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Instinct! I think this topic has been discussed many times before. Usually, there is little time to consider the ‘mathematic’ proportions of a composition – even if you are that way inclined. I am not. I do not like rules.
We watched Hud again the other day. The film’s compositions are worth taking a look at – though its hard not to become immersed in the story. Asphalt Jungle is another film I might recommend for its compositions – amongst many other thangs. Ida is more adventurous without being distracting. In Cold Blood is perfection.
Yes, NCFOM was more restrained in its camera style. Almost always observing the action rather than enhancing or making a comment on it. 1917 was a very particular style of film. I’m not sure I would agree that the camera had a ‘consciousness of its own’, that might be said of Barton Fink but not of 1917. That said, I would say that the camera expresses more than what is on the page in all three films.
The 120D is a small lamp and, I’m sure, has its limitations when trying to create a beam of sunlight. So, I don’t think you need my advice! Looks pretty good. Personally, I am not a fan of using atmosphere unless it is for a very specific purpose. I used none at all on Skyfall.
Nightmare Alley is a good example. Whether you like it or not the peacock blue was consistent with the overall style of the film. In the very early days of color, especially those using the Technicolor process, night scenes were often a very saturated blue.
In the case of Skyfall I added a light Hampshire frost to the opening that I was using as the cut. I felt a very sharp shadow was unnatural so I softened it a little. I could have brought the lamp closer to the cut but then teh light beam would have been less parallel.
I would agree with David’s thoughts on exposure. For NCFOM in particular I exposed a front lit subject by more than a 1/2-stop, probably double that (although the posted frames don’t seem to reflect that). And I would allow a backlit subject to be some 2-stops under. But this can only be a generalization. Is a subject lit by an intense side light or are they far from a source? And how do you want the overall feeling of the imagery? For NCFOM we were trying to depict a harsh, almost bleached looking, landscape. On another film, The Assassination of Jesse James is one example, I might set exposures closer to the actual reading on my meter. Exposure, like any other part of the process, is a personal choice.
Yes, the convention is for moonlight to be blue in films and that seems natural to the way my eye reads moonlight. I, and many others, have been guilty of making the color too intense, but that is only my own judgement and I am only referencing naturalistic films. But on the right project? Maybe a peacock blue would be perfect.
We shot that sequence at dawn and at dusk, scheduling some of the shots to follow a day scene or before a night scene. Some shots were nowhere near the location where the drug deal takes place so we had to connect them to other work.
You post three very different lighting setups. A fresnel lamp projects a sharp beam of light but that is relative to how close to the lamp the subject is. Similarly, any cut between the lamp and the subject will will never produce a sharp shadow if it is close to the lamp, as in the case of a barn door. The further away the cut the sharper the shadow will be. For the effect in that Skyfall reference, I was not attempting to create a very sharp shadow and had, in fact, used a Hampshire diffusion on the opening that is the cut. Shadow sharpness is all about distance and diffusion.
I think the best advice is be prepared. Storyboard your wish list and keep it simple. You can always embellish your shots if you find you have time. If you have storyboards you can break down what can be shot at dawn and what it dusk. There might also be some you could shoot during the day as long as there is cloud cover.
The camera was mounted at 90º to a rod that extended out from the side of a dolly. It was a kind of ‘spit’, as if you were rotating a hog over a fire. The rod was long enough that the dolly never entered frame.
I would like to point out that one shot in 2001, the scene in which they discover the obelisks, involved the compositing of some 28 separate elements onto a single piece of negative. Imagine passing that same negative through an optical printer 28 times to overlay these elements in perfect registration. And you don’t think Kubrick would have loved to use CGI?
To comment on the first post from Stefano. Protection from a bare bulb is tricky. You can cover the bulb with a wire mesh but that will interfere a little with the sharpness of the emitted light. That was a compromise we used for whenever an actor was below or close to a source. However, for the one corridor shot with the vertical slashes of light we felt there was no need for protection as the bulbs were a ways away from an actor.
As far as lighting a stadium for a 400 meter track race, I couldn’t say. Presumably, the existing location has built in lighting. Whether I would use it or not would depend on many factors: the script, the shots required, budget, the length of the shoot, whether slow motion is involved. I’m sure there are a few more. However, I would suggest that it is most common to augment existing light sources rather than start from scratch. I did light one stadium for a night shoot and I just was not allowed enough units to do justice to the scene – regardless that I had three 96K Musco lights!
