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1. The script and the director’s thoughts regarding the script. From that I use my imagination. It’s imagination, exploration and collaboration. After that come all the practical issues you have to take into account when you point a camera.
2. The lens informs the audience where they are in relationship to the subject. I don’t know how the choice of the lens could be considered unimportant! Just take a photograph of a face on a variety of lenses! It should be clear why its important.
3. I’m inspired by everything I experience. What helps? More experiencing!
I have worked with effects teams that use a densitometer. That is really accurate but I would still adjust the level by eye. The issue being smoke in a backlight looks heavier than in a side light!
All of them! Le Samurai, Circle Rouge, Army of Shadows. Duxieme Souffle is probably the best heist movie ever made. Army of Shadows the most realistic film about the French resistance. You could start with The Silence of the Ocean. B&W. Basically shot in one room with three characters. I think it was Melville’s first film. A Masterpiece.
We always referred to lens lengths and precise compositions on the animated film we were involved with. But, as always, its a collaboration with a great many people.
Camera capture was only used on specific scenes or, as with Rango, to explore a set. For the Croods, we were looking at how a hand held camera would feel. I’ve only experienced it in limited situations rather than an entire film.
The film is definitely stunning! I’m certainly not denying that. Technology and tastes change, which is a pity because there is a place from different ‘looks’, On Lawrence, it was the style to see into the shadows.
YouTube video? That may be from a test, I haven’t seen it. The lamps are spaced so that any multiple shadow is inconsequential. If you were to look at the lighting on a white sheet of paper, you would definitely see a shadow for every single lamp. If I was lighting a white sheet of paper I would use diffusion or have the lamps even closer together. On a face the shadows don’t register and if there is movement….
I use fresnel lamps, as on Lebowski, O Brother, Jarhead, or True Grit, so the light is confined to a single area but still appears as one soft source in that area. On True Grit, for the night scenes, the lamps were 5 – 7 feet apart, but looking from 1,000 feet, that’s not a great distance. If I had done the same on BR2049, at 20 feet it would have looked ridiculous.
You ask if its possible on digital and you show an AI reference that shows it is possible! Filmmakers and cinematographers are dealing with the technology of their time. Lawrence of Arabia looks a little rigid and over lit today but at the time it was state of the art. Could you reproduce the same look today? Sure. Would you want to?
The process varied a little from film to film. We did storyboard most films we were involved with, I say we but tehre is a whole team doing story reels as they call them. We just gave advice, swapped ideas. For ‘How to Train your Dragon’ and ‘Croods’ we did some camera capture. This is where you have a virtual copy of your set and the characters within it and you can move around them, alter the sync etc.. But, mostly, shots were constructed by a very large team of people working over a long period of time, working with teh story reel as a basis.
Frustrating for us was that the lighting team then did their work and there was not enough interchange between the layout and lighting.
I was using black duvetyne on the ground more often than large bounce sources, though there were some of these on some shots. It just depended on the angle of the sun etc. ect..
That image from the film is way off. I did shoot the exteriors to be warm but that is ridiculous. It looks like there is a yellow veil over the entire shot.
Practice! You just have to judge the relationship with one small space to a larger one. That does take practice, and, possibly, a look at photometric charts. You might light the space in exactly the same way and then it is just multiples or larger lamps.
You might think about lighting from one side. You could have cold light square to teh subject and the warmer source inside that. Just a thought.
I have only worked on one film that used 4:3 and that was only for the first scene in ‘A Serious Man’. For that one scene the format seemed perfect and I agree that 4:3 suited ‘The Lighthouse’. But why, other than for very specific purposes, a film will flip formats or go from color to B&W defeats me. It generally makes me aware of the surface of the film. It disconnects me from the story and the characters.
