By Iain Blair
Located on a quiet street in the suburban Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles, the Panavision campus seems a million miles away from Hollywood – that is, until you walk up the steps and enter a spacious lobby lined with dozens of photographs celebrating the legends and stars of cinema, both past and present.
Aaron Saffa
Also on display are camera systems old and new, After many visits to the storied building over the years, a recent visit hosted by Jon Witmer, Director, Technical and Creative Writing, and Aaron Saffa, Manager, Panavision New Filmmaker Program, reminded me again that a tour of the facility is both a walk down memory lane and a glimpse into the future, and a look inside a sophisticated operation that has always seamlessly blended the science and art of moviemaking. As Mel Brooks once told me, “It’s called showbusiness for a reason – it’s a show, but it’s also a business. When I started off, it was more ‘show’ than business, and now it’s become more ‘business’ than show, but they always go hand-in-hand.”
That sentiment is echoed by Michael George, Panavision’s Chief Operating Officer. “We think of ourselves as the filmmaker’s partner,” he notes. “Cinematographers, directors, camera assistants — they’ll come to us and say, ‘I have this idea’ or ‘I’m facing this challenge,’ and we find a way to support them. These conversations spawn new innovations, sometimes a one-off custom solution but oftentimes a new product that goes on to benefit other filmmakers as well. It’s that voice of the filmmaker that drives our innovation, and having engineering and manufacturing right here in house allows us to bring new ideas to life in the timeframe a production requires.”
And in terms of the past informing the present and future, George adds that, “Sometimes it’s also about rediscovering past innovations. The rich history here allows for moments like when Robert Richardson saw one of our original APO Panatar prism anamorphic lenses from the 1950s on display in a hallway, and he asked if it could still work. These lenses had been retired for decades, but the Special Optics team refurbished them, they were used on The Hateful Eight and then by Greig Fraser on Rogue One, and they’re still active in our inventory — they were part of the package Autumn Durald Arkapaw used on Sinners.”
The refurbishment of those vintage APO Panatar lenses led to the development of Panavision’s Ultra Panatar series of 1.3x anamorphics, and the Ultra Panatars have since spawned their Ultra Panatar II series. “These lenses all cover 65mm but are also a popular choice for filmmakers working with Super 35mm-format imagers,” he states. “We’re always asking ourselves how we’ll best be able to serve the market with our optics, both anamorphic and spherical, meeting the coverage needs for the formats filmmakers want to shoot with and offering a wide range of aesthetic characteristics for them to choose from. It always comes back to the filmmaker’s artistic intent and how we can support them in bringing that vision from their imaginations to the screen.”
Autumn Durald Arkapaw and director Ryan Coogler had a very specific vision for shooting Sinners. “We shot on film and used two very different camera systems – the Ultra Panavision 70mm and IMAX 65mm,” Coogler told me. “We were the first movie to do it, and shooting it all 65mm with the Ultra Panavision, which is a 2.76 aspect ratio wide-screen format, in combination with the IMAX full-frame 1.43 film photography, allowed us to juxtapose the tallest image that you can make with the widest large format film image you can make.”
Michael George and DP Hoyte van Hoytema
The cinematographer has long worked closely with Panavision and Dan Sasaki, Senior Vice President, Optical Engineering and Lens Strategy, and on the tour I also had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with a man known throughout the industry by DPs as the lens guru. “I always work with Panavision and Dan, and mostly shoot anamorphic,” she says. The DP and her AC do a lot of testing in prep, and for The Last Showgirl, her latest collaboration with director Gia Coppola, that process proved crucial as “we wanted to shoot 16mm film, to have that nostalgia, saturation and density film provides,” she explains. “Unfortunately, there weren’t any lenses I loved for the 16mm format, so I worked with my Dan to create something special for this project. I am very particular with how my lenses perform and resolve, and things like Field Curvature, flares, and fall off, so Dan and my focus puller Ethan McDonald and I work very hard to make sure the lens is exactly what we want. Dan is a genius and he and I are in sync now after working together on all my last films. He knows my sensibilities and gets what I’m after. My team at Panavision and camera team are a huge part of my R&D process in prep, and I did two rounds of testing with Dan and watched the prints at Fotokem as well as a DCP at Panavision. Each round we made some modifications until we found the sweet spot.”
