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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Are Cinematographers allowed to be creative?

In my opinion, the whole DOF field craze created by 35mm lens adapters has hurt the "indie revolution" in the long run. Everyone is using shallow depth of field for every shot, as if to say "Hey look, I can get shallow DOF with my video camera and you can't."
Many times, these shots use shallow DOF without any merit or reason, but only because it simply can be done.
 
What would be the most "natural" F stop on a lens, matching characteristics of a human eye?
Say, using 40mm lens. shaded, 9am day light.
 
I just watched Michael Haneke's Hidden (Cache) the film was shot on DigiBeta and he didn't really bother with the filmic things all together, so no shallow DOP (The DVD I got comes with the Making of, and it shows that how much he try to make it NOT film)

If you ever seen that movie. The ending bit when the credit roll. That really show when you have a scene with many people - many color - it gets really confusing (but that ending scene was doing exactly that - to piss you off :) )
 
This is indeed an interesting thread. My personal view is that one of the most important tasks for a DOP is to be creative. The DOF is one of the tools to use. RED has made this tool more powerful.
 
pict said:
This is indeed an interesting thread. My personal view is that one of the most important tasks for a DOP is to be creative. .
Click to expand...

Hi,

It's far less alowed in digital where everybody wants you to shoot flat & fix in post, it used to be the DOP delivered the look in camera.

Stephen
 
If you want to simulate the human eye you need some pretty hard core vignetting and edge softening as well.

I think DOF is really important in 3D Movies. More important than in any other. Since the 3D effect is faked your focus doesn't shift as you look 'around' the 3D image. So things that are out of convergence just look doubled. Whereas if you have a film with some nice shallow DOF and it's in 3D and you focus on the focus point the 'double image' effect is severely minimized and blended while still keeping the 3D effect. So while the human eye probably is about middle road on shallow DOF there are far too many factors to take into account (such as binocular vision) to really 'simulate' the experience of vision just through shallow DOF.
 
Stephen Williams said:
Hi,

It's far less alowed in digital where everybody wants you to shoot flat & fix in post, it used to be the DOP delivered the look in camera.

Stephen
Click to expand...

Well, the result is not the same and I don't think you always can rely on post to fix the proper softening. I think we are heading the wrong way if we don't take optimal responsibility at the set. It is a balance act of course with the new digital post world, but just to deliver flat pictures makes the DOP job less artistic and more industrial leveled. When we all work like this we loose our sense of being artists and will become just that, artists at a lower level.
 
I would add that the Italian neo-realist movement and the French New Wave busted feature filmmaking out of the studio and into locations, and these were generally low budget approaches fueled by directors and cameramen who applied available lighting techniques from still photography. Available lighting often meant low levels that required wider apertures, hence shallower depth of field, something that studios initially looked on as low quality and possibly amateurish, as with the hand held camera work that often went with them. But these filmmaking revolutions, along with similar work in TV newsgathering, irrevocably changed the way viewers engaged in the moving image. No longer were they watching a "magic window" into the lives of on screen characters; the camera and camera operator were now implicated as part of the reality, such that after a certain point in time, if one wanted to make a studio set look more "real", it would be necessary to have blown out windows. Perfectly balanced light levels inside and outside a set today will scream FAKE to an audience. This is a result of documentary and available light/location motion picture work.

There is a real dividing line between the way Hollywood films were shot leaving the end of the 1950's and the end of the 1960's. In Hollywood in the 1950's and before, most exterior dialog scenes were shot on stages with rear projection. It was thought that good dialog could simply not be recorded on exterior locations, for the most part. One notable exception would be the famous glove-drop scene from ON THE WATERFRONT shot in a park in Hoboken.

PS A cinematographer is REQUIRED to be creative, just as are all other parts of the filmmaking collective: actors, set designers, sound recordists - everyone.
 
The still David posted from Citizen Kane is interesting. I find it difficult to keep my attention on just one of the subjects - my eye darts back and forth between them, which I don't think would be the case if just one was in focus.

I wonder if this is related to the use of generally longer takes in older films - would a modern director tend to have just one subject in focus and cut between them?

It's also notable that the subjects are unevenly, creating more texture to the image.
 
You can't fix bad lighting in post.

That's one responsibility that will always fall on the DP. and rightfully so, I add.
 
DS Williams said:
You can't fix bad lighting in post.

That's one responsibility that will always fall on the DP. and rightfully so, I add.
Click to expand...

Exactly, playing safe is also just as bad & cant be fixed IMO.
 
Moir said:
The still David posted from Citizen Kane is interesting. I find it difficult to keep my attention on just one of the subjects - my eye darts back and forth between them, which I don't think would be the case if just one was in focus.
Click to expand...

That's the power and danger of deep focus photography -- how do you direct the viewer if not through focus? In the case of "Citizen Kane", you create the dynamics of juxtaposition within the frame, visual relationships between characters, and you use lighting & contrast to direct the eye to various points in the frame.

Yes, it also benefits from being held longer on the screen so the viewer can absorb all the visual conflicts. But I have seen quick deep focus shots in movies -- there's that one in "The Matrix" near the opening, with Trinity in ECU on one side of the frame as the cops approach behind her. "Blow Out" has a lot of split-diopter filter shots for suspense -- the one I remember the most has a hand pulling an ice pick out of a fish stall in the foreground as the intended victim walks away in the b.g.

Here's a simple shot I did in "Big Love" with a 45mm tilt-focus lens, in order to simultaneously show someone's reaction and what they are looking at in the same frame:

biglove25.jpg


"Star Trek: The Motion Picture" as a record number of split-diopter shots, maybe over half the movie uses them, partly to compensate for the shallow focus of shooting 100 ASA film in 35mm anamorphic on sets with low light levels. But since director Robert Wise was the editor on "Citizen Kane", he's always liked deep-focus shots, so he and DP Richard Kline used split-diopter filters to achieve the effect, sometimes two, one on each side of the frame with a clear center, as in the last example:

startrekTMP4.jpg


startrekTMP5.jpg


startrekTMP6.jpg
 
Very interesting comments David, thank you. I really like your shot from Big Love.
 
DS Williams said:
In my opinion, the whole DOF field craze created by 35mm lens adapters has hurt the "indie revolution" in the long run. Everyone is using shallow depth of field for every shot, as if to say "Hey look, I can get shallow DOF with my video camera and you can't."
Many times, these shots use shallow DOF without any merit or reason, but only because it simply can be done.
Click to expand...

I agree with the latter statement but I'm not sure about the former...why do you think 35mm adapters have hurt independent film? The whole push for those adapters sprang out of a desire to have the compositional tool of shallow DOF. That some didn't understand it or used it as a "look" is going to be a byproduct of it's wide availability. That doesn't take away from the excitement I had the first time I shot with a dvx/adapter rig and was taken back to my early days in filmschool. If anything, it reminded me of the *discipline* of focus since shooting a 1/3" camera allows a lot of laziness in an operator.

Also, doesn't the DIY adapter movement have some claim to have influenced another crazy DIY'er, Jim Jannard? I would say that the spirit of RED was heavily influenced by the democratization of filmmaking equipment over the last 10 years...and the adapter craze was a big part of that. It's one of the reasons we all get excited by "S35 Single CMOS".
 
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