John Brawley
Well-known member
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Cheers, Josh, thanks for the detailed post.
I’m so glad you brought this up. I think one of the most important creative drivers of going into something like this is having intention.
Have you seen the Lars Von Trier Doco, the five obstructions ?
https://youtu.be/0YPmRMipnSM
It’s a wonderful film about creative process. In this documentary, controversial filmmaker Lar Von Trier challenges his university film school lecturer to a diabolical game...to remake his 1967 award winning short film “the Perfect Human”...to actually remake five times and each time he remakes it, Lars give hims a different set of “obstructions” or rules.
The first set for example is that no shot can be longer than 12 frames (Half a second) and it must be made in Cuba and told in Spanish. The director is Danish, hasn’t been to Cuba and doesn’t speak Spanish. It gets more and more ridiculous from there.
What’s fascinating is seeing the struggle that the director has, and how he overcomes more and more arbitrarily silly obstructions.
Because having a manifesto like these FORCES you to throw away your creative go tos.
Ever since seeing this film I’ve tried for every show I do to have a manifesto for the way we approach the show visually.
Lars also came up with the whole Dogme 95 manifesto as well. Here is the original “Vow of chastity” that you had to adhere to for your film to be considered “Dogme” worthy. They didn’t intend for this to become a movement, it’s just that others followed these rules...this was also at the beginning of miniDV and consumer digital cameras making things a lot easier for filmakers.
http://www.dogme95.dk/the-vow-of-chastity/
Of course Lars himself broke these rules many times, but you get the idea. Creating a set of artificial limitations forces a different creative thinking and approach to problem solving. I think it’d a great technique to apply to creative process.
What I try for here is to try and create a space where happy accidents can happen. We can recognise and respond in the moment as we see something.
Some cinema / film is like classical music, where the whole orchestra is honing and rehearsing for a very perfected and singular performance. The notes are precisely written and a conductor leads this constant honing and refining to an ultimate performance.
In improvised music like Jazz, it’s much more dependent on the mood, tone and the feel of the individual musicians expression. I prefer this kind of thinking. I like to enable my operators to find and explore shots, to be a part of the creative process, to find and tag a moment in the scene, to have comms in and LISTEN to the performance and to react to what the actors are doing.
I’ve always felt camera operating is a performance. You often have to pretend you don’t know what’s about to happen, so you don’t preemptively reveal important scene information till the actor or char hear leads you to that. Or sometimes you do lead the audience and you are ahead of the character in terms of what the audience knows. This means the operator has to know where they are in the story and this informs the choices about operating style and modes, and even to movement of the camera within the scene. This means the camera is also performing and as part of that performance your’e wedded to what the actors are doing.
This kind of freelancing within the scene is something I like to encourage and often plan for. So we might start off with regular coverage, and then we start to try other things out.
At this point too the actors have done it a few times and they often tend to be more relaxed and kind of throw away the performance a little more...
My typical model for a scene is, watch with the director, AD and actors while they do a line run. LISTEN to those discussions about what the actors think is happening in the scene. Then as we start to block I’m watching what the actors are doing. Typically they are in that space with that scene for the first time. It might have been rehearsed, but typically it’s somewhere else, not in the fully dressed set with all the props.
So I watch. I’m typically looking for the “line” (as in action line not spoken)and that drives my coverage and lighting. Where I can I might try to push the actors towards a built-in better looking part of the set, say towards a window or a fire. If there’s more than three line changes on a scene like this then I’ll try to work with the director to reduce that. Sometimes that can happen and sometimes the actors want to move around all over the place. Typically an action line change means more setups. I always figure 15 mins per setup minimum for lighting and camera. That means 4 setups per hour if you’re going well on average. Two cameras means 8 shots, and three cameras means 12 shots per hour. That’s going flat out. It’s typically a bit slower than that but I’m aiming for 30-45 mins of setting up on the first set up and then faster than that for the subsequent setups.
Last few years I’ve been shooting close ups first. This is heretical because conventional thinking is shoot the wides first, light the whole space and then drive in for close ups. That way the actors are building their performance, kind of rehearsing in the wide.
But I like closeups first. Often means I can get the shot going faster. You are spending more time then on the close performance. Typically you do more takes, looking for the right acting performance and THEN you start moving out towards the wider shots.
If you have three hours on a scene it means you’re spending most of your time on the shots that will get used the most, the close ups. If you go wides first you typically burn a lot of time lighting a wide shot that usually only gets used at the beginning or the end of the scene in the edit. Then you’re rushing in to get close coverage against the clock and often I find the staging CHANGES as the actors run the scenes a few times. So now your close ups don’t match the staging continuity of the wide shots. Or if theyr’e crying they run out of tears by the tie you’re in getting the close ups.
So shoot the close ups first, then the wider coverage. Sometimes you run out of time. Amazingly you still have a scene in the movie if you shoot the close ups first. If you run out of time and only have wide shots, it’s a really boring scene and you’re looking at pick ups.
And actors generally prefer it. Not all, but a lot of them do. They come out hard from the start. As their energy wanes though the scene, it doesn’t matter cause you tend not to read it as much in the wides. It’s also especially good for comedy performance because you’re not wearing out the jokes in wide shots....
THEN, once the wides are done, I’ll rock star in with a small camera like a G2 and kick everyone out of the room aside from a boom swinger and myself and the cast.
The we go to it. I’ll get inserts, trades, switch the coverage, basically try and shot the scene like it’s a one-r. Actors by this point are revived by this new camera that’s in their face and that they can FEEL moving when they have bid internal moments...it’s push-in on their FACE as they agonise with a choice. It works well as a condiment.
