Eric+Li+Journal+One

__ Journal One __

Our story is set in a post-apocalyptic world. However, it is far from being serious. It focuses on Joe, a man who desperately wants to finish watching his TV show, The Alley. When the power dies in his apartment, he walks outside for the first time in a long time and discovers the aftermath of an apocalypse that leaves the city a ghost town. However, he soon meets a kid and a strange person and go on a journey to find electricity, during which he discovers his need for companionship. This dystopian comedy unravels the fabric of our existence, showing our inherent qualities of being human.

As Director of Photography, it is my job to manage and exercise the cinematic elements of the film, which are but not limited to cinematography and lighting. In the brainstorming and writing process I offered my opinions on the idea, helping alter and amend the idea. However, only after finalizing the story and script do my duties as the Director of Photography really begin to come across. A cinematographer’s job is to bring a story to life through visual means. However, this requires more than just shooting footage for the scenes. It requires the ability to capture the story in a way that emotionally grips the audience, to visually transform all the subtle nuances of the story into a tangible medium. In order to do this I needed to first understand the story and everything it tries to say. After doing so, I needed to find images that would bring meaning to the words. This meant referring back to films that I’ve watched and taking those instances that really worked and taking advantage of them to convey meaning in this film. In storyboarding the film, I incorporated appropriate shots for each scene, utilizing various established conventions such as the dutch angle, which creates spatial imbalance and disorientation to convey a sense of psychological instability and to foreshadow an inimical event.

The ability of the shot to convey emotion and meaning is extremely important, but the image quality and impression is also important. Therefore, aside from choosing shots purely to convey a specific meaning, I also chose them for aesthetic appeal, to increase the production value of the film. For example, when Joe, the main character discovers the aftermath of the apocalypse, I will use a birds-eye extreme wide angle shot. The birds-eye part of it is to symbolize the insignificance and loneliness of Joe at the beginning (to which will be contrasted by a worms eye at the end to show his growth as a person) and the extreme wide angle part of it is to establish the setting—a vast barren wasteland void of life and civilization. In terms of aesthetics, aside from utilizing visual templates such as the rule of thirds and the golden ratio for frame composition, there are many other factors that go into producing a clean shot such as depth of field (aperture), image quality (iso sensitivity), distortion, foreground/background, etc.

Through my knowledge of cinematic conventions and my technical experience, I hope to be successful in bringing this story to life.

__ Journal Two __

In reading Picture and Composition for Film and Television by Peter Ward, I discovered that many of the technical and theoretical aspects of cinematography that I had come to learn and treasure actually had much more depth. I learnt that much of my theoretical knowledge could be improved on and that I could use my technical knowledge of optics and exposure to a greater extent in combining the two. Being given a story to portray visually, as a cinematographer I need to be able to accurately design shots to deliver the messages intended, and I found this book quite helpful in that regard.

I found the grouping and organization section quite interesting. Ward claims that the brain tends to group and simplify objects and arrange them by similarity and simplicity. I could use to my advantage in shooting our film by arranging for similar patterns to show similarity and connection between Joe and Charleston, and have Frank completely different in space and execution. This, according to Ward’s theory, would allow the viewer to unconsciously feel the connection between Joe and Charleston and also to feel the disparateness of Frank in relation to them.

Since my film is set in a post-apocalyptic world, I decided to look at how to establish mood and atmosphere well. The book states that “instability, mystery or menace can be created by dramatic lighting but also by wide-angle distortion of verticals, rapid movement, canted camera angles and unexpected action from an unanticipated screen direction.” This is a problem for me, as my ability to manipulate the lighting will be extremely limited due to the mainly outdoor nature of the film. As much as reflectors work, they don’t work well enough to create low-key lighting (which would look unrealistic anyway), so I won’t be able to create dramatic effect via lighting. However, my ultra-wide angle lens will come in handy for I can use it to distort verticals which is unpleasing to the eye.

I will utilize the dutch angle for shots such as Frank reaching for the handle in the beginning, foreshadowing the apocalypse that he finds himself in, and also the shots leading up to the fight between Frank and Joe. Another interesting point I discovered was that “the habit of reading left to right is culturally so strong that it is claimed Western readers use the same left-to-right scan when looking at paintings, cinema and theatre.” Armed with this information, I could set up more shots that begin from the left and proceed to the right, thus creating a more natural environment. Therefore I could switch it around to right to left for those shots which foreshadow something bad happening.

Lastly, I found that “the use of lenses, camera movement, shot size and cutting points cannot stray too far from standard practice before the images become so disjointed there is no communication.” As I like to experiment with shots, my shot compositions are often extremely diverse, from extreme wide angle shots to macro shots, from disorienting canted in and out of focus shots to level tripod shots. Knowing this tip will help me from venturing too far from the norm in the future.

