Best of the Best
Who’s the greatest cinematographer of all time? While I think there are some names missing from this particular list (Emmanuel Lubezki, Christopher Doyle), it’s a great overview of some of the best in the business. You’ll never guess who gets the top spot.
Shooting Schedule
Here’s the revised script for the collaborative project, with additional info about location, shoot date, actors, and the person in charge of each sequence.
Scene 1: Parking Lot
DP: Max
Location: TBD
Shoot Date: TBD
Actors: Casey, driver
Exterior, night – a foggy parking lot. Cool light glints faintly off the hood of a car. A shadowy figure – the courier – moves into frame and the headlights come on, throwing them into sharp silhouette. The car’s window begins to roll down and the courier walks over to it. A small object is passed out of the window. The courier takes it and exits.
Same location – we see the handle of a door. The courier pulls it open and enters a building.
Scene 2: Hallway
DP: Casey
Location: TBD
Shoot Date: March 30
Actors: Casey
The courier is now moving through a long, strange hallway. As they near its end, the sound of music increases.
Scene 3: Club
DP: Alex and Casey
Location: Studio
Shoot Date: March 23
Actors: Casey, dancers
Interior, a club environment with brightly colored, flashing lights. The courier enters the room and is surrounded by a small knot of people dancing. The courier removes the an old bellows-style camera from their coat and fires off a shot. The flashing lights – and people – disappear. On the ground in front of the courier is a small orb of glowing purple light. She picks it up and the world around her disappears.
Scene 4: Jungle
DP: Alex
Location: Greenhouse
Shoot Date: March 30
Actors: Casey
The courier is in a completely different environment, surrounded by lush greenery and enveloped in warm light. She surveys the environment and take another shot. The color around her drains away and another orb – now green – appears. She takes it.
Scene 5: Virtual Environment
DP: Dante
Location: Studio
Shoot Date: March 23
Actors: Casey
The environment changes again. The courier is now in a misty graveyard. Once more, the courier surveys the environment, take a snapshot, and collects an orb, now cool blue.
Scene 6: Lair
DP: Brian
Location: Studio
Shoot Date: March 23 or April 6
Actors: Casey and Brian
Again, the environment changes. The courier is in a dark room with long slashes of light falling across the wall. They advance slowly.
Same location. There is a figure seated at a desk, rimmed in light – the boss. The courier advances towards the boss with the camera. On cue, lights from the left and then the right appear, illuminating the boss. They look up at the courier.
The boss: “Do you have it?”
The courier nods, sets the camera on the desk before the boss, and backs away.
Scene 7: Finale
DP: Justin
Location: Studio
Shoot Date: March 23 or April 6
Actors: Casey and Brian
The boss opens the back of the camera. Light spills out from it.
Colored lights flash across the faces of the boss and courier. The courier looks on nervously. The boss smiles. After a few moments of this, the boss lowers the lid again.
The room falls back into near darkness. The boss looks up to the courier.
The boss: “Nice work.”
The courier nods, then turns and walks away.
It’s Complicated.
There is some debate in the filmmaking community – even among professionals – as to whether sensor-size crop factor should be applied to aperture. As you may recall, the size of a camera’s sensor affects the apparent focal length of a lens – so, a 25mm lens on a four-thirds sensor has the same field of view as a 50mm lens on a full frame sensor. Is aperture affected in the same way?
The answer is… sort of. Aperture is the measure of the size of the opening in the lens through which light enters the camera, which affects brightness and depth of field. The size of the sensor does not change the size of a lens’s aperture, so the overall brightness does not change. However, depth of field is directly affected by focal length – long lenses produce a shallower depth of field than short lenses. So the depth of field (the amount of background blur) is affected by by crop factor since, for example, a 25mm lens will always produce less background blur than a 50mm lens at the same aperture. In short, depth of field is affected by sensor size (indirectly), but overall brightness is not.
THE DROP
Exterior, night – a foggy parking lot. Cool light glints faintly off the hood of a car. A shadowy figure – the courier – moves into frame and the headlights come on, throwing them into sharp silhouette. The car’s window begins to roll down and the courier walks over to it. A small object is passed out of the window. The courier takes it and exits.
