So after watching spider-man one and two back to back, I noticed some differences between the two aspect ratios. Part 1 is in 1.85:1 while 2 is 2.35:1.
What I don’t understand is what is the reasoning behind releasing part 2 in 2.35:1 when it seems to cut off the top/bottom of images for close ups… that is you lose part of the top of people’s heads when they are close up at a table conversation.
2.35:1 on today’s 16:9 TV’s and 16:10 computer monitors appears to be wasting screen real estate, showing black bars instead of people’s heads. Can anyone explain why they do this?
Assuming that it was filmed with the intention of being shown in 2.35:1, the director was intentionally framing his shots like that. Not only was it cutting off the top of people’s heads, it may also have been chopping off boom mics, and all manner of other stuff that you’re not meant to see. Basically it is in 2.35:1 because the director wanted it that way. And if they were to reframe it to be shown in 16:9, chances are they’d be cutting more off the sides rather than adding anything to the top and bottom.
A wider screen leaves room for more dramatic framing and composition. Some things “suffer” such as close ups of vertical objects (such as faces) but overall, it makes for a more fun project for the director.
Even though people are generally vertical shapes, we generally view things in a horizontal fashion - i.e. most of the time we see things across the left-to-right vista, rather than the up-and-down. Therefore, the wider and narrower the cinema frame, the more ‘correct’ things appear to be.
From my projection days, I remember that most of the better films were released on 2.35:1 (we called it “'Scope”), and the cheaper films were released on 1.85:1 (“Flat”).
Besides the difference in screen aspect ratio, the Scope format uses more of the frame.
Each movie frame uses 4 sprockets of 35mm film, with the traditional “Flat” image leaving huge swaths of unused film above and below each frame. Filming the movie in Scope uses anamorphic lenses to horizontally compress the image so that every last film grain in those 4 sprockets of film is used.
In a Scope film, the frames are touching each other, and it can be quite difficult to find a frame line to cut on when you are splicing a break in the film, particularly if the film broke during a night scene. (Since a frame covers 4 holes, you could easily splice only half a frame, causing the film to jump out of frame when it hit the splice). We would often have to draw out twenty or thirty feet of film to find a scene that showed enough difference from top to bottom where we could find a clean frame line, and then we would run the film through a frame counter until we got back to the problem section.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on Anamorphic Widescreen. You can see the obvious difference between the frames, and it should be clear that the anamorphic version is using more real estate on the film, thereby having a better image.
Spider-Man 2 was shot in Super 35, which has a 1.37:1 image ratio on the camera negative. Through a digital intermediate, a 2.39:1 widescreen image was drawn, and printed anamorphically on 35mm.
As you can see from the illustration in that link, about 40% of the original image is cropped by the transfer, although the director and cinematographer were no doubt aware of the final theatrical image ratio and composed their images accordingly.