__Journal Three__

Since my film is almost entirely outdoors, I searched for resources on outdoor cinematography and found a good article called “Outdoor Cinematography”—just what I needed. Since it’s from Videomaker magazine, I deemed it credible and began reading. The main topic addressed in this article regards the technical challenges of shooting outdoors, mainly the problems associated with contrast. It states that in order to avoid poorly-contrasted contrast ranges, four steps need to be taken: scouting big, reframing for contrast, lighting right, and being prepared.

Scouting big mainly talks about scouting the location ahead of time, timing the movement of the sun and shadows, determining backup plans and workable sheltered areas, and so on. Doing this can prevent many problems on set and therefore set me up for a shoot (hopefully) without issues. I will not be using lights as I don’t have access to thousand-watt lights so electricity will not be an issue. I will be using reflectors, which can pose a problem if the sun is not out. Therefore I will check the weather and scout shortly ahead of time to determine the conditions of the setting.

Reframing for contrast essentially means not having too high dynamic range in order to avoid areas of over or under exposure/contrast. Since I’m familiar with HDR in photography I can use the skills I have collected in my photography experience to frame shots and also compensate for light. In order to be able to control contrast and over-exposure, I will be relying on my trusty filters, namely my Circular-Polarizing Filter (CPL) and my adjustable Neutral Density Filter (ND) to manipulate glare and exposure, respectively. The article also emphasized that most video does not adjust to certain color and luminance qualities within a frame, and thus a green tree, if lit properly and in the near- to mid-background, will dominate even a properly-exposed flesh tone subject and create aberrations in the lighter subject image. Therefore, I will pay attention to color contrast and composition in order to avoid subject dominance.

Since we will be filming during the mid-part of the day (due to timing issues and not being able to film during the golden hours), the light will be at its worst. The downwards light causes a very flat appearance and forms harsh shadows under the eyes. In order to overcome this problem I will use reflectors on the actors’ faces. However, the article offers a piece of advice that I might consider: filming on cloudy days. This will help with the harsh shadows, and for a post-apocalyptic film might actually be nice.

From the Digital Camera World article on using reflectors outdoors to control the light for different effects, I learned that I could use the reflectors from below to compensate for the harsh shadows while also diffusing harsh lighting from above with diffusers.

Finally, Tom Antos’ video on dialogue cinematography talked about basic rules of cinematography for dialogue such as the three main shots: a master shot and two over the shoulder (close up) shots. He also talks about the rule of thirds and headroom. He talks about close up shots to take away emphasis from the background and focusing on the person talking. In knowing that telephoto lens will compress the field of view, I will use a large (F2.8) aperture telephoto (70-200) lens to shot the close ups, while using a larger aperture on my ultra-wide angle lens to establish the setting for the wide shots of the dialogue.

__Journal 5 __

As a cinematographer, my role became very large as soon as we started filming, because that meant a lot of variables had to be considered such as indoors lighting, outdoor weather conditions, reflectors, etc. We ran into quite a lot of problems along the way and I will discuss those in a bit. One thing I was not prepared for was that I had assume the role of director for a large part of filming, for our group’s director Luke was cast as the protagonist last minute. However, I am glad this happened because it allowed me to gain some more experience playing multiple roles.

In regard to cinematic techniques and applying my knowledge to the field, I pretty much did what I usually do. Composition comes first for me. When drawing the storyboard, I visualized a good deal of my shots, and thus followed that for a large part of filming. However, as the location had a lot of confounding variables such as cars passing by, people stopping to watch, weather conditions, and many more, I had to adapt and as a result some of my shots changed according to location. For example, in the indoor scene with Joe, I couldn’t get any shots from Joe’s side of the room for the TV wasn’t actually on—we had to put a single lightbulb in front of the TV. That forced me to change a bunch of my shots for I could only get shots from the TV’s pov. That wasn’t the only problem though, there were windows in the back couldn’t be blocked whatsoever; we threw tarps and sofa cushions over them but light still leaked in. The lightbulb in front of the TV also did not look real so we had Liz flicker a piece of green paper in front of it in order to simulate a changing TV screen.

Enough about issues we had; I’ll talk about some of my shots. One of my favorite shots was the silhouette/fight scene. At first I didn’t want a silhouette shot, and when I tried exposing the characters well, the background blew up. Thus I had to improvise, lowering the exposure to fit the background. This in turn looked awesome, so then I had to think of a way to justify it. I rationalized that the backlighting/silhouette foreshadowed the darkest part of the film—Frank strangling Charleston and getting killed by Joe. The silhouette also lets the audience imagine a good part of the action, for you cannot see the characters up close. Another of my favorite shots was the crane shot at the beginning. In having Joe walk up to the frame and then pulling up and out, Joe is portrayed as small and insignificant as a part of a larger picture. His problems, in comparison to the problems of the world (e.g. apocalypse) are diminished. Also, the crane shot looks pretty cool. I won’t go into detail about my other shots except to say most of them adhere to the rule of thirds and have other compositional and lighting meaning to them.

