Fish-eye look on film

[Jim Gibson]

Hello,

I'm interested what's your look on lens distortion in movies? It's like a fish eye effect?

There is so much of this scenes on new movies right now. I hate it. No scene in Tarantino movies are fish eye. No scenes on Gibson directed movies are fish eye. No scene in Cameron movies are fish eye.

Just look at the film Last Looks, looks terrible. And then compare it to, for example, Dirty Grandpa comedy, looks so much better. And I notice several shots on Wakanda Forever trailer that are fish eye, as well as Babylon.

Your thoughts?

[Marcel Birgelen]

I think that I need to dig deep for movies that have used fisheye lenses in their production. One movie that comes to mind is The City of the Lost Children, but I'm not sure if those effects were achieved digitally or not.

[Jim Gibson]

Here are some screenshots from M:I7 and Wakanda Forever trailers. Looks terrible. Why are they doing that?

[Van Dalton]

Shakycam of the '20s?

I haven't seen it in a movie yet, myself, but people ab/use it constantly on Youtube, especially Gopro users since I think (hearsay; I've never used one myself) it's the default setting and you probably all know about "average" people and changing from default settings.

It's distracting and it makes the scene look a mess. Just shoot flat and don't do the fake-fisheye crap, unless you're going to project it in a dome theatre where it's needed to correct circular distortion (like IMAX used to do), in which case you'd need an actual fisheye LENS, not a DSP effect. Beyond that, shut it off. You'll also save your batteries.

[Randy Stankey]

I had a discussion about things like this with my girlfriend's father before he passed away.

Direct quote from a well known producer who made movies that we all have seen:
"Never do things that annoy your audience!"

The exception would be if it's something that advances the plot. For example, if a character woke up drunk and disoriented. A POV shot of a character waking up with blurry vision might be appropriate if you are trying to show that the character can't see straight. However, an effect like this is something you might use once, maybe twice, during an entire movie but only for a short time.

To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock: "If it doesn't advance the plot of the movie, cut it out!"

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm interested what's your look on lens distortion in movies? It's like a fish eye effect?

I'm not seeing the same thing. Not even with your visual examples posted above. None of those images have any curvy distortions one would associate with fish eye lenses or with lower quality wide angle lenses. Generally speaking, lens systems for cinema-grade cameras are of extremely high quality and are ridiculously expensive. Movie productions only rent the lenses rather than buy them. Companies like Panavision and Arri will do all sorts of custom work on lenses for big budget productions for very specific purposes.

To me, a fish-eye lens is one with a very extreme wide angle view and very short focal length, like 8mm. For reference, a 50mm lens is closer to a neutral field of view with pretty much zero in terms of barrel distortion or pincushion distortion. A lot of still photographers like carrying around small camera bodies with 50mm lenses attached as "walking-around" cameras.

I'd be hard-pressed to think of any movie that used a real fish eye lens for anything other than camera shots where a very exaggerated wide angle effect was desired.

Movie productions use lenses in a pretty wide variety of focal lengths. Every one of your image examples are wider shots featuring groups of people at a distance or wider scenery shots. But none of those shots look any wider than about 30mm. Directors and Cinematographers go for longer length lenses when shooting closer or close-up shots of actors. We're talking about lenses that are 100mm, 130mm or even 200mm and more in focal length. Wide angle lenses are not flattering for close-ups. They'll exaggerate facial features, like your nose. Lenses farther in the telephoto range are more flattering for mid-range and close-up shots of people. Telephoto lenses collapse perspective, make it easier to blur the background and make the subject seem larger than life. The plane of focus in telephoto lenses can be quite a bit shorter, especially if the aperture is opened wide to blur the background. Many cinema camera lenses have to be focused manually as a scene plays out. It's a lot easier to maintain focus with a wide angle lens closed down to a tight T-stop than it is with a telephoto lens with the aperture opened wide. Time equals money and you can't afford to miss many shots. Some movie productions have scenes where there is only one chance to get the shot.

Lots of movie productions (and even TV shows) shoot using anamorphic lenses. They do so primarily to get that CinemaScope/Panavision-look of anamorphic bokeh to make their show look more cinematic. Even people who shoot still photography are buying anamorphic adapters of various squeeze levels to get the same look. Honestly, the practice is kind of pretentious. When movies were shot on film there were functional reasons to justify the use of anamorphic lenses. With digital-based photography there is no reason for using anamorphic lenses other than to bake a certain visual style into the imagery. Even with a high end cinema camera system like the Arri Alexa 65 (which has a rectangular shaped 2.2:1 ratio 6K sensor) people are sticking Ultra Panavision 70 lenses on it to make the imagery look more cinematic. And then it's an eye-roll joke when you see "Filmed in Ultra Panavision 70" in the movie's end credits.

