Why THE BATMAN is so beautiful. | A Cinematography Video Essay

the batman is one of the best looking comic book films of all time and in my personal opinion i think it's one of the greatest looking films of all time director matt reeves and cinematographer greg fraser have created an immersive world draped in darkness and mystery that makes most modern blockbusters look like amateur student films and it's an answer to a trend that's cursed the entire filmmaking industry which is to make every shot look clean but then that begs the question what makes the batman dirty what's so unique about how the batman was shot that makes it so beautiful in this video we're going to take a look at the approach matt reeves and greg frazier took to bring their batman to life the lenses they used their cinematic references and an interesting new approach to digital cinema with 35 millimeter film this is the cinematography of the batman [Music] greg fraser is one of the top cinematographers in the game hot off the heels of shooting denim veal lives dune and having previously worked on films such as killing them softly vice rogue one and episodes of disney's mandalorian greg has absolutely nothing to prove in terms of his skill behind the camera and this isn't the first time he's worked with matt reeves the two collaborated on 2010's let me in a film that in hindsight now draws a lot of stylistic similarities to the batman one of the great things about fraser is his ability to bounce between genres and still continue to improve his ability to tell stories visually with his own voice killing them softly is a dark crime drama vice is a political biopic and dune is a psychedelic space opera greg has a distinct visual style that's his own but he's still able to morph and adapt to the needs of the director he's working with and more importantly the story he's trying to tell but if you had to define greg's style he definitely loves anamorphic lenses especially ones that give a vintage character to them he's also a big fan of shadows often his films have a deep rich contrast to them and plenty of practical lights when it came to filming the batman both matt and greg drew their inspiration from the films they grew up on 70s crime thrillers that were primarily shot on panavision c-series anamorphic lenses lenses have a particular character that you know the lenses especially the ones that were developed you know the ones that were kind of inspiring us in like the 70s those are some pretty messed up lenses so when deciding which lenses to use for the batman greg used custom airy anamorphic lenses that were purposely detuned this allowed for incredible center sharpness but corner falloff that draws the viewer right into the middle of the frame harry worked with us to build a set of lenses which meant that they had inbuilt resolution but then the edges fell off sometimes we looked at it went whoa people are going to never employ us again there's a term in cinematography called dirtying up the frame which usually means adding things to the foreground or blurring things out in the background and greg is a master at dirtying up the frame horror and dread is often better achieved with atmosphere and what you can't see so there's entire moments of this film that play out in the background and frames that are completely out of focus adding to this was the angles and framing there's a hitchcockian nature to the way this film was photographed characters are often shown in silhouette like the neon backlighting of vertigo or pov shots that feel straight out of rear window to me what was really important was to put you in the shoes of this character who was out of control and i wanted to do it in a kind of subjective almost hitchcockian way where the shots you would see things from his perspective and you would travel with him in essence the camera is another detective in this story providing a vantage point from batman and so by proxy the audience as a voyeur in the story is also solving the mystery in real time with batman and gordon all that said i still think the film draws its biggest inspiration from 90s thrillers in particular david fincher's seven at its core the batman is a crime thriller about two detectives trying to track down an elusive psychopathic serial killer on a personal vendetta against the city he lives in and the corruption of humanity this is also the plot of seven narrative similarities aside visually it's clear that matt wanted to invoke the same terror and mystery of seven scenes lit solely by flashlights the heavy usage of rain and macro insert shots that help convey important information to the audience oh and there's plenty of lamps in this movie and you know i absolutely love lamps seven is a movie draped in shadows and guess who lives in the shadows batman his first appearance in the film is absolutely breathtaking and in the very few behind the scenes moments available you can see that his emergence was lit quite simply it's all about augmenting and enhancing the natural environment not overly lighting everything and just fixing it in post sometimes a big sheet of diffusion is all you need i was really taken by greg's work and and it was really clear to me and i just said it like just consciously to myself a few times on set man this guy is a painter i mean he really does paint with light the color of the lights are also important there's drapes of red and cyan as well as classic orange and yellow of sodium vapor that literally screams batman to the audience gotham feels like a living breathing gothic city with neon signage and street lights it's all very instinctual something feels starts feeling right and it's why i love working with greg 2's because i think that he and i connect to similar things and we get excited about similar things and so like he got excited about the red and i got excited about the cyan but there's no question that it does reach back to the comics contrast that with nolan's gotham which literally just looks like chicago here everything feels shiny and wet as if a thick layer of grease has been applied to the entire frame there were times when greg would take a silicone filter and put a little bit of silicone on it i mean if people take a filter and put a little silicon and so that when you put it in front of the lens and when it got wet you had the sense that it wasn't just that we were in rain that was perfectly photographed the lens itself got wet so you feel in the middle of it and so everything was about putting you squarely in that experience this technique of letting the camera interact with the film world isn't new the revenant employed a similar tactic with mud and even condensation from breath dirtying up the lens but it's elements like this