If Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire looked a little “off” to you, it’s likely as a result of a new lens created just for the movie, which gave the movie a kind of retro, almost direct-to-video look. That’s on purpose — and while it might put some folks off, it’s exactly the look Snyder was going for. So much so that, in an interview with TechRadar, Snyder says he had to meet with his visual effects team to make sure the digital elements of the movie conformed to that vision, rather than looking too clear and totally confusing the vision of the project. According to the piece, Snyder and his team cannibalized a number of lenses to create a look for the movie that feels like a distorted, ultra-wide lens. It sounds like something that would be extremely difficult to approximate again without the same set of supplies and the same tech people working on it.
It’s one of a handful of things that Snyder has done to fully manipulate the look of the film. His movies have always been highly stylized, but the more famous he becomes, the more he seems to hone in on a specific, eccentric look.
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“[The lenses are] based on the hard glass, which is behind the anamorphic elements of the Leica rangefinder series, plus the Summilux and Noctilux lenses,” Snyder told TechRadar. “We found some Japanese anamorphic lenses from a company called Cineovision, which was set up in the 1960s. We took them apart, grabbed the anamorphic element, and attached them to the Summilux and Noctilux lenses. What happens in super-wide angles, such as 24mm, the anamorphic optics of the Cineovision elements are so retro that they give this bizarre distortion. For instance, there’s a shot where Sam [Charlotte Maggi] is talking to Jimmy [voiced by Anthony Hopkins]. She’s standing and he’s seated, and the entire top of the frame is out of focus, but Jimmy is in full focus, so it has this weird vignetted accentuation. I love that cool aberration effect we achieved with the lenses.”
Rebel Moon is set in a peaceful colony on the edge of the galaxy that finds itself threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Regent Balisarius. They dispatch a young woman with a mysterious past to seek out warriors from neighboring planets to help them take a stand the Tyrant.
Eric Newman, who produced Snyder’s take on Dawn of the Dead in 2004, will produce this film, too. Ironically, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead was written by James Gunn, whose Guardians of the Galaxy generated dozens of think-pieces linking him to, and eventually asking him about, new Star Wars that might be in his future. For Gunn, the idea didn’t hold any appeal, as he said he would rather create stories from the ground up…which is kind of what Snyder is now doing.
Rebel Moon stars Sofia Boutella, Ray Fisher, Charlie Hunnam, Djimon Hounsou, Jena Malone, AnthonyHopkins, Ed Skrein, and more. It’s Snyder’s next big franchise following the success of his original zombie project Army of the Dead, also at Netflix.
Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire is now on Netflix. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver is coming on April 19.
