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<p style=”text-align: left;”>You can try ND’s on the windows or their cheaper analogues like construction film from supermarket. If the room is large enough you can totally cover the windows with 500g/m2 black molton (it’s pretty cheap for what it does) and fake whatever you want.</p>
Shoot it the way you want it to appear on screen.
Is this your constant approach, regardless of the circumstances, or does it happen that you shoot in such a way that you can then “tweak” the exposure later? For example, moving the camera out of a dark basement on a sunny afternoon. Sorry for this amateurish question, but modern 15+ stops sensors and compositing tools can do wonders. Is it worth making the filming process as complicated and expensive if, at least, 20% of the final image can be “adjusted” without consequences? Or do you always try to shoot with 100% even spontaneous improvisation?
I think you need practice with all possible cameras/mediums/sensors/lenses to understand the differences and basics. Then, having understood the capabilities of the phone, you need to come up with a story and find at least one actor, one microphone and a couple of lights. And only then…
IMO, “shaky cam” is just a tool for enhancing the viewer’s emotions and provide the right “feeling” of the moment. Personally, I don’t have a problem with it as long as it’s someon’s “point of view” or just logically valid and not overused. Same as shallow depth of field: not for a “style” or “beauty”, but another tool for telling a story.
The point of this anecdote (and I think of a lot of the pertinent answers here) being that the talk about depth-of-field and other techniques (let me put the use of vintage glass in this bag!) becomes a problem only when it takes center stage and replaces the more fundamental and important conversations about emotion, mood, flow, and point of view.
I totally agree and maybe it’s just my personal rejection, but when I watched an Oppenheimer, this “wedding style” DoF prevented me from enjoying the picture. Yes, this is a movie about the inner world and isolation from the outside and 70mm film look, but even understanding this, it was hard to watch.
Thank you all for your opinions and experience: I read everything with pleasure.
is Zack Snyder’s
Snyder was in my first edit of previous answer about the overusing of DoF 🙂 That was funny and cool in 300 for a first time, but then I just phisycally can’t watch his projects. And new Batman is really close in terms of blurring.
I’m really intrigued by what Sir Roger saw there. Absolutely the opposite of how he shoots: unmotivated blur, anamorphics, breathing, harsh light accents etc. Hope to get a lot of insights after learning the details.
First of all, shallow focus has been available to filmmakers ever since the 1930s
Ahhhh, I’ve expected that might not be understood. I meant that from early 30s till early 2010 shallow focus was avaliable only for still photographers or large cinema productions. Now it’s in every pocket in every smartphone and every single wedding is shot with shallow DOF. Just because it pretty, as you said. That’s why I don’t understand why It’s so overused in the Hollywood today. Almost every blockbuster/mass-market film has a dominant shallow depth of field, such as >50% of the scenes in the entire film. Isn’t shallow DOF just a “special effect” like dolly zoom or slow motion?
I think in the case of “The Batman”, as with other Greig Fraser works lately, the shallow focus works well for creating a certain dreamlike mood or a feeling that one is trapped in the headspace of a character (it worked well in Roger’s “Empire of Light” as well).
If we’re talking about Mr. Deakins work, there was a lot of shallow shots in Burton Fink. But that’s because character’s headspace as well and I didn’t mean cases where it’s a justifiable artistic choice.
Just watched Blade Runner 2049 for the first time since the theatrical experience… and only few close up scenes were in really shallow focus. So much texture, information and emotion are preserved when the aperture is closed.
