You can really notice them in the new Star Trek and the new Total Recall. A colourful beam of light will flash across the screen in front of the action, sometimes blocking out the characters behind it. What is up with that? It’s annoying as hell.
I’m not really sure if that’s what you mean…
A lens flare is light scattering on the lens of the camera. It is often used as a form of reflexivity: it makes you aware of the camera. It used to be a documentary thing, because it’s actually a mistake. But people like it now, especially documentary makers, so they do it on purpose.
Huh.
I didn’t even notice it in ST 2009, but apparently others did.
Laszlo Kovacs mentioned using lens flare as a feature in the movie Easy Rider.
They’re lens flares. The wikipedia article linked above gives the gory details, but they’re basically the result of bright lights (often just out-of-frame) reflecting/refracting within the lens and camera body. They’re generally considered a nuisance by photographers/cinematographers, but they do have a certain aesthetic of their own that can be captivating in certain circumstances. For instance modern lens makers go to great pains to make their lenses less susceptible to flares, so an easy way to give your production a vintage feel is to either use older lenses or off-camera lights to produce them.
For better or worse, lens flares are currently somewhat of a trademark of JJ Abrams, who uses them extensively in most of his works, perhaps most famously in the 2009 Star Trek remake. There’s a behind-the-scenes featurette that shows how a grip would be just off camera shining various flashlights and spotlights at odd angles on the camera lens to produce flares.
Yeah, it used to be avoided because, like you said, it was considered an artificial artifact that took the audience ‘out of the movie’ (like seeing a boom mic in the top of the frame). However because they’re often unavoidable and, more importantly, somewhat appealing looking they’ve become an accepted artistic tool. Actually so accepted that now they’re sort of a cliché. What’s ironic is that where once directors of photography were expected to prevent them, and in fact one early use of computer graphics was to erase them, now they’re more often than not deliberately inserted via CGI! Originally just in computer-animated cartoons like those of Pixar etc. to add realism (i.e. to make it seem like it was shot on a real set with a real camera), but now that 99% of all effects are CGI they crop up everywhere.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey when the PanAm shuttle is docking into the rectangular bay of the rotating space station there’s a small lens flare in one of the shots that supposedly drove Kubrick crazy because the effects people told him it was unavoidable…
In the Star Trek restart, J.J. Abrams was deliberately going for lens flares, to the point of having people outside the frame shining lights into the lens. See also: Firefly.
Last summer NBC ran a CTV series Saving Hope about a doctor in a coma who wandered around the hospital in an out-of-the-body sort of way.
Blue lens flare all over the place. It would have been a useful device to distinguish “reality” from “coma world” but it was non-stop. I have no idea why they thought this was a good idea.
You are all wrong! They are ghost orbs.
The lens flare was fairly prominent in Super 8, another JJ Abrams film. I read somewhere the suggestion that he included the lens flare as an homage to Steven Spielberg, whom he admired greatly. (Super 8 itself is very influenced by Spielberg’s early films.)
The really awful thing is that once you start noticing them, you see them every-damn-where, and I personally have found it nearly impossible to un-see them.
I’m tempted to try a lens-flare drinking game with either Super-8 or the Star Trek reboot, but I need to add Poison Control to my speeddial first.
Lens flare. JJ Abrams. Star Trek.
Specifically, they’re anamorphic lens flares - a special type of flare you get when shooting through anamorphic lenses. The flare extends horizontally to the edges of the screen (unlike the classic Photoshop lens flare effect, which was circular). There’s an example here, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, compared to similar flares in Super 8. This specific effect was very trendy a couple of years ago but has become a massive cliche; there’s a little circular subculture of people who spend small fortunes on Iscorama anamorphic adapters for their digital SLRs, so that they can shoot “test footage” which compels other people to spend small fortunes etc. Meanwhile the thing they’re imitating has moved on.
The effect can be mocked up with software. Like all trendy effects it gets pounced on by specks who use it without thinking about it, they’re just blindly copying the style. The irony is that top-quality anamorphic lenses don’t have this flare, because it’s an optical defect; you have to buy special filters that deliberately mess up the image quality.
I just saw the movie Lincoln and there was ‘lens flare’ during a carriage ride toward the end of the film. It took totally me out of the moment and was very distracting. I doubt that Steven said ‘we need a lens flare there’ and added it in post, and if it was an artifact of filming I’m sure they could have cut it out (it only lasted for a few seconds). Very strange for an otherwise beautifully photographed period piece.
Yep. Anamorphic lens flares causes those extremely long, horizontal flares.
Being a huge Spielberg fan, I’ve always loved them. In his movies they really stand out as a magically optical, cinematic aesthetic.
Of course they work the best in sci-fis, and are a way to bring back the imperfections of analog in film/TV, helping anything digital/CG, or even shot using lesser lenses, to feel more genuine. And as with any optical effect, it can be overused, or unbalanced.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a masterpiece as far as anamorphic flares go. Beautiful.
J.J.'s a fan as well—inspired by early Spielberg films—and has said as much all the time after making Star Trek, Super 8, and even Fringe (the latter using mostly post-effect flares. Google Video CoPilot).
^^ True that.
Had Abrams directed the original Trek series, it would have looked something like this. 
In defense of lens flares, they are something that almost everybody who has ever used a camera has seen. Thus, the occasional lens flare can help add a sense of realism to an otherwise fake CGI-looking outer space seen. You know, maybe the camera crew was really floating around in space with movie cameras filming that battle sequence between the Enterprise and that Bird of Prey :smack:
Hmm. Lens flares were one of several reasons I despised the latest Trek movie, but I don’t recall them from Firefly. Which could mean that the fact that I was generally happy with the series made them less obtrusive; or it could mean Whedon was simply more discreet in using them.
FWIW, Despite being a deliberate aesthetic choice, J.J. mostly used real lens flares where he could. Again, because he liked the luminous, optical quality it gave his imagined future; admittedly borrowing a page from Spielberg.
Maybe he used them a bit too much, but I liked them in Star Trek.
I generally hated the movie, enjoying only Spock’s elegant fuck-you to the Vulcan bigots and his relationship with Uhura; I actively wanted New!Kirk dead. It’s likely my distaste for the rest of the, ah, enterprise magnified my dislike of the lens flares.