Chivo, who just won his second consecutive Oscar for Best Cinematography for his incredible work on Birdman, is now hard at work on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, a 19th century Western thriller that is currently shooting in Alberta, Canada. The film, which stars Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio, is described thusly on its IMDb page:
The frontiersman, Hugh Glass [played by DiCaprio], who in the 1820s set out on a path of vengeance against those who left him for dead after a bear mauling.
The big news about the project, however, is that it's among the very first to use ARRI's new ALEXA 65 camera system, which was announced late last year to much fanfare from the cinematography community. The camera is the first of its kind in the digital cinema world, as it combines the proven image quality, dynamic range, and usability of the ALEXA with a much larger 65mm equivalent sensor.
In case you missed the original announcement of the camera, here are the (incredibly impressive) specs:
Technical Specifications
- 65mm Digital Cinema Camera
- ARRI A3X CMOS sensor
- 5-perf 65mm (full camera aperture)
- 6560 x 3102 resolution (maximum recordable)
- 54.12 x 25.58 mm Sensor size (active image area)
- Weight: 10.5 kg / 23.2 lb
- ARRI XPL Mount (64mm diameter)
- 200 - 3200 ISO. Base is 800 ISO
- Dynamic Range: >14 stops
- Uncompressed ARRIRAW
- LDS metadata
- Electronic Shutter 5° - 358°, adjustable in 1/10° increments
- 0.75 to 27 fps (upgrade to 60 fps planned for early 2015)
In a recent piece from the ASC, Lubezki gave away a few details about how he's shooting the film and some of the technical challenges of shooting exteriors in Alberta during the dead of winter.
We’re doing a lot of exterior work with natural light and Steadicam. The lenses are very wide and close to the actors. It’s extremely visceral. The temperature has dropped as low as -30°C [-22°F], and we’ve been experiencing some difficulties with the equipment. At one point, it got so cold our monitors froze!
There's currently little other information out there about The Revenant, but if there's one thing that we can definitively count on, it's that the film will look absolutely incredible with Chivo behind the lens and that it will give us a great idea of what ARRI's new ALEXA 65 is capable of.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
