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A good advice i read time ago (i can’t remember if here or on another website) is that darkness and shadows appear darker than they actually are thanks to contrast with something brighter in the same shot. You could use this trick, if you can sneak something bright in your dark scenes.
I think a black satin/silk fabric could be useful to create some discernible texture, they have a deep black color but with some reflectivity.
How to remove the darkness?
With some kind of…uh…light?
Lame jokes apart (but i suppose you’ll have to use some kind of light to make the abstract texture noticeable), it seems a very interesting project. I’m curious to know what Roger would do in this case.But if i didn’t misunderstand what you were describing, isn’t it a bit risky to get so close to complete darkness for so much time? I mean, if one will watch it not on a perfectly calibrated monitor but on a tv or a pc with a slightly lowered brightness or, even worst, on a tablet with a variable brightness, would he still be able to discern something in the almost complete black of the screen?
I don’t know if it’s an useful information for the other european forum users, anyway i wrote to the ASC to ask about the shipping cost to Italy for the signed copies of the book. They said that the shipping cost to Italy, through UPS or DHL, is something around $46. I suppose that will be, more or less, the same shipping cost for other european countries. I hope it helps!
Did you get your copy?
Looking forward to read it but it will published on november 11th and won’t be here sooner than next month (but i am a bit sceptical about that, we’ll see) . 🙁
Thanks Stip, i think It’s a good advice to see what wins at the end, their emotional power (i like this way of thinking!) or the annoyance for their imperfections.
I am afraid that i need to become a way better cinematographer but also a less finicky person at the same time, ah ah.
Thanks a lot Stip!
I noticed that too, looking at scenes with fresh eyes, after some days, helps me a lot with editing. I really love that kind of shots, like Ozu’s pillow shots (like the famous vase one) , the ones in the original Ghost in the Shell or, as you said, in Miyazaki’s works. Surely they are way more common than i remember (for some obscure reason your post made me think of a misterious tree full of symbolism…) but i associate them mostly with japanese movies, it seems. They are like visual haikus, to me. I didn’t know they have a word for that, thanks for teaching me that! 🙂
And yes, it’s almost a “one man show”, i’m doing everything but acting : luckily i’ve some friends with years of experience as theatre actors that helped me, they really did a great job even with my poor directing skills (but it seems that they had a good time working with me and they offered to work again with me on the next short). So i had to learn everything from scratch in every area of a (very small) cinematographic production: from script to sound mixing, from production coordination as a producer to lights wiring as a gaffer.
It’s an horror short and i think these “pillow shots” really add something to the mood (and, jokes apart, i really love that famous shot in Prisoners, it creates tension in an abstract but powerful way). My problem is that – even if i did my best – some of the shots have a poorer “visual quality” (camera movement not so smooth, no enough head room, a boring point of view, contrast ratio on the face too even to suit the story, etc etc etc) and i’m not sure about using them, even if they could add something to the narrative element.
Thanks a lot Roger! I really love the elegance and simplicity of the cinematography of that movie, i think it’s perfect for the story without being too evident and attention demanding. As an exercise i’m storyboarding the dialogue between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis, one can learn a lot from that scene in terms of…well, everything, it’s perfect.
I wonder if Amazon will sell copies intended for sale in the States. It is a mystery!
Searching on Amazon (i checked on italian, french and german versions) there are two different versions: one from Cassell Publishing (actually Octopus Publishing) to be published on february 12th and one from Grand Central Publishing to be published on november 11th, both properties of Hachette. On US Amazon there’s only the one from GCP. So it seems that the GCP one is the american version (a bit cheaper) and the Cassell one is the european version (a bit more expensive).
My wild guess is that in Europe we’ll be able to order the GCP version on november but it will be shipped from US .
But the strangest part is that italian amazon says it could be delivered on november 19th and in general they are quite timely on delivery here. A week to deliver it in Italy from US ? The mistery deepens! Stay tuned on november to discover the shocking finale of the series! Ah ah!
No shame, cinema Is so full of great works that it’s impossible to know everything. I am in your same situation and i discovered great movies thanks to the forum and the podcast. For example thanks to Roger i discovered one of the best movie i’ve seen, The Silence of The Sea (the original clandestine movie by Melville). 3 people closed in a room and only one talks. I would’ve never watched it on these premises, but Roger quoted it, i trusted his knowledge and i discovered an absolute masterpiece.
November in the US and January in Europe.
