinema's ability to give you different points of view and multiple points of view within a single film. I've always really been fascinated by that relationship between the storytelling of movies and how it works and the way it aligns you with different characters. Shooting a far off aerial landscape presents the frame and establishes the space from a more detached objective point of view, whereas a subtle handheld camera shooting over a character's shoulder places the audience subjectively right in the shoes of the character. Even with all the high tech toys he has available, Nolan often decides to shoot handheld in this way, moving in the steps of characters as they do, shooting over their shoulder, or framing up singles on characters with a subtle organic looseness that aligns the audience with their point of view, or places them in the same visceral moment that the character themself is experiencing. If you're a fan of Christopher Nolan and want to discover a host of other creative and innovative directors, you can do so on MUBI, today's sponsor. MUBI is a streaming service which is perfect for those interested in seeking out interesting, entertaining and critically acclaimed movies from a variety of film festivals around the globe. One of those festivals which recently took place was the Venice Film Festival. As a side note, I'm happy to announce that a film which I shot, Carissa, recently premiered at this year's festival in the Orizonti section. So, I decided to check out another of last year's selections streaming on MUBI, which also featured in the Orizonti section, Gasoline Rainbow. This is a beautiful coming of age road movie from the directorial duo The Ross Brothers, that captures the kind of real free form joy of youth with beautiful and at times spontaneous camera work. If you want to check out a fantastic selection of streamable cinema, you should head over to MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at mubi.com slash indepthcine. That's m-u-b-i dot com slash indepthcine for a whole month of amazing cinema for free. Hope you enjoyed the video. As always thanks to all of you for supporting the channel by watching, commenting and especially to those that get the videos early on Patreon. Otherwise until next time, thanks for watching and goodbye.