Our friends over at /Film got a chance to talk to David Fincher via email about THE SOCIAL NETWORK and one of the questions they talked about was the Royal Regatta race scene in the film which features major tilt shift/depth of field changes. Here is a little excerpt from their conversation:
/Film: I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the tilt/shift isolated focus you employed in the boating sequence. It is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on the big screen before and would love to learn what inspired it.
Fincher: We could only shoot 3 races at the Henley Royal Regatta; We had to shoot 4 days of boat inserts in Eton. The only way to make the date for release was to make the backgrounds as soft as humanly possible. I decided it might be more “subjective” if the world around the races fell away in focus, leaving the rowers to move into and out of planes of focus to accentuate their piston-like effort.
Go and read the entire interview over at /Film. Here is the scene they are talking about below, which contains no spoilers, so you can watch with peace of mind:
Here is some commentary on this scene from the Blu-Ray which hits stores January 11, 2011:
“The Henley Royal Regatta were incredibly good to us and they allowed us to actually shoot the race at Henley. I had no idea how huge the Henley Royal Regatta was. I’d only seen photographs and a lot of them are telephoto so you don’t get the idea of this mile-and-a-half of grandstands and corporate sponsors.” … “But it is a tricky thing to design a sequence around missing by that much when you literally get dropped into the middle of it. You really don’t know where you are, it requires a subtitle to tell you you’re now in Henley for the Henley Royal Regatta, which you probably don’t know is the Super Bowl of boat racing. So this was one of those sequences where the only time we could shoot it was July 4, 2010. It was literally five to six weeks before we had to finish the movie. The movie had to be done so we could get it in theaters, and they were incredibly helpful to us and made it all possible.” … “One of the reasons it was done in this faux, swing and tilt– tilting lens board style was because all of the close-ups of the Winklevosses and the Dutch rowing were done in Eaton on a man made lake that doesn’t look anything like Henley. Doesn’t have any– just has green grass, but we would shoot the close-ups of all the people and then we had to matte in still photographs that we’d shot at Henley.”
You can read more over at Ropes of Silicon
