Interview with John Toll, ASC
technology and various technical components and how they affect the quality of the image. Primarily, what I do is look at an image and I either respond to it or I don’t. I can differentiate individual visual characteristics. I can see noise, black levels, dynamic range, contrast, color response and saturation. But I can’t tell you how or why something happens in terms of digital technical specifics. I actually can’t say I’m vitally interested in why an image technically looks like it does, as much as the fact that it actually does. All I know is the F55 satisfied my aesthetic requirements, and it fulfilled Netflix’s technical requirements, and that’s why we decided to use it. Q: What was your choice of lenses? Toll: I went with Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses because they made sense for this project. They’re very good lenses. I know the Master Primes probably are technically higher quality glass, but they are also physically larger and heavier. So, because we planned on being very mobile and flexible with Steadicam and handheld cameras much of the time, high quality smaller and lighter weight lenses made more sense for the overall project. Q: Given you experiences with the camera on this project, is the F55 something that you would select again? Toll: Yes, there are plans for a Sense8 season two. In fact, we’re bidding the job right now and we’re bidding F55s because of our experience on season one. We actually had multiple units that traveled and worked in nine different countries, all using F55 packages, and we never had any major problems.