digital large format adapter

For the short film Diorama (dir. Vida Skerk, 2025), I designed and built a custom optical device that allows a digital camera to capture the image projected by a large format lens with a coverage circle of approximately 30 cm.

The device consists of three main elements: the large format lens, a diffusion surface acting as a ground glass, and a digital camera that captures the projected image. A pair of Fresnel lenses sandwiching the diffusion layer help distribute light evenly across the projection surface. The lens standard is mounted on aluminum rails, allowing forward-backward movement for focus, vertical rise-and-fall, and forward/backward tilt — giving full Scheimpflug control over the plane of focus. The result is an extremely shallow depth of field with a quality impossible to replicate with conventional cinema lenses: soft, dreamlike focus falloff with the organic rendering of a vintage optical formula.

Diorama is a short film in which director Vida Skerk reconstructs a childhood memory — a summer day on the Croatian island of Pag when her grandmother's dementia first became apparent, observed through the uncomprehending eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl. The film stages its actors as puppets in a miniature world, treating memory as an unreliable narrator. The visual language draws from family photographs: static wide frames, composed figures, pastel summer colours. The custom large format device gave the image its defining quality — a shallow, enveloping softness that blurs the boundary between the real and the remembered.

The lens at the heart of the rig is an Industar 37 — a 300mm f/4.5 Soviet lens originally manufactured in the 1950s for 8×10" large format cameras. Its image circle of approximately 30 cm is roughly seven times the diagonal of a full-frame sensor, producing a compression and focus falloff unlike anything achievable with modern cinema optics. The lens has no internal focusing mechanism; focus is achieved by moving the entire lens standard along the rails, which also means the rig inherits the full range of large format movements — tilt, rise and fall — enabling precise control over the plane of focus even at wide angles and high camera positions.