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Thanks to you all for your replies, you all gave me interesting things to reflect upon! I see the risk of giving more importance to the math than to the image. Perhaps it seems an interesting aspect to me because i have no experience and i think that at the beginnings (no matter in which field) “magic formulas” seems a very useful tool to look for. And besides that i’m a science and maths teacher and so i really love formulas, ah ah.
From your comments it seems to me that (in my particular case) contrast ratio could be the starting point to set the scene and not the final step, since i think it could give me an approximate idea of how to begin to light the scene.About the second part (keeping the ratio or adapting to the scenes) i am trying to study movies i like to see what choices they made. What i hope to achieve is to avoid both a boring homogeneity of the images and a messy variety of them and find the right balance. Which at the moment looks like a very complicated achievement to obtain, ah ah!
I sometimes can’t even comment in a thread at all, mostly when I have already commented. I also sometimes have trouble logging in. It’s a “too many redirects” error, not caused by my cache/cookies as I have this issue with different devices, browsers and when trying with deleted cookies/cache or even over a VPN. That means it must be the website itself but is anyone else even having this issue?
I had some similar problem some time ago but It seems the issue i had with login, password recovery etc are not showing agaib. A strange thing it’s actually that, as soon as i post a thread i see the “edit” option, that disappear in a few time.
Just to clarify: i am not complaining or anything, the forum is great as It Is, It’s Just a little suggestion to add a simple feature that i think a forum template usually allows (in other words, i suppose It could be an Easy fix to do). 🙂
It’s very possible that Tom Stern and Clint Eastwood just “felt” that high contrast, hard lighting was just “right” for the film. Relying entirely on their artistic intuition without really deconstructing why they felt that way. In my opinion, I find lighting is usually more about the feeling than the logic.
Yes, i agree with you on that and that’s my point : the lighting feels “right” for this story but my impression is that they tried to give to the majority of the scenes the very same feeling (because it’s elegant? to underline the moral meaning of the movie? because it’s cool? i don’t know but that’s there) more than aiming to a realistic approach. Of course one could suggest that i feel the lighting so “right” because that’s why i experienced the movie, but as a mental exercise i tried to think how the movie would look with different lighting and if “feels” different.
This is the frame that somehow triggered my curiosity . There’s the composition of the image, the elegance of such a solution and many other things of course, but it made me realize that characters in this movie seem to costantly emerge and drown in the shadows and many scenes are made only by few details in a sea of black shadows.
In my opinion, I find lighting is usually more about the feeling than the logic. It’s less of a clearly defined microcosm of the films complete themes and typically more of an individual component that works in harmony with the rest of the film. But I like your theory a lot. Very clever.
It’s an interesting point of view, it shows that lighting a movie is not just recreating a light for a right scene, but also adding a touch of artistic and personal view to the entire movie.
But I like your theory a lot. Very clever.
Thanks a lot, i do appreciate that!
I apologize if i don’t use a correct terminology but my experience is with illustration, drawing and painting (that’s why the shapes created by lights and shadows and their edges grab my attention, it’s the core of painting reality) and i’m doing my very first steps in understanding cinematography and cinema in genera and i think Roger’s site is the best place i could find to begin the learning journey. 🙂
You could make hoops of 1″ plastic pipe to hold up a ‘tunnel’ of diffusion. There is a white industrial plastic that is equivalent to a 216 diffusion and comes in a wide roll. I used this on a film when I needed a lot of diffusion, instead of paying far more for something from a film supply company. You could rent seamless grid cloths or silks, which might be the cheapest option.
It’s comforting to know that even you resort to a bit of DIY for some scene. 🙂
Turtle Base, they are the bottom or ‘feet’ of a c-stand. Essentially the lowest position you can get on a stand without a babypin nailed to a piece of plywood.
Thanks! I didn’t know they had a specific name! I learned a new thing and it’s a good day when it happens!
Please Roger, don’t get angry, but…
… 2K Blondes set on turtles…
…I can’t take away from my mind the image of this charge of 2000 blonde girls riding turtles. That must have been a wild movie production indeed! Did you have brunettes on platypuses too?
Just kidding (i try not to take myself too seriously) ! Now that i think ashamed myself enough with silliness, may i ask you what “turtles” are? I not very expert about lighting terms, but i’ve never met this one before and it seems i can’t find it anywhere!
I suppose every story is different, but i’d say that with Internet, video calls and so on it’s easier than in the past to get in touch with family and friends even when far away from them.
Without knowing nothing about you and your story i could be wrong of course, but i’ve the impression that it’s the magnitude of the new adventure you are going to live (going to university, living abroad, leaving your world behind for some time, etc) that is somehow scaring you, more than the fact that it’s a different country. You know, that kind of “worried excitement” before a big jump.
Live it like Bilbo would do : run away without a handkerchief shouting “i’m going to an adventure!” . 🙂
In my opinion being a cinematographer requires a high level of fitness. Age probably is a consideration when a producer and/or a director is hiring but, as I only learn of the offers that come to me, I have no idea if I miss out on a job because of my age.
Is it because you do your own camerawork?
Absolutely! A beautiful sunset doesn’t necessarily further the narrative.
In one of the first podcast episodes you talk about telling a director that the cool shot he wanted was didn’t suit the story and you rejected his idea (i am going by memory, sorry if i am not correct). I find it very interesting.to see a DP “stepping back” to preserve the story. In my ingenuity i thought that should be the director first interest, not the cinematographer’s one. You were caring about the story more than the director himself. Have you ever thought to direct your own movie?
Thanks to you all for your replies and suggestions, about the subject and about the suggested movies to watch!
I think that the point is finding what i really like and focus on that, to understand why i like that. And i realized i tend to like the movies done always by the same cinematographers, so at least i have a starting point, let’s say a style that i constantly like.
About the “bad cinematography”, would you include in it great movies with stunning images but that are so beautiful that you tend to forgot what’s their purpose and you simply stare at them?
Maybe it depends also on the position and duties?
I have no experience about cinema world but i think it’s a situation common to many other fields: young people are preferred by employers because they usually are fine with lower pay rates given the lack of experience, even if the present young generation seems to have a different approach to this way of thinking than the previous ones (that’s why they shift jobs very frequently and refuse low paying jobs).
This said, i think you’ll want someone that actually knows the job for a decision making and responsability position and that’s not related to age (but it’s easy to think that an older person that has been doing that job for years has more experience and knowledge). As i said i have no experience in cinema but honestly i can’t imagine a production that could have the chance to work with a famous artist in a relevant position (as a DP for example) and refuse because that artist is not the younger around.
As far as my little world is concerned, i prefer to work with smart people. I know a lot of stupid young people and clever old ones, as well as i know incredibly smart young people and absolutely stupid old ones. There’s too focus on age, with should focus on stupidity. 🙂
I once wrote my own list of personal favorites of cinematography and there were dozens of titles per decade of the history of cinema. Anyone can recommend five movies with great cinematography… but as soon as you watched them, there would be five more to watch, and so on! I think what movies you want to learn for depends more on what specifically would you like to learn. It’s similar to when someone asks what five books they should read on filmmaking. In my mind, if someone is a fan of a subject, they will read everything they can find, good or bad. Imagine someone saying they were a huge fan of U.S. Civil War history but then saying they want to only read a couple of books on the topic. I would just start watching good movies.
Yes, i understand your point and i agree with you, but that would apply to every subject. There’s always something new to learn , new artists, new scientific discoveries, etc.
Cinematography is a wide subject – and i know so little about it – that i am not aiming to collect a global knowledge about it, let’s say just a valid starting point (even if i realize that there’s a subjective element in it) . 🙂
