Matthew Jensen is the Director of Photography

The green screen sets were indeed atrocious.

 

I thought he did a fantastic job on his GOT episodes (mostly S1), and his work on the FFINO film was okay.

Fantastic choice, especially since they're filming on 35mm.

 

I think they actually filmed that scene in Iceland but CGIed the crap out of the sky to make it look like an alien world so it just looks like they filmed on a screen screen.

 

I flinched a little bit seeing Fantstic 4 as one of the guy's credits, but you know... that film had 99,000 problems and the b**** may or may not have even been one. So we'll see...

 

I have only seen "Chronicle", his cinematography seemed OK to me, remember it was a low budget movie .

 

His work on "Game of Thrones" is probably why Patty Jenkins picked him to work on Wonder Woman. Not his work for Josh Trank.

 

Agreed, though I was just commenting that his work on those two movies with Trank should not be considered as a negative thing.

 

100% agreed.

Although I think under better direction and writing, that cast was mostly great too. Miles Teller and Kate Mara were legit choices.

 

Cast of FF was solid.

 

That movie is proof that everything starts with writing and good direction. Those are the two most important elements. Hollywood still seems to think that you can just cobble a movie together with a good cast and call it a blockbuster. I'm looking at you, Michael Bay.

WW, for example, I feel like there might be magic brewing there. We've got a cast that isn't typically flashy and doesn't have THAT big name in it (you know, like stuffing in Samuel L. Jackson or Morgan Freeman or Anthony Hopkins) - it seems to be relying on just good character actors being right for their roles without name recognition. We've got a director eager to do another film after a long time (and a big one at that). I don't know, I feel like the lightning-in-a-bottle effect might be there.

 

So far the cinematography has been... Pretty awesome. Nice job from Matthew Jensen so far

 

If he nails this, we forgive him for Fantastic Four.

 

Well, he wasn't responsible for that movie's problems. And GoT, Chronicle and previous works says he is really good at his job.

 

Those properties definetly give me way more hope than FFINO, especially season one of Game of Thrones, the cinematography of it kinda felt like Diana was at the north near Winterfell lol.


And I sense a disturbance in the force, as if a thread title just changed.

 

Well, we just have a really great mod on this section (FlickChick)

 

And a poster who keeps me on the ball.

 

Indeed we do. t:

 

I see that some find it too dark, but I like it, it works well for a war-stricken region... besides it's not that entire film will be like this, Themyscira will surely be much lighter and this shot already has much warmer colors:




I am actually looking forward to the dichotomy of Themyscira and Man's world at war, it will be interesting to see...

 

Yeah I mean... old times in a ***ing WORLD WAR, and some expect it to be shinny and colorful I mean one thing is not like it, that's completely fine and respected due to different tastes and opinions but the need to watch the ol' same style ALL OVER AGAIN just to please those guys?

I also loved the contrast between the Diana Prince shot in front of the mirror, it means the tone variates... Not to mention that SS, WW and BvS while in the same universe they have an unique tone to it that I appreciate they are distinguishing themselves between their movies.

The shots I've put from the footage just screams... Game of Thrones!! At least for me.

 

Not to mention, it's unfinished also. Nonetheless I don't mind the look of it. And of course the film won't retain that color throughout entirely. I'm sure the Themyscira coastlines and skyline will look gorgeous too. Basilicata is such a breathtaking Island.

 

Oh yeah, it's all going to look truly breathtaking once it's finished. But we've seen so far is still amazing & I'm beyond impressed. Out of the DCCU line-up, I was already looking forward to WW's solo film the most but seeing that footage was almost enough to make my head explode.

 

How Wonder Woman Brought Color Back to the DC Universe

http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/how-wonder-woman-brought-colors-to-the-dc-universe.html

Spoiler

When cinematographer Matthew Jensen first met with director Patty Jenkins to talk about the visual influence that was at the top of her mind for Wonder Woman, he was taken aback. The film was to be set during World War I, but she didn’t show him a battlefield photo. It was going to continue the mythology of the so-called DC Extended Universe, but she didn’t cite one of its previous entries, such as Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Instead, she led off with the work of a man not generally brought up in high-level conversations about cinematic aesthetics – singer-songwriter James Blunt.

