Lens Advance Wins Academy Award
Cameras Now Can Zoom from Stem to Stern

March 2, 2002 -- Imagine a giant human eye filling up a movie screen. Just the iris and the pupil. Now imagine the camera pulling back. You see the lashes and the lid. Then the brow and the nose. Then the whole face. Then the whole person. Then the house behind the person. Then the city behind the house behind the person.

Physicist and lens inventor Iain Neil. Photo: Courtesy OE Magazine

Until just a few years ago, a movie director would have to use several different lenses to shoot such a scene without losing focus. Now, it can be done with just one lens: the Panavision Primo Macro Zoom.

The creator of the lens, Iain Neil, won an Academy Award this year for his invention, which has already been used in several dozen films. (Factoid: Not all Academy Awards are Oscars; the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards are presented well before the Oscar telecast. Winners get plaques.)

"It wasn't really possible to build such a lens until about five years ago," Neil tells Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday. Thanks to new manufacturing technology, the lens surface can be shaped precisely enough to keep an image clear and in focus from various distances.

Within a few years, Neil believes that directors will go beyond using the lens merely for convenience, but will start creating scenes with the lens in mind. Indeed, Steven Spielberg already has done so in his upcoming Tom Cruise vehicle Minority Report.


Other Resources

• Check out a trailer for the upcoming movie Minority Report that makes use of the new lens.

• A closer look at Neil and his history as a Hollywood player.

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