Yeoman shot Asteroid City using an ARRICAM ST 35mm film camera, variously framing the action in 1.37:1 aspect ratio using Cooke S4 lenses and 2.40:1 with ARRI Master Anamorphics.
So, what cameras and lenses are used in his most famous films? Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman mostly use 35mm film cameras and extremely wide anamorphic lenses that help create a deep depth of field and panoramic layout.
A 1950s-style luncheonette, a gas station, a motel made up of 10 white cabins and a telephone booth populate the rest of the town. Filmed on flat farmland in Spain, the Asteroid City set was built from scratch, including underground power and plumbing infrastructure.
Asteroid City (or "Asteroid City") is a 2023 American comedy-drama film written, directed, and produced by Wes Anderson, from a story he wrote with Roman Coppola.
Yeoman shot Asteroid City using an ARRICAM ST 35mm film camera, variously framing the action in 1.37:1 aspect ratio using Cooke S4 lenses and 2.40:1 with ARRI Master Anamorphics.
Asteroid City would not work if it was a CGI green-screen situation. It needed to be tangible for such an outlandish script and characters. The grounding of a real place helped that. While the script may seem a bit bloated and convoluted in some places, Anderson uses that to his advantage.
Longtime Anderson collaborator Adam Stockhausen (production designing Oscar winner for The Grand Budapest Hotel) created the buildings and interiors including the luncheonette, garage and motel. The mountains, boulders, and rocks were all constructed, too, to such a scale that barely any green screen was used.
cinematography, the art and technology of motion-picture photography. It involves such techniques as the general composition of a scene; the lighting of the set or location; the choice of cameras, lenses, filters, and film stock; the camera angle and movements; and the integration of any special effects.
Yeoman: Wes originally came to me, and he said his concept was to shoot everything in Asteroid City with natural light—so no movie lights. We constructed these structures with the skylights that we could control a little bit with silks, so that we wouldn't have to use any movie lights.
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Theatrically, the film is presented entirely within a 2.39:1 frame; the corresponding academy ratio 1.37:1 scenes are windowboxed within that frame. The Blu-Ray, DVD, and streaming version presents everything within a 1.78:1 framing, letterboxing the 2.39:1 segments and pillarboxing the 1.37:1 segments.
Per The Numbers, "Asteroid City" pulled in just shy of $43,000 over Labor Day weekend domestically, which was just enough to put it over the top. It now sits at $28.1 million domestically to go with $22.4 million internationally for a grand total of $50.5 million.
We shot anamorphic color film in the desert. I was a bit concerned at the start because we were shooting in Spain in the middle of summer. The light can be very harsh and unforgiving.
Bryan Cranstons character states something like, "Asteroid City is a fictional city created expressly for this broadcast." So are we to assume in these many fictional universes that Conrad Earp and his story didn't actually exist and it's all created by the Broadcast Company to show what it's like to create a play?
If you have a good eye and a strong desire to learn, the basics of cinematography are pretty easy. A great cinematographer paints his scenes with light. A great cinematographer understands all the intricacies of what the camera does. So just pointing a camera and turning it on is not what a cinematographer is about.
Anime cinematography also teaches us that anime is always evolving. Still shots might be common, but in recent years, CGI technology has allowed anime studios to push the boundaries of what the film techniques used in anime can achieve.
A career in Cinematography is an exciting and rewarding career. It can be a very rewarding career for creative individuals and gives you the opportunity to be involved in diverse and exciting projects. Being a cinematographer requires technical skill, creativity, and knowledge of cinematic techniques.
The film was shot on the Arricam LT and Arricam ST with Cooke S4 and Zeiss Master Anamorphic Lenses. It's a Wes Anderson flick, which means a planimetric composition with room-to-room tracking shots and whip pans that usually provide a comedic reveal or some kind of periscope effect.
These scenes, shot in black-and-white and Academy ratio, are a performance, too — they're presented as dramatizations for the television program that's broadcasting the live production of Asteroid City.
The F-7A and B unit diesels in the movie were kits sourced and built by their effect team. Specific train cars also necessitated some new designs that we didn't have- so it was off to the CAD workstation to design the C40 Caboose and hoppers in the movie from scratch using an O scale brass models and S.P.
Wes suggested the Spanish town of Chinchón, which was super close to Madrid. It was the perfect balance of a great hotel, proximity to a film crew, and this very flat, beautiful field to build the town on.
