Professors Day at Pinewood Studios

”I hear you paint houses!” 

I was reminded of that famous line from Martin Scorsese’s ”The Irishman”, when SONY representative Daniel Listh told me at Camerimage recently ”We’ve heard you also teach cinematography”.

And when I confirmed that he was indeed right about that, he offered ”so we’d like to invite you a few weeks from now to our Digital Production Centre at Pinewood Studios, if the dates work with your other commitments”. Of Course I was thrilled to hear this, and asked if it’d be okay to bring along a colleague and fellow FSF Board member, and yes that was fine. SONY has the Bucks.  🙂 

So fast-forward to Wednesday December 11th and I, together with Charlotta Tengroth FSF (my colleague) and Stefan Grandinetti from the prominent Stuttgart Hochschule der Medien (HdM), find ourselves in a taxi heading for the Black Horse Pub and Restaurant in Slough west of London, for a rendezvous and evening dinner with the other participants in the SONY Education Event at Pinewood.

We turn out to be a Portuguese-Swedish-German ”Europudding”, rounded out with Antonio Morais and Luis Branquinho from Portugal, Tom Keller from Film University Babelsberg in Berlin and with Zoltan Denes from Hungary adding a little Eastern European flavor. Mr Denes turns out to actually be the most senior participant, as he’s the only one among us who represents a state-run institution, the prestigious SzFE in Budapest.

SONY are represented this evening by ”the usual suspects” one might say: Sebastian Leske, Florence Quintin, Daniel Listh and Will Newman, and most of us have run into each other several times already over the years at Camerimage, the BSC Expo, at Cinecittá in Rome, and other film trade shows and events. 

We’re off to a flying start and the conversation cuts loose immediately. Our common denominator here happens to be that we all have extensive experience teaching cinematography at various film schools and institutions, and yes, the discussion sometimes focuses on that… But more often than not, it’s about great movies we’ve seen, memorable or hilarious on-set adventures we’ve had or anything and everything simply having to do with the fact that we’re all crazy about movies!

We’re having such a good time at the Black Horse Pub that the taxi drivers have to wait a while for us to finish up at the table (and with the conversations!) but eventually we’re taken to the excellent Crowne Plaza Hotel at Gerrard Cross for a night’s solid sleep.

The following morning, a transfer has been arranged for us from the hotel to Pinewood Studios, so we all gather outside the Crown Plaza entrance to climb into the waiting taxis. The drive to the studio compound is short and pleasant, as this is a pretty affluent neighborhood. A lot could be added here about the shuttling around of us during this project which has been ordered in advance, and which frequently adds a humorous touch to the proceedings, as the taxi companies and the cabbies themselves keep calling and texting us what time we wish to be picked up when, where and how… As if we participants would know. But we give them our best guesses whenever they call… The confusion becomes pretty solid at times, but it all works out and the drivers themselves are real champs and deliver us safely every time.  

A nice and graceful final touch when we arrive at the studios, is that the cars actually drive us all the way to the SONY headquarters, saving us the walk from the main entrance gate. This is of course hallowed ground for movie buffs. Streets between the stages have names like ‘Goldfinger Avenue’, and the famous 007 stage looms majestically a stone’s throw from the SONY facilities. At 5 500 square metres and with a maximum ceiling height of 15 metres, it is the largest soundstage in Europe. 

Upon entering SONY’s headquarters, we are greeted with coffee and biscuits, and we’re introduced to the very ambitious program for the day. The facilities are divided in two adjacent rooms: a studio where several high-end SONY cameras are already waiting for us, and an auditorium with a large screen, and this is where we all gather, reclining in comfortable armchairs. 

Will and Daniel kick off a packed PowerPoint presentation in the cinema, giving an overview of the SONY digital cinema cameras, which can be divided in two tiers, and when we learn that the FX 9 is ”on its way out”, I ask whether the BURANO is meant to be the successor to the FX 9, but the answer is a firm ”no”, the BURANO belongs to the ”top shelf” in SONY’s line-up, along with the two versions of the VENICE.

Amusingly, the presentation is nick-named ”death-by-powerpoint” in the schedule, and in fact the program proves to be overly ambitious, so it has to be reworked to accommodate the inspirational speech by Hungarian DP Balazs Bolygo, HSC, BSC, since he is already ”on set” so to speak, and ready to go.

Having started out in the days when 35mm film was the gold standard, Mr Bolygo is in the middle of a long and prolific career. And when, about a decade ago, SONY unveiled their then revolutionary 8K flagship F65 camera, and its more affordable cousin the F55, he was one of the early adopters.

He’s been a fan of the SONY cinema camera line-up ever since, and this is highly evident in the slideshow overview of the many feature film and episodic television shoots where he has relied on these cameras to great effect. He’s particularly happy with the various focus assistance features offered by SONY cameras, ranging from focussing aids when using lenses incompatible with the camera’s auto focus system, to the SONY auto focus system in its own right.    

”I like using the SONY auto focus systems”, he explains, ”whenever that’s applicable or possible, depending on the shoot. I recently did a documentary where I used it a lot on a long interview where the subject would lean forward and backward and it was always tack sharp. I found it very helpful and also we were on a tight budget so not needing an extra camera assistant person on the crew was a bonus.”

We audience members are invited to pose questions, and the venerable technique of using tape measures on set is brought up. ”We now have a whole new generation of camera assistants who’ve grown up with digital”, Mr Bolygo reflects. ”They may not be familiar with how to work with a tape measure. But personally I feel very comfortable working with assistants who use tape measures, because then I know for sure I have sharp images even if it’s hard to tell in the viewfinder if it’s tack sharp or not”.

