Lenses In Cinema
By Carlos Maldonado
Introduction
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The reason that I chose this topic is, quite obviously, for my love of filmmaking and the various parts that go into it's craft. However, when it comes to movies, something that most people don't take into consideration when thinking about the process of making a film is it's cinematography and what it truly takes to make the movie look good. Hollywood, for example, has a certain standard for the "good" quality of their motion pictures and the main way to achieve that caliber of image is through, none other, than their lenses. Good lense selection in film can ultimately come to make a film very unique in it's look and feel. So, what optics did some of your favorite movies use?
Methodology
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In this project, I took a look at 40 films and what their main lense selection was on a scale of 16mm to 100mm and, based on which movie used which lense most, saw how it came to define their overall remarkable and classic look. Some movies include:
Data
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After having collected my data, I put it all together saw that it's variation was rather varied yet strange but also incredibly interesting in it's usage. Keep in mind that the lense types I considered were only the MOST used out of the many used in each film.
1. 16mm
2. 13mm
3. 20mm
4. 22mm
5. 22mm
6. 22mm
7. 16mm
8. 35mm
9. 50mm
10. 55mm
11. 55mm
12. 35mm
13. 50mm
14. 16mm
15. 22mm
16. 16mm
17. 35mm
18. 30mm
19. 100mm
20. 24mm
21. 24mm
22. 100mm
23. 35mm
24. 50mm
25. 55mm
26. 55mm
27. 35mm
28. 30mm
29. 24mm
30. 24mm
31. 16mm - Jurassic Park
32. 24mm - Inception
33. 16mm
34. 24mm
35. 16mm
36. 35mm - Jaws
37. 16mm
38. 50mm - Transformers
39. 35mm
40. 35mm
Data (Continued)
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Next, I took my data and put it into a histogram in order to view the true variation of lenses from 16mm to 100mm.
However, after taking a good look at my completed graph I saw a problem with how I would complete the problem due to the gap in between the 55mm lenses and the 100mm lenses.
Data (Continued)
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Therefore, I re-did the graph, this time, taking out the 100mm lenses in order to be able to not have the huge gap and complete my problem.
After doing so, the gap was still there with the 35mm lenses and 50mm lenses not letting me find the standard deviation for my data.
Data (Continued)
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So, because of the way my results turned out due to the gap in between certain lense lengths, I was not able to find the normal distribution. The main problem was that, unlike a regular normal distribution graph, the optical lengths were not completely random and also were varied in their numbers due to the fact that good quality imaging requires certain lense lengths regardless of whether the measurements are close or not. In this case, the gaps were caused by the difference in distance of 35 to 50mm lenses and 55 to 100mm lenses.
Conclusion
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In conclusion, how would I perform the experiment differently in order to get better results? For starters, a the only way in which I would have gotten close enough results would have been to use non-existent lense lengths, but then , there would have been no point in doing a survey. Despite that, the way in which I could've made this more successful was by looking more deeply, with research and not just a survey, for specific movies that used optical length which are closer together in order to find and have a normal distribution.
Lenses In Cinema: Normal Distribution Project
By Carlos Maldonado
