Netflix’s zombie apocalypse hit ‘Army of the Dead’, directed by Zack Snyder, was shot using a special bit of kit that seems to have polarised its audience – the Canon ‘Dream Lens’.
Snyder, whose other credits include ‘300’, ‘Watchmen’ and ‘Wonder Woman’, shot the film on the idiosyncratic lens made for the Canon 7 series of rangefinders in the 1960s. The 50mm lens, with a maximum aperture of 0.95, is notable for its extreme bokeh in out-of-focus areas.
“The lenses were these Canon Dream lenses that were built in the 1960s,” Snyder told movie website Cinemablend. “Consumer lenses. They open to a .95, so a really thin depth of field.”
Snyder matched the lens with RED Monstro digital camera, an 8K cinema camera that comes with a $60,000 (£42,300) price tag.
“So yeah, sophisticated, and this weird combination of super-high tech and super-low tech, and that feels like my wheelhouse,” Snyder told Cinemablend. “Taking the most high-tech thing and getting it dirty.”
The Canon 50/0.95 ‘Dream lens’ was produced by Canon for release with the Canon 7/7s/7sZ family of Leica screw-mount rangefinder produced in the late 1960s. Only 25,000 examples of this lens were made by Canon and working examples now easily fetch £2,000 ($2,800) on eBay.
The lens’s characteristic look has drawn some criticism among viewers of the movie, which sees a group of mercenaries try to steal a casino vault in a zombie-infested Las Vegas. Part of the reason is the way Snyder used the lens, as Screenrant explains: “The custom rehousing Snyder did for his dream lenses didn’t even have aperture blades built-in, meaning the entire movie is shot fully “wide open…. enabling it to make the objects in focus pop more drastically against a blurry background and/or foreground, while giving out of focus areas of the image a blurry dream-like quality.”
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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