Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
A dolly-push just works better. It draws the viewer’s attention to the face or whatever it is that you are pushing towards.
The easy answer is Day-4-Night, but I hate that as it nearly always looks rubbish. Even on big-budget productions, Day-4-Night nearly always sticks out like a sore thumb.
The trouble with pannels is that they are not sharp like moonlight. For that reason, I would use a single, powerful industrial light, even an LED and set the shutter speed to 25th of a second to avoid flicker. You can also bolt several building lights close together so that they are about 35cm across for a tight lighting source!
How much lamp power? Depends on the camera and the lens! You would be amazed at what you can get away with using modern cameras! Suck it and see is the answer!
The easy answer is to shoot wide using a 6K camera and use motion tracking in post and crop to roughly 4K.
But you will still need to have the camera fairly steady and there are all sorts of ways to achieve this and YouTube is full of DIY hacks to getting a steady shot.
The Rolls Royce answer is the have a crane on tracks parallel to the scene. Another is to use a drone, as they usually have an automatic tracking and steady-shot AI algorithm built-in. The downside to a drone is the smaller ones cannot carry a film camera and use something like a GoPro set to Rec709 and have a very limited dynamic range.
I’ll just add to the above that not all actors are good at ADR, but ADR does give the casting director the freedom to pick actors who look perfect for the role but whose voices are unsuitable. We are hoping to get going on a film in Gaelic, English and German next year (or maybe the year after that – we shall see!) and I imagine that there will be quite some ADR involved as most Gaelic speakers are older and the kid we would like for the junior lead does not even speak English! The actress for the proper lead role speaks all three and the script is being written around her.
As luck would have it, I am writing out the shot-list for wind, rain and a high-velocity sniper’s rifle. We are doing the entire thing in post and no prod. sound because getting good prod. sound is really hard on a set and outdoors it is even harder.
Gunshots are done in post. You can get an off-the-shelf (grams) GS, but I prefer Foleys, i.e. a longish wooden batten (3ft-4ft) smacked onto a stone floor with my foot for a small calibre pistol – up to a 9mm. For a larger weapon, add a little kick drum. Add reverb to taste.
Lavaliers and wind do not mix as you need one of those furry caterpillars and they are almost impossible to hide and still get reasonable production sound. For that reason, a boom mic for production sound is the answer, which is nearly always a Sennheiser MKH416. But 90% of the time, wind and audio do not make for good bedfellows, especially if you have to use a noisy wind machine. (It never is windy or rains when you want it to do so – ever! Wind and rain/fog always require rain, wind and fog machines!)
For all those reasons, I would not even bother to use any production sound, though usually an MKH416 on a stick is used just in case. I would (and do) ADR the whole thing (using a 416 to match other prod. sound) and save costs by not even recording any decent prod. sound – a mic on the camera would do!
Wind sound – keep wind low and either grams or DiY. I prefer DiY using mouth noises slowed down to half speed and pitch and multiple layers – 2 to 3. Wind is a very important part of any sound design and can be used to great dramatic effect.
Of course prod. sound means you do not have to get the actors to do an ADR (additional dialogue recording) session in a suitably dead vocal booth and then add the right ambiance from a machine or a plug-in.
Also, ADR means that the voice has to be squeezed and stretched so that the lips match the image perfectly. If you are working in Avid’s ProTools, you will need the Elasitique plug-in, if you are working in Reaper, Nuendo, Cubase and a few others, Elasitique is built in and that speeds things up and editing the ADR becomes a doddle! (ProTools does have ‘Elastic Audio’ but it warbles and has other digital artifacts and is nowhere nearly as fast as Reaper!)
Unfortunately, most US production companies and sound supervisors insist on ProTools because they have got it into their heads that it is the “industry standard” on the rather flimsy grounds that Avid told them so! Universities usually teach only ProTools because they either get it for free or at a reduced price. The same applies to Avid’s Media Composer for video.
So for a sound stage, prod. sound is the best answer. For locations where unwanted noises such as nearby traffic, planes overhead, wind and mic handling noises are the rule, ADR with added Foleys and FX are usually the better answer. Like all these things, it depends on the circumstances.
Shoestring budgets can help creativity! But be careful where you try to save – here’s an example –
A friend got the job of recording an orchestral film score for a Bollywood film. But the budget was below tiny! As in a few thousand! At first he thought of going to somewhere cheap but at that time, places that were cheap did not have really good musicians who could bang out a score in a couple of hours. Then there were the travel costs, so he sat down and started crunching the numbers. The CHEAPEST method was eight musicians in one of Abbey Road’s smaller rooms for just two hours and then padding it out, using samples.
Location shoots can get very expensive very quickly! They also involve compromises and bodges and can lead to a “This will have to do!” attitude. i.e. a lesser product.
A studio can be the cheapest and easiest place to film and it can also be a barn somewhere and a few sheets of plasterboard. I would try to find a friendly farmer with a barn he can let you use for a few days and build a room there where you can control everything to do with light – especially for B&W!
I’ll put it this way – if I had someone on set who had Roger’s talent and experience, I would be bone-crushingly stupid to not listen carefully to what he has to say. (In German “Dümmer als die Polizei zulässt!”)
In my whole life, I have always followed the best method of managing a team is to find people who are better at their jobs than I could ever be and then let them get on with it!
Also not Roger – but I do not think the question is without merit. Obviously every creative must consider the role of every other creative and it is the job of the director to ensure that this happens. A film shot wide in an observational style is going to have a very different type of editing rhythm than an action film with many sudden cuts and camera moves. Set design, lighting, framing and camera movement will all comply and aid the telling of the story and the director’s vision.
Panasonic FZ1000. Cheap and has a good Leica zoom lens that goes from 29 to 400 without ghosting or flares. If I do not want to schlepp a box of lenses and stands and recorder, etc., etc., I have two of these and they are my “grab-n-go!” cameras. They only do Rec709, so no log, but we are talking about a really cheap camera here – ideal for YT videos and with a UHD/4000 image that is more than good enough!
In my opinion being a cinematographer requires a high level of fitness.
I am about the same age as you and it’s not just the cinematographer that has to be fit – and age DOES play a role – but in reverse. I really notice that many younger crew members cannot handle long days. When it gets to 11 or 12 at night and we’ve all been on our pins all day, they seem to wilt.
I’m sure someone will tell me why this is, but I have noticed it happening many times!
If I edit and colour-correct what I shoot then all my mistakes become painfully obvious to me!
Rinse, repeat!
Because I am actually an audio guy and I have neither the experience nor the formal training of a DoP, I use two monitors. One is REC709 for my idiot’s guide to what it might end up looking like and helps with composition, the other is log so that I can see that all the shadows and highlights are within dynamic range.
So far, that has been working for me!
Does it HAVE to be cloth? How about sheets of plastic/PVC? Admittedly, they will not pass & health and safety rules for a regulated union shoot, but if the is an ‘informal’ gig, I would go down the PVC route.
You can also get 8′ x 4′ PVC sheets that will pass H&S rules (fire retardant, etc.) that are used in hospitals and commercial kitchens. 8′ is the standard ceiling height.
White and clear PVC on a roll costs (UK) about £30 for a 4m x 8m length on eBay.
There are all sorts of funky materials for you to play with and get creative about!
A member of this forum put this very useful website together so that you can see how each lens works on each movie camera – there are even some of the more useful DSLRs in there!
