In the world of the marvel cinematic universe where everything looks like CG, with no audience connection via just visuals then batman comes to unveil how to capture the audience's attention via visuals, there is color but as not saturated as most movies with dusty & little dirty color.
Let's Start with Matt Reeves's vision
Gotham that felt very visceral I wanted you to feel when you're doing a kind of Hitchcockian thing the thing is about subjectivity so the sound and visuals all need to make you feel like you're in it and so that you can feel like you're immersed it's one of the reasons why I'm excited for people to see this on the big screen I wanted it to have a kind of horror bent sometimes what's out of focus and what you can't quite see is the most terrifying because then you are filling it in.
as the audience you know like Hitchcock always talked about how in the shower scene he was very careful you don't ever see the knife piercing the skin but you feel like you're getting you're experiencing that assault and all of that is created by the audience engaging in that visual in such a way that you fill in the blanks and i think we wanted to move in that way where you would fill in the blanks and so the idea of what was in focus what wasn't in focus what even like I wanted the batmobile to feel real so I wanted to do it the way you would have done it in a 1970s chase the way you would have done it in like let's say the french connection or bullet.
one thing that I thought was very impressive was the visuals visually I think this film takes most of its inspiration from the movie 7 but it also incorporates many details from other movies while still standing out on its own
Batman cinematography can be defined as the combination of Seven, Rear Window & Vertigo.
Look of Seven
Point of view of camera As Rear Window
Silhouette like vertigo.
movie 7 was shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji who also shot the movie the crow is another film about a vigilante who takes justice into his own hands. film 7 used a technique called bleach bypass that results in a contrasty silver-rich image this technique was most famously used in the film Saving Private Ryan. cinematographer Greg Frazier also used this bleach bypass technique on the batman for those that aren't familiar with bleach bypass I'll let the colorist for the batman David Cole explain it.
the batman was shot on the Alexa LF and then printed to film and rescanned. the Alexa LF was used to capture the footage so that the look of the film could be precisely controlled a common characteristic of bleach bypass is that it washes away much of the color and this is something that they wanted to avoid for this film the color was very important for the characters and the emotion of the film so they captured digitally to have as much control over that aspect after the footage was captured on the Alexa lt was then transferred to film to create that more immersive visceral look.
I think the batman is such a visual treat and with the amount of attention to detail, it makes it well worth your time to take a deep dive and study this whole production and everything that they put
into it visually I was very happy to see the marriage of digital and analog to create this unique look for the film. To learn more you can watch the full interview of Matt Reeves, Greig Fraser & David Cole.
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