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1. Contrast ratio is a creative choice based on the dramatic needs of the scene.
2. The softer the key light becomes, the less you tend to worry about fill light levels because the key is wrapping so much into the shadows.
If it’s overcast, it should work. You might consider using a heavy ND so you can shoot closer to an f2.8, which is more like what you’d have in real night photography — however there may be a stylistic reason to use deep focus. There are day-for-night shots early in “Wyatt Earp” that Owen Roizman chose to shoot at a deep stop because that was the general look they wanted for the movie. The day-for-night in “Mad Max: Fury Road” is another example of a stylized deep-focus night look.
You can run modern 35mm film stock through a 1920s camera, the standard hasn’t changed. Steve Gainer, ASC recently did an ASC Master Class where he filmed an actor on two 1920s cameras, I think one was a Pathe Professional from the late teens! He used Kodak Double-X emulsion. Coppola’s “Dracula” used silent era cameras for a scene when Dracula arrives in London, with modern color stocks — the footage looked so “normal” that they ended up duping it a few times to look grainier, like an Autochrome image.
The camera has to be in good working order. They aren’t easy to frame and focus on, no reflex viewing, tiny lenses, etc. You often pre-focused through a viewing tube looking at the gate with a piece of frosted gel in there, like a groundglass (you used to be able to focus through the film itself before they had anti-halation backings.) The mags are tiny, you need short loads. By the 1920s though you had Mitchells and Bell & Howell cameras that took 400′ loads. Talk to Steve Gainer, who runs the ASC Museum.
Well, keep in mind that a 60mm 2X anamorphic is like a 30mm spherical in terms of horizontal view… but yes, the movie favors close-ups and long lenses. In a busy set, a long lens tends to shoot through foreground elements so you have a sense of the character being surrounded on all sides and yet also is isolated by the depth of field being shallower. On the other hand, it can also feel more “observational” in tone since the camera is not physically close to the action… however, this is offset by the exaggerated movement laterally as the camera pans, creating speed, and if the camera is tight on the face, you still get a lot of the intensity of the performance despite any distancing and flattening effect of the telephoto lenses. It also resembles how a live sporting event would be covered from the sidelines on longer lenses.
It’s better to use the word “guideline” or “suggestion” than “rule” when it comes to artistic expression.
Compositions often fall into certain approaches — symmetry vs imbalance / centered vs. off-centered (where the Rule of Thirds comes from)… but the subject and its surroundings (in front of and behind the subject) have such an impact on what you frame and don’t frame, plus the artistic intent and the story point being made, that compositional “rules” are either just a quick starting point or an after-the-fact realization. They aren’t rules.
Let’s say you are walking with a camera through a landscape and stop to take a picture — maybe you start out by splitting the frame between the sky and land, but then try giving more space to the sky or to the land, or maybe you realize you need some foreground element to create depth, or maybe not, maybe you eliminate close foreground to simplify and create flatness… so you try and discard a half-dozen compositional “rules” within a few seconds in your mind before you take the picture. Ultimately these rules are just suggestions to spark thinking if you don’t have an immediate feeling for the framing.
And in filmmaking, you are telling a story. I had a wide shot of a public swimming pool next to the ocean as a character stands on the edge afraid to jump in. We had some beautiful clouds in the sky so the operator asked me if I wanted to tilt up to get more sky or tilt down to get more water or split the horizon… and I said “the scene is about her being scared of the water, so tilt down to show more water.” It wasn’t the prettier composition but it was the one that told the story.
There are no rules for exposing since that is a creative choice but when you are doing a sequence, sometimes it helps to imagine a 360 degree circular camera move around the actor in sunlight, then imagine what it would look like if you only set one f-stop for the whole move, then imagine opening up a little for the shadows, etc. then closing down again in frontal sunlight, etc.
My general rule is that the shadow side of a face should feel like it is the shadow side, so I wouldn’t normally expose a face in backlight at full exposure, I’d decide how many stops under key would look natural.
I find myself often leaning towards a face in bright frontal sunlight being a 1/2-stop over or more and in backlight, the face being 1-stop to 1 1/2-stops under, sometimes 2-stops under. But it depends on the face — I’ve worked with very pale actors who look overexposed even at normal exposure!
I recall an interview with Douglas Slocombe about filming “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and he said he overexposed the desert scenes in general to retain the feeling of heat, but it had the benefit of opening up the shadow detail. But I also remember that the sand dune scenes in “Four Feathers” shot by Robert Richardson were often shot with the exposure set to silhouette the actors, enhanced by using large frames of negative fill. So it all depends on the look you are going for.
You’re talking about two separate things. Whether you get the key-to-fill ratio the way you want it by increasing the key versus lowering the fill is a separate issue from the overall exposure.
If you want to use more light in order to work at a lower ISO to reduce noise, or effectively do something similar by darkening an overexposed shot, that is up to you. If you are recording raw, then ISO is just metadata anyway but as you use more light and process it darker to compensate, you are exchanging overexposure headroom for better shadow detail with less noise.
At some point, especially if you aren’t recording raw, you have to factor in that as you overexpose skin tones on a digital camera, you may get some artifacts on some cameras if you go too far that will look odd once corrected down to normal. Highlights can pick up a color shift or clip unnaturally.
The camera is shifted to the right, just outside of the right edge of the mirror to be out of the reflection. It swings open and close fast enough to not see the camera, which is looking through a camera port hole cut into the set, so it’s a black square that passes through the mirror.
Vittorio Storaro has told this story that after film school and even his first feature, he couldn’t find work for two years and felt like a failure. So he hung out in art museums during that time. He said that later he realized that this time of studying art on his own were the most important two years of his career.
I photographed over 20 short films at CalArts, all in 16mm. They were mostly masters degree thesis films.
A year after graduation I shot a 35mm feature as a DP for a fellow CalArts graduate, a non-paying job. I paid the bills by working part-time at a sound effects company as a data entry person; the owner liked to give jobs to CalArts students.
A year after my first feature that I shot another feature because a fellow graduate introduced me to the director.
Another year passed and I shot another feature because the same fellow graduate introduced me to the director for a short film and then this feature that followed.
Another year later and I was introduced to the director of my fourth feature by the editor of the second feature.
The producer of that fourth feature hired me for six more features.
These were all very low-budget non-union jobs in Los Angeles. I shot 23 features before I joined the union. For a decade I barely earned enough money to pay my bills.
At 24/25 fps at ISO 100:
100 fc = f/2.8
200 fc = f/4
400 fc = f/5.6
800 fc = f/8
So with ISO 800:
100 fc = f/8
200 fc = f/11
400 fc = f/16
You lose 5-stops going from 25 fps to 800 fps, so to shoot at f/2.8, you need to light for f/16 so that once you lose 5-stops by going from 25 fps to 800 fps, you’re down to f/2.8.
That’s about a 5-stop light loss so you look at the photometric data for the light and figure out how many foot-candles you need to shoot at, let’s say f/2.8 at 800 fps or think of it as shooting at f/16 at 25 fps.
The old rule of thumb is that you need 100 fc to shoot at f/2.8 / 24 fps / 180 degree shutter / 100 ASA. So that’s like f/8 at 800 ASA if you have 100 fc. So to get 2 more stops of exposure for f/16 at 800 ASA, you’d need 400 fc. Then you’d be shooting near an f/2.8 at 800 fps at 400 fc. I think.
Mainly you shoot tests in advance for any technique that you want to try. Otherwise (or as well) you contact people who have tried that technique or you hire crew people with some experience in that technique. If you only do things you’ve done before, you never learn. You take calculated risks based on research.
