MovieStuff wrote:Anamorphics do not lend themselves to close up work at all. In my previous life doing special effects, we found that it was much easier to shoot miniatures with spherical lenses and then have them optically printed to anamorphic, if necessary.
Yes, I've discovered conventional anamorphics are not very good for close up work. For optically printing spherical to anamorphic it's the same constraint of course, ie. it's closeup work as well, but I guess for printing one can put together an eccentric system that just works for that setup. No need to alter it's parameters as you would otherwise do when shooting camera original.
Re. solutions in search of a problem - I'm quite into that philosophy - I often stumble across certain ideas for which I don't know in advance what problem they might solve (if any). But I get into them anyway. Solutions in search of a probelm. For example the lenticular sheets I purchased a few months ago - I wasn't sure for what purpose I'd use such (other than a 3D display) - but as it turns out a solution to the problem of how to diffuse the LED light source on the printer projector occured to me as I was staring across the studio space at the lenticular sheets. And the use wouldn't have occurred to me if I hadn't been studying the lenticular sheets themselves, ie. independantly of any reasons one might have otherwise had for having lenticular sheets sitting in the corner of the studio.
Indeed, is not a computer the ultimate solution in search of a problem? I recall the early days of home computing (late seventies/early eighties) and a common question was "what is it for?" In many ways we've had to invent the problems for which the computer would be the solution. I don't know if this is back to front thinking but it often works quite well and in weird sorts of ways. I'm often thinking of some solution without a problem when someone calls me with the exact problem for which I have the solution! Its perfectly strange but it happens enough I just treat it as some sort of strange way the universe works!
There's all sorts of other examples. For example, the fact that silver turns black in the presence of light. It can be regarded as a solution to a problem that sat around for two thousand years before someone thought of the problem, the problem being: how to create a photograph.
C
