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That would make sense! Maybe you can drop him a little Email  🙂

To the original poster, the plugin Scatter from Video Village does a great job of emulating diffusion filters, among them haze and fog filters. While it can never replace real fog, it could help balancing out continuity discrepancies between shots caused by sun and wind.

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Given Klimov’s obsession with realism, which went as far as shooting live bullets over the heads of the actors (the cow in the picture above really was shot dead during the scene) and the quality of the fog, I think it may have been natural.

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I’m not sure if this is what you ask but it will not react the same if you use different lenses. The longer the focal length, the more the image gets compressed, the shorter the more depth will be expanded and that will affect how large or small things appear in the foreground/middle/background  (their relative size to each other), perception of depth and object distortion.

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So Roger and Benicio didn’t talk to each other during the making of Sicario because they were both scared of each other, brilliant 🙂

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Sorry, I take back the B&W viewing finder recommendation, just tested my old one, it’s not working well enough on reds and yellows.

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I have to add, the viewing filter is still quite far from true B&W, it’s more like looking through a dense ND, but it could help someone not familiar with B&W get a feeling for what basically happens with colors in B&W.

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You might consider a B&W viewing filter to help judge contrast by eye (e.g. Tiffen T1 Black & White Viewing Filter). It’s also nice to just carry with you and look at things through it and get a feel for how colors work in B&W.

You might also consider color filters for the lens (red, green, yellow) to alter varying degrees of contrast, although some prior experience might be needed when using these.

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I think it looks great and has the mood you were aiming for. In my opinion one can get fantastic, and maybe even more authentic, results for night interiors (or exteriors close to a house) with clever use of practicals and no film lights.

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I would guess the students you refer to still read a lot, though. The internet is one huge book. I used to collect hundreds of articles from dedicated filmmaking or cinematography sites whenever they contained something I found useful or inspiring.

Books have some advantages over the more fractured knowledge of the internet though.

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I can’t say anything about Blain Brown, just that books about cinematography (or filmmaking in general) never worked for me personally. They could be inspiring and great theory, but very seldom anything actually translated onto set later.

I think I learned more by listening to Team Deakins than from any book, e.g. it made me realize how differently people can go about the same task. Which made me more confident in my own choices or actions when they didn’t correspond to what I believed to be conventional.

This is not to discourage you from getting books, people are different and what didn’t work for me might work very well for you!

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I know Roger and James like the cinematography of ‘The Batman’ but to me it left a strange taste when I left the cinema. It was visually stunning but also felt off and artificial. Later I learned that much was shot in The Volume, which explained the fake, video game-ish feeling it gave me. Combined with the many plot holes everyone was seemingly happy to ignore, it left me with a shallow impression.

But that’s just me and my growing dislike for anything fake in this growingly fake world; The cinematography is excellent and the vast majority likes it very much.

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Hi Abraham,

before listening to it, are there any spoilers for Oppenheimer in this episode?

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Yea but stop asking questions should the going get tough, haha. You’ll learn so much just by being there and observing.

Usually, film crew are really cool people, so don’t worry too much. I only met a few bad lemons in 20 years.

One thing that you should avoid though is to make suggestions on something if you haven’t been asked, e.g. if the director and set designer discuss the color of the curtains, they’d probably not appreciate if you’d join their discussion 🙂

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Also check locations how they look/feel during different times of day and schedule accordingly.

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