Sandra Valde-Hansen shoots 'Plan B' with the Sony Venice and Zeiss Supreme optics

The combination between the cinematographic camera Sony Venice and the lenses Zeiss Supreme have given life to Plan B, film photographed by Sandra Valde-Hansen.

The director of photography Sandra Valde-Hansen (The L Word: Generation Q, Now Apocalypse, White Bird in a Blizzard, Kaboom) found the need to capture scenes with different meteorological conditions and lighting for the film Plan B, by Natalie Morales. This road movie, which can already be seen in Hulu, follows a pair of teenage friends during a day-and-night search for emergency contraception.

The pandemic caused production to be delayed: the production had to abandon its plan to photograph the story in snowy weather, so Valde-Hansen was forced to embrace “the warm tones of autumn.” Anamorphic lenses, Valde-Hansen notes, might have been a good choice for an approach rooted in past decades, “but one of the discussions I had with Natalie was based on recent testing with anamorphics for The L Word: Generation Q. For that series, my co-director of photography, Moira Morel, and I had tested numerous anamorphic sets. "We found that they weren't fast, that they fell apart when shooting wide open, and we concluded that the drop in sharpness on the sides wouldn't work for the aesthetic of the series,"

Valde-Hansen weighed her options: "I thought, OK, what do we want from an anamorphic? We wanted intimacy, a natural perspective, natural magnification, and a very shallow depth of field. We wanted to be able to see the world that these girls live in and go out into that world, but we also wanted it to be very intimate. Once it became clear that anamorphic presented challenges, I started looking into the large format”.

Large format with Zeiss and Sony

The director of photography conducted tests for the film over a weekend. “That's when I was able to try the 2500 ASA in the Sony Venice plus the T1.5 in the ZEISS Supreme Primes. I was absolutely surprised by the combination. The objectives were beautiful. The images were very clean. I proposed to Natalie that the pros of anamorphic coincided with those of large format, while the cons of anamorphic were not present in large format. She agreed,” Valde-Hansen recalls.

Fall in Syracuse leads to early evenings and unreliable weather, problems that Valde-Hansen encountered during a scene at a playground over the course of two nights: "It was cold, it was raining, it was snowing... our time was very cut short because of the weather. It was crazy, we had to light quickly, but the speed of the Supreme Primes helped us overcome some of the problems and stay on schedule." Valde-Hansen appreciates the authenticity that the Primes bring to sequences like this: "One thing I love about the Supremes is that they create such a natural look without compromising sharpness or contrast. This allowed us to maintain that naturalism throughout the film. All in all, seeing how beautiful the Sony Venice is at 2500, and how clean the Supremes look at f/1.5, I knew I had made the right decision."

Once the filming of Plan B, Valde-Hansen began filming the second season of The L Word: Generation Q (aired on Showtime) with the same camera and lens combination: "I've been working with the Venice and the Supreme Primes for a year and a half, and I'm really impressed. Using these lenses with incredible color reproduction, great skin tones, good fall-off, no lens distortion, and consistency throughout is just wonderful."

https://youtu.be/u4-oQ1LEXO4