Shaw Brothers and zoom lenses?!

[waywardsage]

So...

I watched The Flag of Iron and was pretty floored at the amount of zooms in the film! I know the Shaw Directors were fans of the zoom, but dang! I think I counted at least 30+ snap zooms in the film.

Why were the Shaw directors such fans of zooms? I don't think I have ever noticed a dolly or crane shot. I may be wrong about that. But they really liked snapping zooms in most of their shots.

Does anyone know what camera's and lenses that most of the Shaw films were shot with? I'm a filmmaker, so this sorta interests me.

[masterofoneinchpunch]

Chang Cheh used the zoom pretty effectively, some directors are better with the effect than others. It is important to think about when to use a zoom in and a zoom out, when it is effective, when it is not. The technique was copied and sometimes very badly used by other directors.

Well ShawScope is 35 mm anamorphic format.

I like this quote from David Bordwell's Planet Hong Kong:

Now the much-maligned zoom shot makes

sense. The zoom’s primary role—enlarging a portion

of a scene rapidly, or demagnifying part in

order to show the entire context—is to provide

spatial information. In swordfight and kung-fu

films, however, that aim is often secondary to

matters of rhythm and expressivity. A fast zoom

often plays out the pause/burst/pause pattern:

fixed view, whip in to a detail, hold on it. The

zoom often establishes a fight scene’s tempo. Typically

one shot ends with a zoom in to a fighter’s

face or arms or legs. Then we cut to a close view

of the opponent before immediately and rapidly

zooming out. The zoom can be timed around a

blow as well, underscoring its force, or singling it

out as the decisive one, or even reinforcing a pulse

linking one punch to another (Figs. 8.76–8.78). In

Yuen Woo-ping’s Dance of the Drunk Mantis, the

old master and his pupil are cartwheeling around

a banker. He tries unsuccessfully to punch them,

and the zoom singles out a punch as the one to

which the old master responds (with a kick

through the spread legs of the pupil). Such effects

are hardly subtle, but the choreography and camerawork

that create them are.

[BaronK]

CC was pretty lazy in that regard. He was hammering out so many movies at the same time, he hurt some of his stuff that way. When other directors seemed to be growing, even visually, visually, he was getting lazier and dated his material.

Others were getting crisper by the early 80s and smoothing out their lines, while CC was still doing that stuff in '82s 5EN. It looked so rough and jarring. You can do it and have it be smooth. That's not how his looked. Weird for someone that did it so much.

[waywardsage]

Yeah a lot of the zooms are pretty rough and jarring. Does everyone agree that it was just a product of the factory line production of these films at Shaw?

[masterofoneinchpunch]

Yeah a lot of the zooms are pretty rough and jarring. Does everyone agree that it was just a product of the factory line production of these films at Shaw?

No, I do not agree.

The rough zoom is used a lot later on even in Golden Harvest films and especially the Taiwanese MA films even going into the eighties. Seriously it is used worse later on (true with Chang as he got older as BaronK states though I would argue that not all of his later material is cinematically dated). Take a look at the zooms used in The Young Master (1980) for example. Some of it there is so overused it seems almost impossible to parody.

Speaking of American directors has anyone seen The Big Red One (any Samuel Fuller fans)? There is a pretty effective use of multiple zooms when the unit happens upon the concentration camp.

[waywardsage]

As a filmmaker myself, I've known that Zooms can be used so you can cut down on your camera setups. So, seeing as they seemed to shoot a TON of these films back to back, my thoughts were that they just didn't have time to do multiple camera setups all the time.

So, if you do a lot a snap zooms, you don't have to spend a ton of time setting up costly dolly shots, crane shots and multiple angels.

[BaronK]

That's the feeling I got from CC. That why i call it laziness. Yes, he was shooting more than anyone save for Chor Yuen, but he didn't give the individual movies their visual due, resorting to that.

[masterofoneinchpunch]

Here is a pretty good link describing the lens the Shaw Brothers used and answers further what you asked in the first post. This is one of the better articles on the subject. There is also some more description of their use of the zoom:

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

Arriving late to the anamorphic competition, some seven years after the process was introduced in the U.S., Shaws had a choice of equipment. Like most non-U.S. systems, Shawscope didn’t rely on the technology developed by Bausch & Lomb for Twentieth Century-Fox’s CinemaScope. Nor did it adopt Panavision, which had yet to be available in the region. Charles Wang Cheung Tze, whose firm supplied equipment to the studios at the time, recalls that Hong Kong filmmakers used versions of both Dyaliscope and Kowa-based lens systems.

[waywardsage]

Here is a pretty good link describing the lens the Shaw Brothers used and answers further what you asked in the first post. This is one of the better articles on the subject. There is also some more description of their use of the zoom:

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

Awesome! Thanks for posting this! I'm definitely book marking this to read!