I have never been as excited about a film as I was Jurassic Park. I had finished the excellent Michael Crichton novel a little while before the movie was announced. The book, for someone of my age - I was about 15 I think - was a bit shocking. There's a scene, one scene in particular, that really shocked me in a way pretty much nothing has since. It involves Henry Wu, if you've read the novel you'll know what I'm talking about. Wu is, by the way, the only original character coming back to the movie as his exit from the first movie was less dramatic than the book.
While the film wasn't quite all I had hoped for, based on the book, it was still a remarkable movie. The CGI dinosaurs were remarkable for the time, and they still look good now, even 20 years on. But there's something more subtle too, about the way the film was shot. Spielberg used a film ratio of 1.85:1, a rarity in blockbuster movies of the time - and now too. The difference between Jurassic Park, and say Jaws, is how wide the image is compared to its height. Jaws looks great in a cinema, but on your widescreen HDTV will have black bars top and bottom. Jurassic Park, on the other hand, does not.
Jurassic Park was shot at 1.85:1 which matches almost perfectly the ratio of your HDTV. You can see... [+]
The reason, apparently, was that this format allows you to fit a dinosaur and human in the frame at the same time. So with the new movie on the way the producers, director and cinematographer have decided to do something incredibly interesting, and that's shoot in something of a new ratio. It has been used before, it was invented by a cinematographer called Vittorio Storaro and it has been used on about nine of his movies, one directed by someone else and, rather interestingly,
House of Cards was shot 2:1 and on Red cameras at 4K. The ratio makes sense for Netflix, but leaves... [+]
He called his format "Univisium" which is supposed to mean "unity of images". The idea is rather a good one. Instead of shooting movies in either 4:3, 16:9 or 21:9 ratios as we do for TV and cinema now, why not shoot everything at 18:9, which is bang in between the two most popular shooting formats (1.85:1 and 2.35:1 as they're known in cinema terms, the new format is 2:1). This means when you watch the movie on Blu-ray at home, it will mostly fill your widescreen TV with some small black bars top and bottom - they're small enough to be cropped out if you really hated them. In the cinema, it will still be an expansive image, and one that suits display on IMAX (and other "large format") screens really well.
Jurassic World is being shot at a ratio of 2:1, which fits well on a cinema screen, and on a HDTV -... [+]
So why do I claim this is so important? Well because cinema is something of a mess these days. There are several main formats, but there are also dozens of individual names and processes for each of these. If you want to shoot a 2.35:1 movie, you'll need to use an anamorphic lens, this squashes a wide picture into the 35mm film. 1.85:1 is a bit more simple, and just uses a normal spherical lens process. This is advantageous, because the lenses are cheaper, there are more variations of them and they are more sensitive to light.
American Psycho is shot in 2.35:1 even though it wasn't a high-budget movie. Directors usually get a... [+]
Univisium, on the other hand, uses 35mm film with normal, spherical lenses. It also moves at a slightly faster rate, giving an output of 25 frames per second, instead of the usual 24fps. This makes it ideal for broadcast in the UK and Europe, where TV systems are based around 25fps formats.
Cinematographer John Schwartzman, has good things to say about the format "I think other filmmakers will want to give it a try when they see how it looks. It’s very comfortable". If you look at thge Jurassic World trailer, below, you'll sort of see what he means. It doesn't have that extreme ratio of the Cinemascope 2.35:1, but it has a slightly more epic feel to it than 1.85:1.
Although film studios have never given much thought to how the movie will look on TVs, with the decline in people going to the cinema, there must be some executives in Hollywood who are thinking that, perhaps, to keep those big opening weekends there might need to be some day-and-date release window for streaming movies when they first hit theaters. With the correct rights management, this could be a way for film buffs to get the newest films, at a premium price, but without the hassle of going out. This would certainly suit parents, and those who just don't have the time to go out for a movie.
In some ways I wish Jurassic World was being shot in high framerate or HFR, as The Hobbit films have been. It hasn't won a lot of praise with critics, but action films like the Jurassic movies are really worth having "blur-free" and it would be interesting to see dinosaurs in silky-smooth 50fps. The problem here, apparently, is Spielberg prefers to shoot on film, and while some shots in Jurassic World are listed as being done on Red cameras, the bulk appears to have been shot on good old 35mm and 65mm Kodak stock.
