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Hi! I’m without experience and still learning like you, so i don’t know how useful my thoughts can be, but a thing i noticed (and Roger somehow says it often, in a way or another, but the core of the concept is similar) Is that the tool you use Is less important than how you use it and how you use your brain and instinct to tell the story.
For a little school project i gave to my middle school students a very old and poor camera to shot some shorts. In half an hour they all were not thinking anymore about the camera, they were Just using their instinct to set the lights, direct movements of actors, blocking the scenes, thinking in terms of cuts to be made, without any input by me, in a spontaneous way. They were learning by doing. And i’m doing the same, the more i play with the camera the more i learn. So, being in your same situation i can Say that i’m learning by studying masters’ works (i.e. Watch a lot of good movies and try to understand why they are good) and experiment. Write a nice scene, shot It with whatever you can, learn and have fun.
I see It in a simpler way. People have ideas and opinions. I’m interested in the ones of the filmmaker, since they should explain the movie meaning. I find less relevant actors’ ideas, but i am happier when they are similar to mines. Just my opinion of course!
I don’t think cinema is just entertainment. Entertainment movies exist, of course, but there are also movies dealing with moral and ethical problems that also have something to say, not just make you spend a couple of fun hours. I think it for every kind of artistic expression, there’s space for entertainment and for a lot more.
My humble opinion is that director’s ideas and desire to tell a given story are relevant, not actor’s aderence in real life to the role (but i agree that it’s a delusion when you discover that an actor you admired in a role Is not a nice person). The message of the movie and the role of cinema will always be the same, while actors are just people faking something as a job, not heralds and champions of the truth. I wouldn’t mix the actor and the role (but of course Is a nice feeling when the actor Is in real life the Hero that he plays on the screen). Just my opinion, of course!
Congratulations for completing it, it’s not easy! It looks interesting, good luck for the festivals!
Partly for a technical problem: i created a little set in my garage but it has no window. And i have a room with a big window. I would like to show the characters against the window but the only other option i have Is using a green screen and faking It in 3D, as i did for other set extension, but it gets more complicated than matching 2 locations shot. And above all, i was looking at the (so called) set with the garage door wide opened and just the natural light. It was beautiful, calm and (of course) natural. No point in trying to fake what nature gave me yet. So i tried to figure what Roger would do in such a situation, and my answer was that i needed to find a window somewhere to use that natural light. Perhaps i’m completely wrong but it’s not easy to try to think like Roger, ah ah! (But it’s the best way to try to learn from him, to me, not just copying what he did but trying to guess what he would do) .
If you want to do it yourself you can use the Studio Version of Davinci Resolve. It automatically creates subtitles from your audio tracks. If you have the English subtitles created, you can use ChatGPT to translate them to French and replace the original. I can’t include YouTube links, otherwise it won’t let me post this comment, so I’ll try to add them in a second post.
I don’t know how good are translations from ChatGPT but in general i try to avoid automatic translations, sometimes i checked languages i know and translations were a bit odd at best (but they are improving everyday of course). To quickly understand what a website talks about they are fine, but i wouldn’t trust them for subtitles. Just my opinion of course!
I’m not an expert but i’m a similar situation (mine it’s in italian but i need english subtitles to join some festivals) . Wheat kind of problems would you like to solve?
As far as the technical aspect is concerned, it’s not a difficult process actually, you need to create a written file in which the words corrispond to the timestamps. A bit tedious and time consuming but not that complicated. You attach that file in the software you are using for post production (i’m doing it in Da Vinci Resolve, for example, and it offers a tool to create subtitles automatically – but i prefer creating them manually). Usually it’s the same file you have to submit to festivals, when they request subtitles.
To translate the dialogue i’d suggest you to see how movies create subtitles, sometimes i see differences between the subtitle and the dialogue when they are in different languages: the global meaning is respected but not the actual dialogue. I find it a bit annoying, i don’t see the point in changing the script, when the phrase still makes sense in the other language. I hope that helps a little!
Thanks to everybody for your tips!
To clarify, as Roger guessed i’m perhaps overthinking about that, since while the two walls are in two different rooms, they actually are rotated of 90° and they belong to the same building, so it shouldn’t be a great issue to match the two shots and make them look two sides of the same room (summin up, in one room i have a library i’d like to use as a background but i can’t use its window, while in the other room i have a nice window but no library…) . I’m a bit sorry i won’t be free to move the camera from a side to the other but as long as i can use natural light i’m happy. And i think a static camera could be useful to create a bit of tension, given it’s an horror story.
Thanks for the tip about the audio, Stip! i was not thinking about that, but you are right, audio will help in creating the matching!
And now let’s go and find that shot in Hail Caesar, ah ah!
What a great news! Looking forward to read It! I just hope shipping to Italy won’t be too expensive (as usually Is, go figure now).
May i ask on what set the photo of the cover has been taken (if It was shot on set of course) ? To see if i guessed It, ah ah!
Yes, it’s a dialogue scene but the main problem is that i can’t combine shot and reverse shot in the same location. And, above all, in the first one i don’t have a window i can use to give a motivation to the light, while in the second one i don’t have the element of the set i need to tell the story. I thought about creating the second part of the scene (the window one) with a 3D background and a green screen, but i’d like to use a real window and a real set, i’m afraid to achieve a fake looking effect with the green screen (apart from the complication of using that).
As always, since i’m just an amateur working on a little project i don’t think that my opinion is particularly relevant, but even in my little i try to take inspiration from Roger’s masterpieces. But i came to the conclusion (and it happened many times, in other completely different contextes) that, while it’s highly interesting and informative to know how Roger (or other great cinematographers) created a given scene, the point is not doing the same thing , but thinking in the same way. At least it works for me, i can’t speak for anyone else. But if i just try to copy something i can obtain, at best, a decent copy. If i try to think in the same way of someone that created something i really like, in that moment i understand and learn. Of course there’s some subjectivity in it, but an educated guess is better than no guess.
So, my humble advice : study that scene from Skyfall and try to guess why Roger did this or that, not just what he did. If your goal is creating an exact copy of that scene do it, but perhaps i think it would make an even better impression to show that you can create a scene – even a different one – in the same way Roger would. Just my opinion!
Hello David, thanks very much for your reply. This really helps and as you suggested, I will schedule the wide shots / the ones with windows in frame around dusk.
As always, i’m unexperienced and i’m afraid i’m writing just a bunch of stupid stuff, but take in consideration that you’ll have the natural light from the windows even in close ups (if you plan to shoot them previously), so it’s possible you’ll need to match the colors of close ups and wide shots to keep them coherent (you’ll get probably cold/greyish diffused light from the windows). Perhaps a warm diffusion on the windows for the close up, together with artificial lights placed inside, could help controlling the natural light also in close ups?
On the one side you can calculate how many foot candles you need to get to middle grey based. A rule of thumb is that you need 100fc for a T2.8 at 100 ISO and 24fps. Double or halve the values for each stop, so T4 at 400 ASA/ISO requires ≈50 fc if you want to light at key.
Let me see if i got the math right. You lose 1 stop from T2.8 to T4 but you gain 2 stops from 100 ISO to 400, so at the end you obtained 1 stop more and need half the light (50 fc instead of 100) to have the same exposure. But when keeping the ISO at 100 and going from 2.8 to 4 you’d need 200 fc, is it correct?
