To better understand the characteristics of Cooke optics, nothing better than to see how they are used. The ShotOnCooke gallery provides a window into Cooke lenses and great cinematography.

ShotOnCooke is the brainchild of Cooke’s Director of Sales – Europe, Carey Duffy, and has been designed as an insightful, educational resource presenting professional content created with Cooke lenses from around the world, championing great cinematography and highlighting interesting case studies. The website is not a simple collection of film trailers, it goes far beyond it, offering a unique perspective about the industry, by showing the lenses in the different context they are used. While it is a marketing tool for Cooke, it can also be an educational voyage for whoever visits it.

“We wanted to expand people’s understanding of the characteristics of each Cooke lens series. While staged tests are important and useful, we wanted to produce a dynamic resource for reviewing Cooke lenses that highlight the attributes and qualities they produce,” said Duffy. “The concept of #ShotOnCooke is to offer ‘real world’ content that represents and defines the Cooke Look across our different lens families on different production genres, while also offering real insight into the DOP’s choices and reasoning for their selection of lens, aspect ratio, cameras and lighting.”

A visual insight into Cooke lenses

Catherine Crawley, Director of Marketing, Cooke Optics, added, “We considered using trailers from films or TV programs, but came up against a major obstacle: trailers sell a film, not a cinematographic look, and they may have a variety of lens manufacturers’ products intercut. Instead we wanted to produce something that was unique, interactive and educational that put the cinematographer at the heart of it.”

Aimed at cinematographers, camera/lighting department professionals, directors, producers and students, as well as the wider creative community, #ShotOnCooke provides a visual insight into Cooke lens characteristics such as dimensionality, roll-off and edge fall-off by hosting a wide variety of examples that feature and illustrate each lens series.

The website presents sequences from feature films, television programs, documentaries, short films, commercials and music promos, with sub-categories within commercials for fashion, automotive, food, beauty and travel, to show how a certain lens family used in a particular way can help to enhance the visual style of a project. Film and TV categories will also be sub-categorized as the amount of content grows.

Submit your work to ShotOnCooke

In addition, the site features technical details about each clip, such as the cinematographer’s name, camera model, aspect ratio, lens series and focal lengths, as well as production information such as the director, colorist, post house, rental house, and relevant hyperlinks. There is also a space for the submitting cinematographer to describe why they chose Cooke lenses on the project, and how important they were to the look and feel of the featured production.

Highlighting the variety of material that Cooke is seeking, Crawley said, “It’s nice to feature the big budget, award-winning, high production value material, but we are also keen to present interesting production choices – such as using one single focus length lens, a 1:1 aspect ratio, an incredible single take Steadicam shot – and we’re also keen to highlight students and young cinematographers who show great promise. It’s about being excited about the content that Cooke lenses are being used for, and creating a virtuous circle between Cooke and our global creative community.”

As #ShotOnCooke is a curated website, cinematographers are invited to submit work that they feel best reflects the quality of their cinematography and the attributes of the lenses they chose. The Cooke team will then choose the most interesting examples to include on the website. Anyone interested in submitting content for consideration to #ShotOnCooke should email [email protected].