We all know which brand of digital cameras dominate the high-end cinema production market niche, but without naming names here, Balazs Bolygo offers that although he agrees that the leading cinema camera on the market will give users a cinematic and pleasing look straight out of the camera, he feels that this isn’t ”the whole story”. ”In my experience”,  the Hungarian cinematographer explains, ”the SONY Venice and BURANO cameras will give you files with more color information and also files which you can twist and tweak a lot further before they begin to fall apart, a lot further than compatible files from the competing cameras on the market”. 

After a well-deserved round of applause for this Inspiration Piece from Mr Bolygo, we’re treated to a delicious meal in the foyer. Actually it’s a variation of a smorgasbord, where one picks one’s favorite treats from an appetizing assortment of goodies, and since we’re not sitting down at a table in any traditional fashion, the situation lens itself to even more chatting and networking. Impressed by what I have just heard about the wealth of  color information the SONY high-end cameras deliver, I have a word with Sebastian Leske. ”Practically none of the other manufacturers of high-end cinema cameras make their own sensors”, Mr Leske informs me, ”it’s just such an extreme undertaking to do that, but SONY has the capacity to do so, and it shows in the final results”.

I fully understand the desire to create increased awareness of their portfolio, but I’m intrigued why SONY have invited us to this generous workshop, is there a more pin-pointed objective to the whole undertaking?  ”Whether we’re the number one high-end cinema camera on the market or place second isn’t so important”, Mr Leske muses in reply, ”but it’s always nice with a little increased market share”.  And of course he has a point here, since we participants aren’t exactly going to bad-mouth the SONY brand when we return to our home turfs.

After the lunch break it’s time for technical training and practical demonstrations, or ”a deeper dive into the usage, key features and setup of SONY cameras”, as it is referred to in Daniel’s ”Death-by-PowerPoint” description.  🙂

And now the professors become the students, as  we all scramble for the best seats in the main studio armchairs, overlooking several high-end SONY cameras set up on tripods in front of us.

Daniel and Will now launch a massively informative presentation, with lots of practical hands-on demonstrations of the cameras and their various features. As previously mentioned, the portfolio can be divided in the three high-end cameras, and the second tier consisting of their more affordable cousins.  A lot more examples can actually be given, than you would have expected, of where these more consumer-oriented cameras have been used to great extent on big productions. For instance, Greig Fraser ASC ACS used the FX3, the most affordable camera in SONY’s entire line-up, to shoot Gareth Edwards’ ”The Creator” (2023). But it makes sense that the majority of this presentation will be about the big cameras, and they all have surprisingly compact form factors, considering the high quality images they deliver. 

I’m interested in why the BURANO is smaller than its VENICE siblings, since I was under the impression they all featured roughly the same sensor. ”The BURANO has the same family 8,6K sensor as the VENICE”, Daniel corrects me, ”it’s not identically the same sensor but it has the same resolution and colorimetry. And one of the reasons why the VENICE is considerably larger and more expensive, is that it has the additional hardware for extremely fast readout from the sensor, and that simply has to fit in somewhere. The readout speed from the sensor is really in a class of its own with the VENICE cameras”.

We are handed cameras where we sit, so we can all have a feel and get comfortable with them. One key feature, which can save a lot of time on set is that they all have built-in ND filters.  The two versions of the VENICE have physical ND filters mounted on two motorized wheels in the camera, but the BURANO offers an ingenious solution in that it has an electronic ND filter. Apart from the comfortable ease of operation this offers, it also gives you the opportunity of making spectacular in-camera speed ramps -as well as invisible iris pulls to make the depth of field shift dramatically during a scene with no difference in exposure. This feature alone could be a strong enough bonus to warrant the BURANO as a B-camera on any production, regardless what brand your A-camera is.

And the SONY cameras indeed make inroads also on productions that are already up-and-running with another brand camera system. We learn that on ”Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning” (2023) they were using Arri Alexa Minis and big Panavision lenses, but it became too bulky for some fight scenes, so they decided to go with VENICE with the RIALTO extension. 

The operator would then handhold the RIALTO, which is about the size of a beefy DSLR, and ”presto!” -instant intense fight scenes! The crew wound up using the RIALTO this way for a lot more shooting than originally anticipated.

By now in the late afternoon we are all of us definitely in a time crunch, and the time has come to thank our gracious hosts for a rewarding and memorable workshop.

All of us who arrived the night before from various parts of Europe have had a pretty good chance of getting to know each other, but there were also a few more participants who joined the group on the Thursday, probably because they already lived in the UK, and unfortunately there was never really any chance of networking or getting better acquainted with them. The Pinewood day was a very full day indeed with presentations and hands-on demonstrations all the way through, and now by necessity focus must be shifted towards the logistics of returning the participants safely to their respective countries all over Europe. 

So we now quickly became a decimated group standing there with our suitcases in hand and our backpacks slung over the shoulder, chatting with each other. And every 20 minutes the group grew a little smaller as the various cars arrived that would take us to London’s major airports. Portuguese Cinematographer Luis Branquinho was one of the last to disappear out of sight, and he had something memorable to say so I’ll let him have the last word here. ”It’s no secret SONY has a strong market share now with the VENICE cameras”, Mr Branquinho mused, and concluded ”so okay now it’s a digital world, but in a way it’s a bit like in the old days of film, when the question was ’are we gonna go with Fuji or Kodak on this shoot?’ ”.  

Lars Pettersson FSF