I don’t know if it’s of any relevance but italian Amazon page says it will available in November here, i hope they didn’t mistake publishing date and european availability date, ah ah! The excerpt of the book are great, looking forward to read and re-read it!I bet it will become the Bible of the present and future generations of cinematographers!
Thanks a lot Stip! I apologize if i misunderstood, i was referring to the LUTs that are used in post. Your example helped me understand, but unfortunately i can’t use this approach with my camera since it can’t show LUTs (this made me misunderstand), so i am forced to more or less guess what the final look could be After grading. I am planning to update my gear for the next short and i’ll keep in mind the show LUT technique.
Thanks a lot Stip!
I am using Resolve but i don’t like LUTs, i feel i have little control on them and i learn nothing from them , since for me this short it’s mainly a learning experience, not only a creative one. I tend to learn through “backward engineering”, so i try to begin with Roger’s shots in the movies going backward to (try to) understand how he shot them (and this forum and upcoming Roger’s book are like treasure for me for that). I think Roger’s style is created by every aspect of cinematography (camera movement and placement, lens choice, lights, etc etc) and how he uses them to tell the story (and each story has its own different way to be told), something a LUT can’t create on the spot. I undersand that it’s a tempting shortcut, but i’m one of those persons that prefer the longest and hardest road to get to the peak of the mountain, ah ah ! 😀
This said, i need to take something usable out of my shots, so after some testing this workflow seems to work:1) i shot the scenes (and in the AI era it’s not that obvious that the images were created with a camera with real actors, ah ah!) trying to create with light and production desing the palette i wanted. Given my limitation i couldn’t create “the look” in camera for all the shots, just something vaguely close.
2) i looked for some shots that had a similar composition, mood and lights to grade my shots. I understand a professional wouldn’t work that way but i’m not and i need some kind of guide to know the path to follow. I grade my shot until my waveform, parade and vectorscope are close to the reference. Of course there’s an enormous difference in the quality of referencing shot and my own, but somehow my humble shots are turning decent in this way. By dissecting the waveforms and the vectorscopes I’m slowly beginning to understand the work behind the shots, something impossible with a LUT (at least for the way i learn).
3) I know how i want the scene to look and i find that look working on palette , temperature, saturation, etc. In this phase i move from the reference point and i use my instinct and creativity. And this is the phase that i’m struggling with : the shots are not that bad, the scenes look more or less as planned, but i feel i need to do a step further to make them look like part of the same movie, with more harmony and coherence among the shots. So far, this made me learn that i can’t work backward (first the shots and then the look of the entire work), i need to plan how the entire work should look and then create the shots according to that. Next time i’ll improve on that : better late than never!
EDIT: sorry for the long reply, i hope it was not too boring. I think the problem with my backward approach is that i am referencing to too different works to grade my shots. I need to study just one movie to make this approach usable, i suppose.
Thanks for your answer!
You are right as always, in effect I’m more looking for the right look for the scenes than refining the shots. It means that i didn’t really create the scenes in the way I wanted them to look, I simply exposed them correctly (well, kind of). I didn’t reflect on that.
In my defence I have to admit that, apart from one scene that was created with a precise look in mind that more or less i obtained in camera (and all the knowledge the forum gave me helped me a lot in creating that shot, so i am extremely grateful to you all for that) , for the other scenes i had to do my best to overcome lack of knowledge, lack of time, lack of decent lights, lack of budget, lack of everything but problems, ah ah! So now I am forced to rely on the sinful and dreadful “fixing that in post” to get what i figured in my mind. I hope to be able to do more in camera in my next short, but for now i’m afraid i’ve to find not only the right look for each scene, but also make them all look part of the same thing.
Since i suppose you’ll have little control on the exterior lights, you could create a similar artificial lighting in the studio for Key light (intensity, temperature, diffusion, direction, etc). Consider that you’ll need separate light on the green screen to make the Chroma Key step easier. Study how light behaves in real scene to mimick It in studio (what types of shadows, reflexes, etc).
EDIT: I am not an expert and i apologize if i am saying something not correct, but i suppose that for camera movement in theory you have two options: shooting in the studio and match the movement in the exterior or, even more simply, shooting in exterior and match it in the studio. Perhaps you’ll need some camera tracking in both cases, so in studio remember the tracking points!
I used green screen for my short movie and, if it may reassure you a little, even if the lights were completely off (in my defence, it was a shot made for another scene but i had to use in emergency in a different one by altering the lighting in post production) by grading it in post production i managed to match the shots in an acceptable way, so i’d say it’s not impossible with modern softwares