The 2.4:1 'scope format itself really would have a hard time justifying its continued existence if we wanted to be honest. Very few new movie theaters feature true 'scope shape screens. They're usually taller like our 16x9 ratio TV sets at home. Too many theaters lack any masking, so the cropped "scope" movies are shown mildly letter-boxed, just like so many movies (and TV shows) we watch at home on our flat screen TV sets. On 4-perf 35mm film the 'scope format was the biggest, highest quality format. In d-cinema the 'scope is the smallest, lowest resolution format. If everything was geared toward delivering the highest quality we would see d-cinema projectors with square shaped higher resolution imagers and anamorphic decompression lenses attached. Instead, the version of 'scope we see in theaters is a cropped down thing. It's basically a digital version of 2-perf 35mm TechniScope.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I neither see any real fisheye lens distortions in the examples being posted. Some may be extremely wide angled with some slight distortion, but I wouldn't call that a fisheye lens, just an extreme wide angle lens. If you want to film closeups in scope, wide-angle lenses are often the only feasible solution. They may give a somewhat distorted look, but none of the examples posted looks really bothersome to me.

The particular scenes I was refering to, regarding City of the Lost Children do feature a distinctive fisheye-lens look, they're applied to scenes viewed from the character called Crank, which is essentially a brain in some sort of aquarium. But as the movie was known for its early use of digital special effect, this effect may have been created digitally.

[Jim Gibson]

We can clearly see lens distortion here. This is MI7 and Last Looks

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm still failing to see what's so offensive. That shot of Tom Cruise running features some very modest barrel distortion on the pillars scrolling by in the foreground, but it's not very noticeable.

Most high quality lenses, especially wide angle lenses, feature aspherical elements to counteract barrel distortion artifacts. Those lens elements will make the horizontal and vertical lines on buildings and other geometric objects appear straight rather than curvy. Some lenses, like true fish-eye lenses, will leave the barrel distortion in place.

Again, I rarely ever see any obvious barrel distortion effects applied to scenery in a feature film. Such scenes are usually very specific camera shots, often depicting the point of view of some nefarious object or thing. At the end of the 1980 movie Flash Gordon, Flash gives a celebratory leap, screaming "yes" toward a killer drone's camera when he's told he saved the Earth. Or in The Matrix there's the view of a surveillance camera in a police interrogation room where 3 agents walk in to "question" Neo/Thomas Anderson. Those camera angles have real curvy barrel distortion, closer to a fish-eye effect (but not quite).

Are you really complaining about being able to see obvious slanted vanishing point lines on buildings and other objects from wide angle shots? There really is no practical way to eliminate the effects of 3 point perspective in camera shots, not unless you're shooting everything in close-up with a really long super-telephoto lens. And that would get tiresome after awhile. The only other alternative for making slanting lines on buildings appear more straight up and down is by using a tilt-shift lens. As far as I know tilt shift lenses are used only for certain kinds of still photography (usually for taking photos of buildings) but the camera angle has to be chosen very carefully otherwise the image is just going to look oddly warped as hell. Tilt shift lenses are very tricky to use. I'm not sure how they could be used in a motion picture setup unless the camera was locked down stationary on a tripod. It would be a bitch to have manually adjust the tilt shift mechanism (and maintain focus) on any sort of dolly system.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The first movie that used fisheye lenses quite a bit was the Sci-Fi movie "Seconds". That was photographed by the great James Wong Howe in B&W. The next movie that used a fisheye lens was 2001. Hal saw everything through a fisheye. 2001 also used the Todd-AO bug eye lens, but that is not technically a fisheye because it only sees a 120 degree angle of view. The images Jim posted were just from very wide angle lenses, probably as short as 17mm, because at 15mm a lens becomes a true fisheye. Bobby is also correct on barrel distortion. That must have been an older lens, because all current high end 17mm lenses have almost no barrel distortion. Although the fisheye was invented in the 1920's, it was not until Nikon released it's first fisheye that they became practical... and at a price of $27,000!!