Same location – we see the handle of a door. The courier pulls it open and enters a building.
The courier is now moving through a long, strange hallway. As they near its end, the sound of music increases.
Interior, a club environment with brightly colored, flashing lights. The courier enters the room and is surrounded by a small knot of people dancing. The courier removes the an old bellows-style camera from their coat and fires off a shot.
The flashing lights – and people – disappear. The courier is in a completely different environment, surrounded by lush greenery and enveloped in warm light. They survey the environment and take another shot.
The environment changes again. The courier is now in a misty graveyard. They survey the environment again, and take another shot.
Again, the environment changes. The courier is in a dark room with long slashes of light falling across the wall. They advance slowly.
Same location. There is a figure seated at a desk, rimmed in light – the boss. The courier advances towards the boss with the camera. On cue, lights from the left and then the right appear, illuminating the boss. They look up at the courier.
The boss: “Do you have it?”
The courier nods, sets the camera on the desk before the boss, and backs away.
The boss opens the back of the camera. Light spills out from it.
Colored lights flash across the faces of the boss and courier. The courier looks on nervously. The boss smiles. After a few moments of this, the boss lowers the lid again.
The room falls back into near darkness. The boss looks up to the courier.
The boss: “Nice work.”
The courier nods, then turns and walks away.
END
Gromit Gets Lit
Ever wonder how lighting is done on a miniature scale for stop-motion animation? Check out this video from Cooke Optics.
Group 1 – Max, Brian, Alex
Group 2 – Justin, Casey, Dante
Collaborative Lighting
Over the next two weeks, we’re going to be working on our mid-semester project. Filmmaking is a collaborative process, so rather than assigning everyone an individual project, we’re going to work on this project as a group. You will each be graded based on your creative input, your on-set skills and knowledge, and your ability to work as part of a team.
For this project, we’ll be filming a series of shots, each with a different lighting concept. There should be continuity between the shots – such as a character exiting one side of the frame and entering the next shot from the opposite side – but they should have totally different lighting. Our goal here is to showcase different lighting techniques and ultimately create a unified piece – a sort of showreel for the class.
Again, I want this to be collaborative, so we can work on the specifics of each shot and the overall narrative together. There should be at least six setups; here are some things I would like to include:
Each of you will take the lead as cinematographer on one of the setups. Once we decide together exactly what we’ll be filming, we can assign the different scenes. On your setup, you are welcome to ask questions and get input from the rest of the group, but you’ll be making the final lighting decisions.
The goal is to finish this project during the class periods on March 2 and March 9 – if we absolutely need to, we can wrap things up after the break, though.
Here’s how you’ll be graded on this project:
25 points – overall look and effectiveness of the finished shot
25 points – knowledge and technique during your assigned setup
25 points – input and help on other setups
25 points – safety and correct equipment use
100 points total
Let’s work together, have fun, and make something cool!
Wrapping Up Lighting
Before we break for the mid-semester recess and move on to the wonderful world of color grading, there are a few last tips and techniques I’d like to discuss.
There are also some great videos that have been posted to the Blog Posts section of the site, so be sure to check those out when you get a chance!
Shooting Log and Other Camera Settings
If you pay attention to the wold of indie filmmaking, you’ve probably heard people extol the wonders of “log” settings on various cameras. Different manufacturers use their own log variants: high-end Sony cameras come installed with S-Log (usually multiple versions), Panasonic has V-Log, Canon has C-Log, and so on. So what is a log setting and why do people get so excited about it?
Simply put, log is a camera setting that lowers the contrast and saturation of the image being recorded; a “flat” picture profile. Log footage is pretty unpleasant-looking at first – milky, bland, and washed-out. Log footage comes to life in the color-grading process when saturation and contrast is added back into the image. Because you are starting with more of a blank slate, log footage can be color graded and tweaked more aggressively in post-production.
So should you always be shooting using a log profile? Actually, no. Because log footage has low contrast, it protects the details in both shadows and highlights. That makes it great for shooting environments with very bright areas and very dark areas. However, if you’re in a situation where you don’t need to recover details from both the shadows and the highlights, there really isn’t much point to shooting log – you’d only be adding unnecessary work later.
