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Operators often want a “surround” view on their eyepiece or monitor to see what’s just out of frame to know what to avoid (or what to include) before it encroaches on the shot. Same can be helpful for focus pullers and DPs, or really anyone on set watching a monitor. Sure, it could be distracting at first, but it’s easy to get used to. Most monitors allow you to grey out or otherwise diminish the image outside the frame lines, but its rarely useful to fully black it out.
This doesn’t solve every mistake I make, but I find it solves at least one problem on almost every project… shoot a little something before the director calls action, and definitely after they call cut.
If you’re on an actor before the scene starts, you often get a beat of “focus” or “intention” or even “anxiety,” and if you’re on them for a few beats after you can get to see them release tension, or shift focus, or physically adjust position or look or even just twitch a small muscle in an undefined way. Invariably, a director/editor (who you alert to look out for those moments) can Kuleshov effect a clip to create a emotionally appropo cut away for a flubbed line or a focus bump or a transition in or out of a story beat.
If I’m not on a face, I do the same thing on hands, props, set dressing, background actors, pan around on a location or set, pop off a few frames on clouds or the skyline, etc…. Especially on indie projects there’s never enough b-roll, and there’s definitely never a pickup day to go out and shoot inserts and establishing shots, so I just try to get as much of that as possible informally as I go.
This may be a bit of a cliche answer, but whenever I think of a character’s subjective POV in a shot, I think of Jonathan Demme, especially (but not only) Silence of the Lambs. And of course, that’s a detective story which is powerfully concerned with diving the objective facts of the case from these subjective interactions…
If the camera is close enough, especially for a clean single, my eyeline mark is almost always a piece of tape on the matte box, sometimes even inside it.
If your reverse shot is at an entirely different time, bring a still frame from the first set up to compare the eyelines directly.
I’m part way through an indie project where I’ve set a bit of a compositional rulebook for myself. I’m center punching subjects as much as humanly possible, being extra careful to be at right angles to whatever the dominant elements in the background are, finding symmetries wherever I can. Trying to put a little formal distance on the story, maybe make it a bit presentational. Then there’s a handful of shots and a couple of specific scenes where I’m breaking those strictures, and hopefully it’s gonna be seamless for the audience, but they’ll feel the shift maybe before they can name it.
I think the frame you share above is typical of Mr. Deakins, perfectly in control and precise without being the least bit regimented. The horizon is perfectly level, of course, and he’s almost but not quite centered up in the squared off room. There’s no mathematical formula to the offset angle, like shifting all the way over to be 45* to the room. Instead it’s near enough to squared off that it still conveys the strictness and formality of the interrogation. Far enough to feel the empty space and isolation of the prisoner, no help is coming, and to be overwhelmed by the queasy oppressive yellow.
If the prisoner is perfectly centered by bringing the camera left, then the interrogators are pushed too far to the edge of the frame, no longer drawing attention and demonstrating command of the room. If the camera goes right, then the interrogators end don’t have enough space to maneuver without overlapping with the prisoner, muddying the separation between the opposing forces before they’re ready to engage. I take Mr. Deakins at his word that (assuming my interpretations are reasonable) that he probably isn’t consciously debating any of those effects either to himself or aloud. The camera just feels right in one spot and wrong everywhere else.
If I understand correctly, you’re not trying to illuminate the interior with these lights, just blow out the spaces between the slats and let the light beams glitter in the atmosphere, correct?
I don’t know how big a space you’re dealing with, but my instinct wouldn’t be to cluster them, but to line them up horizontally, aimed in parallel, not at a single point in the set. If there’s no structural elements interrupting the gaps across the width of the wall, I guess I’d probably slightly overlap the edges of the beam spreads, try to keep the light level reasonably even left-to-right. That should keep you from getting multiple shadows.
If you really wanted to turn four bulbs into a single close source, your trickiest puzzle will be getting the heads right up next to each other if they’re each on a separate stand. You might have to get creative and invent a sturdy way to mount them safely on one or two stands. The other option of course would be to aim them all through a diffusion frame so that that becomes the source, but then you’re losing some of the punch you’re trying to build up by clustering them together in the first place.
If you’re imitating the sun, the “point source” of the sun is far enough away that all the rays are coming at you in parallel, as if from the entirety of the local sky, not from a single nearby point.
Not to speak for the DP, of course, but I find that questions like this are just as effectively answered by asking yourself, what effect do those different perspectives have on you, the audience? Do you react differently to each of those shots, and if so, can you pin your reaction down to the framing alone or are you combining input from the frame and the story beat and the performances and the background and etc.?
Authorial intention is dead! Long live the New Criticism! 😉
For me, assuming I’m not restricted by a tight location, I’m mostly influenced by how focused I want the audience to be on the principal actor’s face vs how much I want to emphasize body language and allow enough of the OTS character’s reactions.
Cinematography in narrative filmmaking is always (sure, nothing is “always” or “never”) about the story, the characters, the setting, and serving the director’s intentions in bringing those elements to the audience. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a situation in which “aggressive color” or a muted palate is a must or is forbidden. You could tell a modern western noir lit in pulsing neon or in sunbaked sepia. You could tell a mind trip fantasia in swirling pastels or in black and white. It all depends on how the team of creators from writers to production designers to actors to the director and cinematographer agree they want to approach it.
2007 YouTube would not have been a major marketing platform yet. Not even 720p for another two years.
Of all the wheelchair dollies I built on no-budget shoots, my favorite set up that surprisingly worked was sitting in the wheelchair on a hardwood floor, wearing thick socks with the camera nestled on my feet sliding along the hallway, for an eye-level, low angle view of our mortally wounded protagonist crawling away from his assailant.
I’m sure this topic is long past finished, but I’m reminded that Woody Allen (when working with Gordon Willis or otherwise) famously wanted to only shoot exteriors on flat grey days with no strong shadows and no details in the skies. He just found that the most flattering and beautiful way to see New York (or London or wherever).
