#64 Wk46 Cinematography

Work is starting to pile and in the interest of streamlining tasks I'm taking a different a approach to recording this show. For the next few months I'm going to produce a less scripted show and be less picky when I edit. The effect, I hope, will be me sounding more natural even as I eliminate production time. You'll let me know if I sound less intelligible, right? I'm interested in cutting down production time without sacrificing critical quality.

The list of things on my plate are

• increased demand for video in my day job, a big development
• a class project shooting and editing scenes from the Hemingway script, The Killers
• independent, paying projects, outside of school and work, such as the promotional videos Laura and I shoot for the Huntington Theatre - there may be another one I'll be involved in coming in January with another classmate
• and of course my final film project which is a documentary about the life of a professional craftsperson, a potter.

I'll have more to say about my final project in the next show. In this show I continue to talk about using light to control the feeling or mood of a scene that helps to advance the film's story.

Let me know what you think.

#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.