There are also lots of cases where you definitely should not use a log profile. Because log footage requires intensive color grading, it can actually create more prominent noise and grain in the dark areas. In low-light shooting, log footage can end up looking much worse than footage shot with a normal picture profile. If you are taking the time to properly light and expose your image – so that you are capturing what you want in-camera – then shooting log might be unnecessary or even negative. You should avoid log shooting when filming against a green screen, since you want the screen itself to be as saturated as possible.
The way your camera records video files also makes a difference as to whether or not you should shoot log. Without getting too technical, cameras that use low compression (4:2:2 as opposed to 4:2:0) and capture lots of color information (12 or 10-bit as opposed to 8-bit) using a robust codec (RAW or ProRes as opposed to H.264) will do better with log footage. In our collection, the BlackMagic Pocket Camera and Sony FS5 are better suited to using flat picture profiles than cameras like the GH3 and AF100.
Finally, shooting log can be problematic because it’s difficult to imagine what your finished footage will look like when everything is desaturated and grey – it can even be challenging to light and expose correctly, since the footage appears so flat. However, some cameras and external monitors (like our SmallHD DP7-Pro) will allow you to load a LUT (essentially a color-grading preset) and preview your footage with a more finished look.
In summary, log recording is potentially useful, but it definitely has a time and place – I think that lots of inexperienced shooters record in log simply because they can. We’ll look at the specifics of color grading log footage later in the semester.
Whether or not you shoot log, there are other camera settings that you may want to tweak before filming. Our Panasonic GH3 and GH4 cameras have several picture profiles available, with different levels of saturation, color balance, and contrast. This becomes a matter of personal preference, but I like the “Natural” profile on these cameras, since it has a slightly lower contrast “filmic” look, without dipping into the flat look of a log profile.
On cameras where such things can be tweaked, you may want to slightly turn down the sharpening, contrast, saturation, or noise reduction. Doing so will give you more flexibility in post-production – all of those factors can be quickly added back using editing or color grading software – while avoiding the potential pitfalls of shooting log.
Problematic Practicals
We’ve talked about practical lights – lights that are visible within the shot – quite a bit already. Practical lights are great for adding ambience and “motivating” the lights that you have placed off-camera. However, sometimes practical lights can cause unexpected issues when filming.
Flicker is the most common problem you are likely to run into. You may notice that certain light fixtures and screens pulsate when filmed. This is the result of the interaction between the frequency at which the light is emitted and the shutter speed of the camera.
Fortunately, this fix is usually pretty simple. You probably can’t change the frequency of the light in the shot, but can change your camera’s shutter speed. Adjusting it up or down will almost always clear up the issue. Of course, changing the shutter speed will affect your exposure – and, to a lesser extent, the amount of motion blur in the shot – so you don’t want to alter it more than you need to. However, it’s almost always easier to fix this issue on set than try to salvage the footage in post-production later.
The other common issue with practical lighting is color temperature. Professional video lights are specially calibrated and tested to emit light of a certain color (or be adjustable as needed). Random lightbulbs on set are not. The lights in your scene may be warmer or cooler than the lighting you would like to use. If this is the case, I’d suggest adding some CTO or CTB to the light to take care of the issue. If that’s not possible, you may need to adjust your off-camera lights and play with the white balance of your camera to resolve the issue.
Lighting Multiple Subjects
This topic has been asked about a few times, so I thought I’d address it. Most of the time, you will probably be lighting primarily for one subject – even in shots with multiple actors, most shots will be focused on one of them. In wide shots, master shots, and shots with multiple subjects, however, you may need to light multiple actors.
Lighting for multiple subjects isn’t really any different than lighting a single subject: if both actors are facing the camera, they should both have key lighting, fill lighting, and back lighting, in addition to any lights illuminating the background. Depending on how your actors are positioned, you may be able to use the same key, fill, and/or back lighting for both of them; or, you may need two sets of lights.
There are alternative methods to lighting multiple subjects, though. I found the following lighting diagrams in an old issue of Videomaker Magazine.
Transforming the Space
Here’s an informative video from Cinematography Database in which one room is lit for three different looks – sunset, day, and night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDZWTKH8NOE