Dan Sasaki
Cinematographer Alice Brooks also relies heavily on Sasaki’s expertise. For tick, tick…BOOM! directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, she tested different camera packages and lenses, and ended up with the same package she used on In the Heights; the Panavision DXL2 with Panavision G Series anamorphic lenses. “The difference is, we detuned the lenses in a totally different way, and Dan did it,” she reports. “Then after COVID hit and we finally came back, Netflix and our producers were very worried about us using atmosphere, so I did new tests and Dan then stripped more coating off the front of the lenses to age them more and make them more reactive with the light.” For the epic two-part Wicked (the second part comes out later this year), Brooks started doing her own series of camera and lens tests at Panavision in Woodland Hills before prep even began.
“First, we tested every single camera, and initially I thought we were going to shoot on the Alexa LF, and Dan had this idea for lenses, and so we started developing this lens set together,” she reports. “But after going to Company 3 and watching the test dailies projected, Jon and I realised we wanted to shoot on the Alexa 65 as we needed that scope for this movie, but then Dan said he couldn’t make the lenses to cover that sensor in time.” As fate would have it, the schedule was pushed back and Brooks called Sasaki “the same day we pushed, and I said, ‘Can you develop these lenses now for the 65?’ and he said, ‘Let’s go for it,’” she recalls. “And we ended up shooting on Panavision Prototype Ultra Panatar IIs, which we called “Unlimiteds” because they didn’t even have a name when we started using them. We’re the only film that’s ever shot on the prototypes, and we didn’t even have a full set of lenses when we started the movie because he was still making them. It was wonderful to have him starting from scratch and looking at my lookbook and discussing the emotion of the movie and have him developing lenses specifically for Wicked, and us picking the colour of the lens flare.”
L to R: Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu
The tour also included stops at the engraving department where I met Eddy Vasquez, a veteran engraver who was busy putting the finishing touches on a lens, and a stop at the painting department where I chatted with painter Ubaldo “Wally” Yanez. And over at Technical Marketing I met Lee Mackey who showed me the new Array system which was used in the current Brad Pitt blockbuster F1. Guy McVicker, Technical Marketing Director, notes that, “Before F1, we were already working on our Array system, and we started with a prototype of our Large Array plate. That prototype was sitting in the Engineering department here at Woodland Hills when cinematographer Claudio Miranda was in during his prep on F1, and when he saw the plate, it kicked off a collaborative effort between Claudio and 1st AC Dan Ming and us here at Panavision in Tech Marketing and Engineering to develop a Small Array plate specifically for their use. We now have Small, Medium and Large Array plates, all of which allow for three or four cameras to be arranged either toe-in or toe-out and can be configured for 360- or 180-degree shooting. The plates are engraved with guides to make them quick and easy for crews to rig – it’s a very streamlined system. And we also offer precision-matched and calibrated Array Lenses specifically for use with these Array plates.”
In addition to F1, Sinners and Wicked 2, a short list of recent projects Panavision has collaborated on includes such highlights as The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, and TV smash The Bear. Looking to the future, Aaron Saffa, Manager, Panavision New Filmmaker Program, notes that, “Panavision’s committed to empowering filmmakers throughout their careers by providing tools and support to help them realise their creative visions. One way we do that, specifically in the U.S. and Canda, is through our New Filmmaker Program, which provides educational programs and outreach to schools in the form of presentations, equipment demonstrations and facility tours, as well as grants for camera and optics equipment packages.”
Sinners
Summing up the whole operation, George says that “There are a lot of moving parts, and logistics are also at our core. It’s not just the equipment and the innovation that’s housed here at Woodland Hills — it’s happening at every Panavision office around the world, with gear constantly moving from one office to another. It all needs to run smoothly while allowing for the flexibility and pivots that are inherent in filmmaking. This company is full of employees who are passionate about this industry and totally committed to supporting the filmmakers we collaborate with, and they have the talent and skills to get the job done and bring new ideas to life.”
