[Dortmunder]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Just from looking at the trailer (which will be it for me until I can view the UHD) I can see it's got that shallow depth of field that's characteristic to large format, but this not being being large format he's probably used longer lenses and/or shot the movie wide open to create the effect. The digital capture - despite the incessant hype about what film can actually resolve - will also lend itself to that kind of razor sharp detail in those circumstances, as long as the focus is nailed.

He had me at 'pellucid'. And 'Ed Ruscha'...

From Nick Pinkerton in ArtForum ~
"What Soderbergh understands and revels in, as working-class hero Andy Warhol did, is the fact that authentic, homespun American life is shot through with a generous dose of artifice—artificial sweeteners and colors that appear nowhere in nature. Soderbergh is acting as his own DP here under his usual “Peter Andrews” pseudonym, shooting on a RED digital camera with Leica Summilux-C lenses, and these give his widescreen frame—invariably teeming with bright life and incident—an ultra-sharp, pellucid, almost glassy deep focus unlike anything in classic, grain-rich 35mm Cinemascope. In constructing his contemporary Appalachia, Soderbergh gets a sense of everyday life that’s bigger than life. He has, somewhat perversely, made a drive-in movie for the hi-def age, one in which flatscreens are ubiquitous—it’s a nice gag that a mounted TV in a hallway plays the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte as background visual noise throughout the film’s mock “prison riot”—in fact an elaborate put-on covering up other subterfuges. The color palette is a combination of cotton-candy pink, My Little Pony band-aids, manicures that glitter like an Arabian Nights treasure trove, the cacophony of sponsorship logos on stock cars, gas stations worthy of Ed Ruscha, and ubiquitous red-white-and-blue gear—this is one of the only movies to take full advantage of the pomp of a major sporting event preshow, replete with an F-14 flyover and LeAnn Rimes belting out the national anthem and everything."

And talking with the great Amy Taubin at 'Film Comment', SS elaborates on his colour work ~

"We were working in a different color space than we normally do. One of the many layers of experimentation of this project involved some things in postproduction that are sort of forward- looking in terms of how we are going to archive things. So we ended up in a color space that, when converted to the color space you use for projection, did some really interesting things that I hadn’t seen before. Initially there was some alarm from people on the post crew. I thought it looked great because certain colors were really exploding. And everyone was asking, “Do you want to desaturate that?” and I said, “No, I think it looks kind of cool.” It was a happy accident, and instead of backing off, I said let’s push it even further. There’s no rational reason why we should do that. But I think when we were looking at the first scene in the bar, I just thought this is going to work."