#63 Wk45 Cinematography

This is the first week on the topic of Cinematography. The class is all about controlling light and the camera to create a specific mood or effect. Successful lighting is all about mastery of these two elements in filmmaking. We're going about this by running through tests to see the subtle differences between intensities of lights and how to use camera handling techniques such as tilt, pan, handheld and dolly moves.

I hope the explanation of Key/Film ratio is understandable. Simply put, the key is the brightest light shining on the person, at about 45 degrees to one side of the front, and the fill is positioned on the opposite side of the key also at 45 degrees. Both lights are above eye level.

The key creates a shadow on the far side of someone's face and body and the fill, which is not as bright, lightens the shadow enough to show detail, but not to remove the shadow. You play with how dark you want the shadow to be to create an effect or mood.

I want to note an error I made when I listed F-stops, I listed 1.2, which is an error, it should be 1.4. These are important details.

#45 Wk31 - Film Project II

This is the last week of the Film Project II module, which is to say the last week where we can shoot footage that we will edit in 3 weeks.

We don't have anything more we plan to shoot right now, but we may. This week we reviewed our footage and talked about it in light of what we already learned in previous classes and this project. We had problems lighting, but the final footage looked quite good.

There's also information about how to log video, before you capture and I explain how the camera sees compared to how our eyes see.

Next week is another new module where we learn how to use Avid.