A large part of you does not missed going to see Mommy last year at the cinema. The film by Xavier Dolan is, in fact, distinguished by its particular use of its format offering to his public a square image enlarging by moments.
So far, Dolan is certainly not the first to have pushed the rules of conventional formats. These formats are called “classic” are themselves legion and often very close to each other.
It all starts with the democratization of the 35 mm film, which as its name indicates, 35 mm width for a length of several…kilometers !! The portion of the film on this long film was divided into boxes of 22 mm by 16 mm, or 4/3, basic format.
Of course, there are other types of film to be developed, but the 35 mm remains the most used format.
As you might expect, the relationship between film formats, and image formats is very strong. So far, we’re not going to talk about more of the format of film.
Even at the time, the 4/3 was not a convention and we note numerous experiments, including Abel Gance with his Napoleon project across three displays and providing a ratio 4,00:1. This process is called Polyvision.
With the arrival of television, the cinema decides to stand out and offer sizes larger to better pass on the side of the dramatic films. We can then see the arrival of the first formats wide. These are distinguished into two families, the formats large native and panoramic formats.
Formats wide native are distinguishable into two categories : formats, anamorphic and non-anamorphic.
Formats non anamorphic opt for example for the horizontal scroll, which allows you to change the width of the box reserved for the image as the process Vistavision.
Others will opt for the use of the 70 mm formats and very large up to a 2.20:1. In all these cases, one film in particular is necessary, the concern remaining is that the film comes into the spotlight planned, films standards.
Formats, anamorphic use, them, the optical distortion of the image at the film to take the entire 35 mm film classic. Therefore, an image stretched on the film. An appropriate lens on the projector will return the image identical to that of the shoot.
The standard formats in the film became close to the ratio 16: 9 or 2,35:1, which are the most common. I say near, because in reality, there are very many formats today are still used that are close to these standards, but is not exactly the same.
The IMAX, for example, is not a format called ” wide “. If you’re attentive during your viewing of the DVD of a certain film from Christopher Nolan, you can see that some images are not the same formats that other. They correspond to the shots filmed in IMAX. Moreover, if the cinema this difference is desirable, this is not the case on a DVD, since the DVD can’t re-transmit the quality of IMAX.
Finally, be aware that these stories of the formats are far from benign. In fact, since the 50s up to the democratisation of the scan, the projectionists are often enabled to crop the film for example to return to a 4/3 in a 16/9 format. Please understand that this is the equivalent of a crop total of the film, which therefore does not correspond to the paw’s artistic director. These latter were therefore often themselves in the projection booth to check the work of the projectionist, see project themselves and their film. But this dilemma is far from being finished, especially with the remastering HD TV series that suffers from the same problem of changing formats. An example with Buffy against the vampires.
I hope this article you will have more and you will be introduced to the importance of choosing the right image format.
Arnaud