How to bring emotional weight

[rama lingam]

Dear master Roger how to give emotinal wweight for characters. Could long and short focal length both gives emotional weight. How camera distance involved to bring out character emotional weight. Because I watched some movies and i found camera distance is not enough to put the viewers close not enough to that character performance. Recently I watched ‘Godland’ movie. The choice of lenses is very good for me. Did you watch any Good movie?

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[dmullenasc]

There’s no formula for this. You can’t say that, for example, “25mm at 3’ has more emotional weight than 50mm at 6’.”

You have to watch movies (or look at art & photography) and see what moves you. I think Gordon Willis’ 1970s work often has emotional weight though often shot in wider frames due partially to the somber light and how the framing works with that — but really, ultimately the weight of the scene comes from the content.

[dmullenasc]

You could say the having the camera closer with a shorter lens gives the character more “presence” or makes the shot feel more “intimate” compared to shooting from farther back, but whether that always adds more emotional weight is not clear. A lot of Gordon Willis “weighty” shots in “The Godfather Part 2” involved a 40mm lens, which is not particularly wide-angle, but the lighting/exposure and framing create a certain heavy mood that matches the content.

[rama lingam]

Thank you David master. But some people’s using long focal length lenses for more observational purpose. It’s seems observational but at that same time it’s get very beauty. Soft background gives Beauty impression rather than survey the story. Could you explain little more about long focal length uses of some good films.

[dmullenasc]

Like I said, Gordon Willis movies — look at “The Parallax View” or “Godfather Part 2” or “Klute”. They are observational and yet have emotional weight.

Kurosawa’s 1960s movies like “Red Beard”, “The Bad Sleep Well”, and “High and Low” use longer anamorphic lenses stopped down for deeper focus.

The problem is that “emotional weight” is context-oriented more than technique-oriented.  If the scene is about a lonely person getting bad news like the death of a loved one, perhaps the most effective shot emotionally is a wide observational one where the character is seen sitting alone in the next room framed by a doorway. It could even be longer-lensed, if there is room to back up the camera, in order to create flatter planes of depth. Yes, being up close and wide-angle might give the feeling of experiencing the moment with the character and yet the wider, farther shot might suggest their isolation and could be the more emotionally “weighty” shot.

[dmullenasc]

Same thing could be said about frontal shots versus shots on the character’s back — sometimes it is more effective emotionally to play the scene with the character’s back to camera or have the character be in darkness and hard to see.  Or shot size, tighter is not always better.

There is no formula that you can apply, this is where understanding the text and the actor’s performance informs you as to the approach based on your taste and experience, and there is no single “correct” decision (of course, it is possible to make some bad decisions as well.)

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