“She showed me this still photo of James Blunt,” Jensen recalls, “and it had this colored smoke in the background and him walking in this dark trench coat through the smoke. And she said, ‘I really like this colored-smoke thing.’” He laughs. “And I thought, Huh, I wonder what that means.” It quickly became clear to him that it meant looking radically different from recent DC Comics–based films, which have been dominated by the desaturated, almost chiaroscuro tones of director Zack Snyder. As Jensen puts it, “She was really interested in color in this movie.”

Jensen was game for that, and the finished product reflects their shared interest in using a diverse palette to paint their globetrotting tale of superhero fiction’s most famous and iconic woman. Her native, utopian island of Themyscira is all azure skies, verdant fields, and crystal waters. The London she visits is one filled with burgundy wood, striking costumes, and myriad skin tones. There’s even color in No Man’s Land when we see the title character race across the battlefield in her gold-red-blue costume. It’s a great leap forward for the DCEU.

Much of that leap began with Jenkins’s desire to bring the past into the present. “She was really concerned, because it was a period movie, that she didn’t want it to look like what we associate with period movies, which is a lot of desaturated colors and a soft, gauzy romanticization of the past,” Jensen says. “The period would come from production design and costumes and setting, but we wouldn’t be doing anything with the lensing that would say that it’s a period movie, essentially.”

That said, they did use century-old reference points for inspiration — just not black-and-white photos. Of particular interest was the vibrant work of Edwardian painter John Singer Sargent, particularly the portraits he was crafting around 1918, the year in which the film is set. But they also looked to more recent artwork in the form of Wonder Woman comics. Jenkins was enthusiastic about the groundbreaking late-’80s run by penciler George Pérez, inker Bruce Patterson, and colorist Tatjana Wood; Jensen was fascinated by the early-aughts work of penciler Cliff Chiang and colorist Matthew Wilson.

But although DC comics were an inspiration, Jensen adds that, surprisingly, DC Entertainment and parent company Warner Bros. didn’t interfere much with his and Jenkins’s vision. Studios these days are concerned with building brand consistency for their franchises (e.g. the eye-popping primary colors of virtually every Marvel Studios movie and the metallic sheens of the Fast and the Furious saga), but DC used a light touch when it came to the visuals for Wonder Woman. Perhaps that was owing to DC Films co-chief Geoff Johns’s efforts to inject more “hope and optimism” into the movies he oversees, or perhaps it was just owing to him wanting less strict oversight, in general.

“They really left us alone,” Jensen says. “There was never any direct conversation about other DC films. I think we were very free to make our own movie. Wonder Woman’s just a different char than both Batman and Superman, and we felt that, since this was her origin story, we could do our own thing.”

Their own thing included what is perhaps the most visually stunning sequence in any DCEU flick: a massive beachside battle between Wonder Woman’s fellow Amazons and a landing team of German soldiers. It features masses of combatants swarming toward one another and engaging in combat that includes everything from bullet-time slo-mo to trick horse riding. As you might expect, it was arguably the hardest portion for Jensen and Jenkins to film — though not for the reason you might expect.

More challenging than anything else, Jensen says, was a shot within the sequence that merely lasts for a few seconds, one in which the camera moves downward from a high vantage point to the beach. “We wanted to see that in profile in a big, high, wide shot, but then have the camera travel down close to the sands and get in front of the action — and we also wanted this to all be in slow motion,” he recalls with a laugh.

Plus, they didn’t want to do it as pure CGI. “So we built this huge rig — almost a roller-coaster of pipe and tracks — and suspended it up in the air with all these cranes, the camera on a remote head, programmed to start high and wide and travel down and make an S-turn in front of the action.” One problem, though: “It’s on sand. So the rig would start sinking halfway through the shot, so you’re just hoping all the elements will line up perfectly.” In defiance of the odds and the elements, they got the shot.

In stark contrast to the halcyon colors of that scene and the others on Themyscira were the shades of London. Though still colorful, Jensen felt it should have more “blues, grays, and blacks and cyans, instead of the lush full-color spectrum you get in Themyscira.” That was largely the result of a single line in the screenplay. “There’s a line in script where, upon first seeing London, Diana says, ‘It’s hideous,’ so that was really the guide for me.”