that make the batman feel real it just doesn't have that commercial gloss we've become so accustomed to even nolan's incredibly grounded dark knight trilogy seems a little bit dated in its appearance when compared to the batman and if you compare this to modern superhero films it's literally night and day vfx heavy films like spiderman no way home are a mess of tone and lighting sometimes it's moody and sometimes it looks like an amazon commercial there's just never a moment in the batman where you think oh that was definitely shot in front of a blue screen add in that fraser also brought his experience from working on the mandalorium in ilm's volume they use similar led projection walls so they never had to worry about a sunrise ending too soon or a helicopter ruining a cityscape shot the thing is fraser's lighting is always tonally consistent whether it's a cgi heavy car chase or batman just walking through a crime scene then where things get extra interesting is the color grading and finishing process although this film was shot digitally on the area alexa lf the team developed the digital negative onto real 35 millimeter film and this was a technique that was also applied to dune but here they took it even a step further the sharpness of what you can get with the really technically perfect lenses and the sensor on the on the alexa lf which is i mean an amazing camera it's a beautiful camera but it could be so clean and so the idea was well how can we take all of the sort of texture that we associate with movies of the era that we were sort of inspired to do that's kind of 70 stuff and one of the ideas which i know that he did partially on dune which was to go to negative but we were going to take it even further which we did which was to actually go to ip so there are sections of the movie that literally are like scan back ip and it was all so that we could get in that very particular sort of texture that would make you feel like you were immersed visually in this world it really just feels like this film is an answer to the common criticism of most modern blockbusters which is everything is shot to look pristine it's all razor sharp lighting is crisp shadows are always a bit faded to gray and although for the most part this can be defined as technically correct it's also soulless and boring i think great cinematography is often about the things you can't control like the way a lens renders areas that are out of focus or the way it flares or even how the elements affect the glass these are imperfections that end up adding something that feels tangible to a scene there's a way in which beauty can be you can look at it and it can remove you and it can become an object that you're watching from a distance and admiring as opposed to in a way it's about making things imperfect and not letting things be too clean the movie had to have a very visceral side to it and that it happens in the visual it's a critical part of it we're trying to take you into an experience i firmly believe that the cinematography of the batman will change the way films look moving forward at least i hope so the problem is shooting everything in a warehouse is cheaper and it's more efficient so studios often prioritize budget over style but there's other examples of efficiency and beauty going hand in hand too most of fincher's mind hunter was shot in the studio but it's still able to create an immersive experience that feels real even in the corporate machine of marvel we're seeing some filmmakers try to break the mold and i'm very excited to see what sam raimi does with the next doctor strange and i'm optimistic that this film as well will continue to inspire every studio to experiment but if nothing else in a world of blue screen concrete parking lots the batman is a beacon of hope for cinematography and it's a reminder to filmmakers that it's okay to get a little dirty so i hope you enjoyed this little cinematography essay on the batman as you can tell i'm incredibly excited about this film i think it's absolutely breathtaking and beautiful and like i said in the essay i think it is an answer to this clinical clean crap that we keep seeing from every blockbuster to netflix movies amazon movies even apple tv movies i didn't want to stop with just doing an essay i kind of want to show you guys some stuff that you can do and learn from this movie to apply to your own cinematography so just for fun i grabbed some friends and we shot our own little batman sequence taking a lot of the stuff that we learned in the essay so how to dirty up the frame using vintage anamorphic lenses giving it that look in that character that just doesn't feel pristine now look i'm no greg fraser so please watch this with a grain of salt it's nowhere near the caliber of what is happening in the batman but i'm still very happy with what turned out so here's a little batman inspired sequence shot in toronto instead of gotham city something in the way something in the way something in the way [Music] i've dabbled and experimented with anamorphic in the past but this is the first time i've ever done some full frame anamorphic on this a74 so i took an adapter that i usually use for my micro four thirds lenses which is this slr magic anamorphot adapter and look a big thing with the look of this film was that it was filmed in darkness so we shot all of this at night starting around golden hour until it was basically pitch black out and big thing here was i was just experimenting and having some fun and doing angles and you know styles that i don't normally shoot and being okay with being out of focus like we talked about in the essay quick shout out to my buddy lee for shooting some of that behind the scenes as well as isaac for being batman but otherwise i hope you enjoyed this video if you have any questions about that little sequence we shot or this batman essay in general please let me know you know we're doing some more experiments on the channel having some fun let's talk about it otherwise my name is patrick demasso i hope you enjoyed this video and you will see or hear me next time i feel like making a video cheers [Music] you

Channel: Patrick Tomasso

Views: 2,036,819

Keywords: the batman 2022, matt reeves, batman video essay, the batman review, the batman movie, andy serkis, batman, bruce wayne, catwoman, colin farrell, coming soon, dc, dc comics, dc films, film, film trailer, film warner, gotham, jeffrey wright, joker, justice league, movie, official trailer, paul dano, penguin, riddler, robert pattinson, super hero, the batman, the joker, trailer, trailer 2022, wb, warner bros, warner brothers, warner media, zoe kravitz, cinematography

Id: STynLl-2FqU

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022