http://www.aintitcool.com/node/56065

On a similar note, the studios really need to calm down with the trailers and spots for TDKR and Prometheus ffs...

Snow White’s 2012 return to the big screen won’t be mistaken for the animated Disney classic from 1937. Snow White and the Huntsman is a live-action reinterpretation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale that takes a more adventuresome, sometimes darker approach. To draw audiences into the luscious, colorful world they have designed for the story, director Rupert Sanders and cinematographer Greig Fraser chose to photograph the story on a combination of formats including 35mm anamorphic and 65mm film.

“We did a lot of testing and we considered every format except Super 8,” Fraser recalls. “We considered 16mm, 35mm and all the digital formats. Our tests showed that the resolution and quality of digital had become very good, but we still felt that anamorphic film was far superior in color rendition to the digital formats. Snow White and the Huntsman is a film that relies heavily on color, so having a format that was best in terms of color was the overriding factor.”

The production was mounted on sets at Pinewood Studios and on locations in southern England and Wales. “We had such amazing production design and costumes,” says Fraser. “It would be doing the production designer (Dominic Watkins) a disservice to not properly capture that. With widescreen anamorphic, you can create a certain softness around the edges, which then draws your attention to the important things in the frame.”

The significantly larger 65mm film format – which has lately been used on several films including The Tree of Life, Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol, and the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises, among others – was again brought into action by Fraser. “The 65mm stock is absolutely incredible and it has no rival now,” exclaims the cinematographer. “It is simply the best format we had to work with. We used it on certain key wide shots and second unit shots. From a technical point of view, wide shots and resolution don’t always go hand in hand. Sometimes the wider anamorphic lenses don’t appear to resolve the best. We found that with a wide shot in 65mm, you get the absolute finest resolving power. Then we would do the coverage on 35mm anamorphic, and it worked quite well.”

The film begins with a storybook flavor to the images, but paradoxically, Fraser and Sanders wanted to maintain some naturalism. “That’s how one might expect a fairy tale to be shot and directed, and that is exactly the reason we wanted to get away from that at the end of the day. Over the course of the 15-minute prologue, we slowly introduce a different style to the audience. We are creating a world that is anything but naturalistic. Creating a slight naturalism in that world is an interesting process. You’re fighting a number of things – the fact that you’re shooting on a stage, or in a forest that is otherworldly. We had fun with that tension.”

The large format scenes were done with Panavision’s System 65 cameras. Most of the 35mm scenes were filmed on lightweight Panavision XL cameras, with G series, E series and Primo anamorphic lenses. Fraser used three film stocks: KODAK VISION3 250D Color Negative Film 5207 and KODAK 500T Color Negative Film 5230 were the workhorse stocks, with a few scenes done on KODAK VISION2 50D Color Negative Film 5201.

Fraser had an opportunity to test the 5230, a newer emulsion, on a previous project. “I love the way it looks,” he says. “It has a nice, creamy quality, yet solid, like you’re looking at a glossy black and white print. The blacks are still fantastic and vivid, but they are a little looser and creamier. It was the right choice for Snow White and the Huntsman – it’s a movie that cried out for a big-picture look.”

Ern - wouldn't it be easier just to sig http://www.ainitcool.com instead?

It's an awful site but a good aggregator in it's own way

I'm wondering if I can avoid movie sites until I've seen TDKR in July - I'm sick of article titles and screenshots telling me what situations characters find themselves in