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It often comes down to Theory and Practice. You read, you watch movies, you shoot, and repeat over and over again.
Activity and Reflectivity are key as well, you need time to digest what you’ve learned. Vittorio Storaro once said that after his first feature, he couldn’t find work and spent two years visiting museums and studying art. At first he thought of those two years as lost time, wasted time, but later he realized that these were the most important years of his professional life because they gave him the foundation for the rest of his career.
What’s a vector set? Is this a day scene? Do you have a grid above the set? How big are the windows? What do you want it to look like in terms of mood?
Keep in mind that the proper or right exposure artistically isn’t necessarily a full or “normal” exposure – what’s more important is consistency of exposure across the coverage. That’s where the tools are handy.
It’s tricky to talk about how to know exactly how your negative is exposed except in obvious cases of heavy over or underexposure. Even when talking about printer lights, keep in mind that the printers were calibrated at each lab slightly differently, printing at 25-25-25 (middle of the 1-50 scale for each color) didn’t yield the same results at every lab with the same piece of negative — though the lab could tell you want something shot “normally” based on LAD values should print at. More or less.
This is why testing in prep was so important, what mattered is that you found a set of printer lights you felt was best for the image you wanted. After that was determined, day by day you could find out if your footage was printing close to what you wanted, knowing that underexposed footage would end up using lower numbers, etc. Or you could do what cinematographers like Richard Kline did, actually tell the labs to use a set of numbers — then you’d find out yourself if your footage was too dark or too bright rather than have to corrected for you. Of course he did that in the days when there was only one Kodak stock to shoot. With the varieties of stocks later, and daily variations in lab chemistry, etc., I was more likely to ask that the roll be timed for a grey card shot at the head.
If you’re shooting film, then having a neutral gray card (and face) — shot in boring, flat “white” light so that there is no creative interpretation involved in deciding what “neutral” and “normal” is — is the best way of knowing if the footage that follows the card was under or overexposed a bit more than intended.
This is best answered by a focus-puller — there are a number of techniques that can be used, larger monitors, zooming-in on the monitor signal, peaking tools, etc.
If your AC is struggling, you may have to give that person a deeper shooting stop as well, though a deeper-focus image actually makes it harder to focus by monitor since you don’t see the fall-off in focus as clearly. But then, you also don’t see the focus mistakes as clearly!
Perhaps a pola filter would help, flags would help… but today there is very good spill correction software that compositors use to deal with that.
You can’t really compare the two because your shot is not in focus. If you zoom into it, you can see that you’re focused on the tip of his nose, not his eyes.
<p style=”text-align: left;”>The lens (and its f-stop setting) isn’t the only factor. You haven’t mentioned what camera you used nor the recording format nor the delivery format. Nor the source of the frame from “The Revenant”. Also in a small image seen on a computer or mobile device, the difference in sharpness between two similar images might just be the amount of electronic sharpening applied.</p>
The majority of cinema has been shot on standard 35mm for a century, not Full Frame. So there is no reason for filmmakers to always convert the focal lengths they are using to Full Frame equivalents in terms of field of view when discussing their movie. When we talk about Orson Welles’ use of the 24mm on “Citizen Kane” or the 18.5mm on “Touch of Evil”, we don’t convert those numbers to Full Frame equivalents.
“A 35mm lens on a Full Frame camera is around 27,5mm on a Super 35.”
No, a 35mm lens on a Full Frame camera is 35mm on Super 35. The format doesn’t change the focal length of the lens.
Larger and/or closer is softer, though too close and the rapid fall-off is noticeable, so just larger for softer is better. If the bounce amount is too much, you can either dim it by stretching a single net scrim over it (so you don’t have to back it up), or you can use a less white material such as Day Blue Muslin (or Day Grey), even a dirty unbleached muslin would be less bright if you also want some warmth.
I find that large Day Blue Muslins add subtle cool fill without looking obvious.
I would say because it’s not a scene about intimacy, it’s about an imbalance of power — he’s in a single chair, she’s alone on a love seat.
