Wes Anderson's new stop motion film, Isle of Dogs, has already received critical acclaim for its Japanese cinemainspired look and feel. That's in no small part down to the creative vision of Tristan Oliver, the film's Director of Photography, who chose to shoot the entire film on Canon EOS1D X bodies.

Read the full article here: canoneurope.com/pro/stories/makingisleofdogs/


People like a bit of stop frame but there's not much of it about I mean the skills base is very tiny you know there
aren't many of us who do this but people who do what I do there's probably 5.

You don't sign up for a Wes Anderson movie thinking you're gonna make anything other than Wes Anderson movie, I mean that is how it is, he is trusting me to deliver what what he wants so I
have to totally get inside that mindset and deliver that even if in another environment with another director that would be a completely different process in fact what he's really after is to achieve as much as possible in camera so things that we're very much used to solving by using visual effects, postproduction, we're now going back to where we were perhaps 30 years ago and
creating those effects and set in front of the cameras so all those organic things that are very difficult to do in animation such as rain and smoke and fire and fog in anything that has organic movement to it is very difficult to make as an animated element because that very organic quality is very difficult to produce so you have to find ways of doing that and they very deliberately have a handmade feel to them. So it's it's it's kind of resurrecting old techniques so you know typically we're making fog out of cotton wool and we're making water out of cling film and it's just finding ways to get
those materials to behave in a realistic fashion.

We typically shoot on any of these productions for thick end of two years and we would be shooting with anything up to 50 units so we've got 50 cameras running 50 sets simultaneously.
As in all the movies there are 24 frames per second that normal running right so the animator goes on to the set with
their puppets and they pose up the first
frame they take a frame it's how you manipulate that timing you know if the puppet is pausing then you can afford to take more than one frame at once. In terms of how long it takes you know have you got one puppet standing there blinking or have you got 70 chickens
waving their arms in the air screaming something like we had on Chicken Run for instance, you know that obviously takes weeks compared with a blinking puppet that might take a couple of hours.
So what's going on is also the question really.
I've got topdown view of 50 units are I'm physically lighting you know with my gaffer and my spark so I'm physically lighting maybe 15 of those units I can't conceivably like 50 there's just enough hours of the day so I have another 2 or 3 guys who are lighting to
my brief but I see every frame that comes of every unit and I see every lighting test because I need to make sure that that movement looks like one hand made it my in terms of shooting stop frame you know there are challenges which you are not presented with in the liveaction world most of my best fixes for Wes revolve around depth of field which is never enough then you know everything is his liveaction movies are all shot on super wide lenses with humans sensible distances and that's what he wants his animation films to look like and it's often tricky and to get to at that point. The main issue is the size of what you're shooting so everything you're shooting is very very closer to the camera so if you're doing a closeup instead of your actor being six feet from the camera your puppet or actor could be six inches and this compromises what you can do hugely with your lenses because you're working right down at the
minimum focus end or even into the macro end of a lens and that makes a huge difference to the depth of field or the depth of focus that you have available to you when I've got a puppet right up to the minimum point of the lens if I'm at f16 or f22 I might just about have full focus from nose to ear and everything else is mush, so if you want more depth of field that becomes a challenge then you have to find ways of making your lenses work slightly differently or making the way you shoot different so that you can achieve that depth of look that you would expect if that puppet in was six feet high.

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