Thus came a vision of England’s great city that was devoid of nostalgia. “A lot of reference paintings we looked at from London at the time, showed that it’s polluted, it’s gray, it’s dark,” Jensen says. Nevertheless, James Blunt wouldn’t have been happy with them if they’d gone full-on desaturated, so Jensen compromised: “We still wanted color, so luckily, we were shooting in London in winter, so we got a lot of overcast light, which put a soft patina over everything.”

The key to all of this creative energy throughout the film, Jensen says, was a fundamental fact of the movie that the average viewer might not notice. “The movie, essentially, was a road movie,” he says. “So we never settled into one set for a great period of time. We were never comfortable the whole movie — just as you’re figuring out what angles work in one set, we were off to the next one.”

The end result is a new kind of DCEU movie, though Jensen hastens to add that he thinks it shares some DNA with the prior adventures of Batsy and Supes. “I wanted to make sure we fit into the DC universe,” he says. “Certainly we used some techniques that [Batman v Superman director] Zack [Snyder] and [Batman v Superman cinematographer] Larry Fong used in other movies.” However, Wonder Woman is still self-contained and unique within the DCEU, and the fact that it’s the best-reviewed of its kin is due in no small part to Jensen’s instincts and rapport with Jenkins. Perhaps that’s a result of one simple maxim that the two of them lived by: “We weren’t comparing ourselves to other movies, at all.”

 

Cinematographer did a good job, he was unjustly criticized for his work in Fant4stic movie, in fact he did a good job in that movie too.

 

Wonder Woman Cinematographer Reveals His Favorite Scene to Shoot

http://screenrant.com/wonder-woman-cinematographer-belgium/

Spoiler

The cinematographer behind Wonder Woman has revealed which scene from the film was their favorite to shoot. A lot of the praise for the DC Extended Universe movie is going to names like director Patty Jenkins, as well as stars Gal Gadot and Chris Pine � and rightfully so, given their utmost importance to the final product�s quality. It�s nonetheless worth taking the time to recognize the other personnel who worked behind-the-scenes on Wonder Woman too, including cinematographer Matthew Jensen.

It takes a lot of skill and talent to shoot a big-budget blockbuster, and Jensen adeptly worked side by side with Jenkins to craft memorable action sequences and a striking visual style for Wonder Woman � varying from the gloomy, bleak setting of World War I-era Europe to the scenic, gorgeous Amazonian island of Themyscira.

Slashfilm sat down with Jensen to talk about his work on Wonder Woman. Among the many interesting details from the interview, Jensen revealed his favorite scene to shoot in the film:

What was your favorite scene to shoot?

My favorite scene, it turned out really great in the cut, and it was a beautiful, magical couple of nights when we shot it, was the dance sequence with Diana and Steve in Veld with the snow falling. They were so great when they were shooting together on set, we had music on set and it was a beautiful night, even though it was really cold. There was a romance in the air when we were shooting it, and I think that carried across in the movie.



The scene takes place right after the major �No Man�s Land� action sequence, where Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor�s ragtag gang defeat a whole squadron of German soldiers and save a small village. Steve and Diana share a quiet dance as the town celebrates, and Diana experiences snowfall for the first time in her life. It�s a gorgeous scene that is vital towards further establishing the romance between the two. According to Jensen, these smaller moments are just as rewarding to shoot as the big action set pieces:

So it was one of the more intimate scenes that you connected to, rather than action.

Yeah, [with] action sequences, there's so many little pieces that it�s sometimes hard to see them, get into the flow of them. When two charismatic people are relating, you can see that when you're looking through the lens, and that's the beauty of that kind of thing.

Jensen is best known for television cinematography work, most notably shooting for shows such as Game of Thrones, True Blood, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. He also worked with director Josh Trank on his two superhero films Chronicle and 2015's Fantastic Four reboot. His work on Wonder Woman is filled with striking visuals, from the aforementioned snowfall scene to a horrifying image where Diana is surrounded by deadly orange mustard gas. With Wonder Woman being as popular as it is, it won�t be surprising if Jensen parlays this into another major blockbuster job in the near future.

This scene was a little bit like the lanterns in Tangled. I could easily have imagined WW and Steve Trevor begin to sing "I see the light"

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