Calling high dynamic range “a dream for any cinematographer,” the Oscar winner told THR that he would explore this possibility for “all of my future projects."
LAS VEGAS — Calling high dynamic range “a dream for any cinematographer, any creator of images,” Gravity’s Oscar-winning director of photography, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, told The Hollywood Reporter that he would explore emerging HDR capabilities for “all my future projects.”
On Sunday at the NAB Show, he acknowledged that this would “absolutely” include his latest project, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, which is currently in postproduction.
High dynamic range, or HDR, is getting a lot of attention from Hollywood’s filmmaking and technical community for its potential to expand the range between the darkest and brightest images a display can produce.
“I think every cinematographer will have an interest in high dynamic range, because it’s the way that we want to capture images, so later we can do whatever we want in [digital color grading]. We need all the information that is captured by the camera,” Lubezki said. “That’s something that we don’t have right now. We are living in what I would call ‘the gap.’ We have all these new instruments, and they are fantastic, but they are not really capturing what I was used to capturing with a [film] negative. So if I could capture [and project] that, or more, I would be incredibly excited.”
Dolby has already demonstrated that there's also potential to go back and postproduce a previously lensed film (depending on its original production format), having completed Rob Marshall’s 2002 best picture Oscar winner, Chicago, in its Dolby Vision HDR format.