Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
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.
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!
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.
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 🙂
A tip would be to shoot and then edit it yourself.
One thing you’ll learn about for example is (in-) consistency between shots of a scene. How much of it is still fine for post (minor exposure shifts to glue a scene together are common), how much is too much and where the devil is hidden (e.g. color temperature or tint changes).
It’s a good idea to always try to get it as close as possible in-camera, but it’s hard to do perfectly and there is a certain wiggle room, and to know that wiggle room can give you more confidence on set.
I meant to say lighting takes place during pre-production and production as in, you can already scout locations for favorable practicals, windows ect. You can also block towards natural light and/or rearrange practicals accordingly. I highly recommend hiring a set designer / art director even if you only have a micro budget (at these budgets crew members usually wear several hats).
You may also want to look into the later films of Jean-Marc Vallée. On ‘Dallas Buyer’s Club’ he started to shoot with available light only, as he wanted to be able to shoot 360° on set. Afterwards he fell in love with this style of shooting ( how fast he could get things done and how freeing it was for his collaboration with the actors) and other movies followed. “Demolition” is another very nice example.
I’m a huge fan of available light and it works great on drama, where authenticity is often more important than a nice looking image, but can also work for other genres. “Children of Men” used available light to a large portion (or all?), also Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on “Birdman” or “The Revenant” (only the camp fire scene is lit).
Keep in mind though that on these set’s, the lighting basically takes place in pre-production and is within the set design. If you’re going to shoot on a micro budget, you may want to spend some time on changing/relocationg/adding practicals to your locations wherever you can.
Ultimately the director has the last say so what you describe is possible and ‘technically’ ok. Of course it’s not fulfilling as you’re more of a camera operator. So other factors decide whether to take the job (pay, gather experience, make connections ect). But even a job like this should present situations where you can bring yourself in.
It seems like 50mm was – and still is – the easiest (and cheapest) to design and build to achieve good image quality at fast apertures.
The ‘Double Gauss’ design was invented in 1817 by Carl Friedrich Gauss as a telescope lens and later refined by many others like Taylor Hobson in the 1920’s (later resulting in the Speed Panchros). The current design, presently found in inexpensive but high quality fast lenses like Canon EF 50mm 1.8 or Nikon AD 50mm 1.8, can be traced back to 1895 to Paul Rudolph and Carl Zeiss (the first Zeiss Planar lens).
From Wikipedia:
“The design forms the basis for many camera lenses in use today, especially the wide-aperture standard lenses used on 35 mm and other small-format cameras. It can offer good results up to f/1.4 with a wide field of view, and has sometimes been made at f/1.0. The design appears in other applications where a simple fast normal lens is required (~53° diagonal) such as in projectors.”
So the projection thing would make sense not just for the viewer experience but also on a technical level!
“Maybe it’s me getting too into the weeds with so much information out there on filmmaking, which gets me overthinking everything to the point of over-analysis often hahaha.”
Clint Eastwood often says: “Let’s not overthink things”.
On the other hand I think pondering over such things and looking at how other people do it is part of learning and finding your own voice.
I think in the situations you describe, key is what you said, to discuss more dramatic changes in exposure with the director and/or DP. Because sometimes things are really intended not to be seen. I had this issue a few times, where the colorist pushed the (low-key) image so that the viewer could better see what’s happening. But the intended purpose was to force the viewer to guess, not see, which was much more powerful.