Already posted but heres the example...
https://www.flickr.com/gp/johnbrawley/70n6JL
Bah filters. I do prefer in front NDs because I always have trouble with internal NDs and don’t trust them. And often I use diffusion, so there’s two filters. Add in a few dozens candles and it’s a nightmare.
Tungsten is a wonderful light source. Bad for the planet, very energy in-efficient, 90% of the power dissipates as heat. LED is closer to 50%.
But nothing bests it for spectral response.
If you have a couple in front of your camera, your camera will never see that colour unless that colour exists in the light you shine on that object.
It has to be able to reflect that colour back.
Most people don’t realise how “peaky” LED lights are. Lot’s of holes in the spectrum that means those holes of colour aren’t in your shot.
This is how you get pallid and colourless skin tones.
Yeah and if it’s hard and direct, someone can walk through it and because it’s overexposed it “prints” white even on a 5600k balances camera, BUT the light bouncing off the other surfaces will be warm. So you can have ambient daylight say, like in the corridors of The Resident, but this nice warmer fill / mix of sunlight...
Dichoic are great, but get super hot.
I use gel sometimes on tungsten if I need to get to 5600K rather than HMI which is also, not as bad as LED, but can still be very uneven in terms of spectrum.
This is true. What it means typically is that the red channel will clip before the blue channel and so it in effect reduces the DR...or makes the same DR with more noise
So on The Great it was another good reason to go Tungsten lighting as the “white” point. This meant the candles wouldn’t be as orange as they would be if the cameras were balanced to 5600K.
Yeah for a while a lot of people were using 80D and 80C filters but it didn’t really make that much of a difference.
No worries and it’s nice to talk about the craft a bit more instead of sensors overheating conspiracy theories...
JB
Cheers, Josh, thanks for the detailed post.
I’m so glad you brought this up. I think one of the most important creative drivers of going into something like this is having intention.
Have you seen the Lars Von Trier Doco, the five obstructions ?
https://youtu.be/0YPmRMipnSM
It’s a wonderful film about creative process. In this documentary, controversial filmmaker Lar Von Trier challenges his university film school lecturer to a diabolical game...to remake his 1967 award winning short film “the Perfect Human”...to actually remake five times and each time he remakes it, Lars give hims a different set of “obstructions” or rules.
The first set for example is that no shot can be longer than 12 frames (Half a second) and it must be made in Cuba and told in Spanish. The director is Danish, hasn’t been to Cuba and doesn’t speak Spanish. It gets more and more ridiculous from there.
What’s fascinating is seeing the struggle that the director has, and how he overcomes more and more arbitrarily silly obstructions.
Because having a manifesto like these FORCES you to throw away your creative go tos.
Ever since seeing this film I’ve tried for every show I do to have a manifesto for the way we approach the show visually.
Lars also came up with the whole Dogme 95 manifesto as well. Here is the original “Vow of chastity” that you had to adhere to for your film to be considered “Dogme” worthy. They didn’t intend for this to become a movement, it’s just that others followed these rules...this was also at the beginning of miniDV and consumer digital cameras making things a lot easier for filmakers.
http://www.dogme95.dk/the-vow-of-chastity/
Of course Lars himself broke these rules many times, but you get the idea. Creating a set of artificial limitations forces a different creative thinking and approach to problem solving. I think it’d a great technique to apply to creative process.
What I try for here is to try and create a space where happy accidents can happen. We can recognise and respond in the moment as we see something.
Some cinema / film is like classical music, where the whole orchestra is honing and rehearsing for a very perfected and singular performance. The notes are precisely written and a conductor leads this constant honing and refining to an ultimate performance.
In improvised music like Jazz, it’s much more dependent on the mood, tone and the feel of the individual musicians expression. I prefer this kind of thinking. I like to enable my operators to find and explore shots, to be a part of the creative process, to find and tag a moment in the scene, to have comms in and LISTEN to the performance and to react to what the actors are doing.
I’ve always felt camera operating is a performance. You often have to pretend you don’t know what’s about to happen, so you don’t preemptively reveal important scene information till the actor or char hear leads you to that. Or sometimes you do lead the audience and you are ahead of the character in terms of what the audience knows. This means the operator has to know where they are in the story and this informs the choices about operating style and modes, and even to movement of the camera within the scene. This means the camera is also performing and as part of that performance your’e wedded to what the actors are doing.
This kind of freelancing within the scene is something I like to encourage and often plan for. So we might start off with regular coverage, and then we start to try other things out.
At this point too the actors have done it a few times and they often tend to be more relaxed and kind of throw away the performance a little more...
My typical model for a scene is, watch with the director, AD and actors while they do a line run. LISTEN to those discussions about what the actors think is happening in the scene. Then as we start to block I’m watching what the actors are doing. Typically they are in that space with that scene for the first time. It might have been rehearsed, but typically it’s somewhere else, not in the fully dressed set with all the props.
So I watch. I’m typically looking for the “line” (as in action line not spoken)and that drives my coverage and lighting. Where I can I might try to push the actors towards a built-in better looking part of the set, say towards a window or a fire. If there’s more than three line changes on a scene like this then I’ll try to work with the director to reduce that. Sometimes that can happen and sometimes the actors want to move around all over the place. Typically an action line change means more setups. I always figure 15 mins per setup minimum for lighting and camera. That means 4 setups per hour if you’re going well on average. Two cameras means 8 shots, and three cameras means 12 shots per hour. That’s going flat out. It’s typically a bit slower than that but I’m aiming for 30-45 mins of setting up on the first set up and then faster than that for the subsequent setups.
Last few years I’ve been shooting close ups first. This is heretical because conventional thinking is shoot the wides first, light the whole space and then drive in for close ups. That way the actors are building their performance, kind of rehearsing in the wide.
But I like closeups first. Often means I can get the shot going faster. You are spending more time then on the close performance. Typically you do more takes, looking for the right acting performance and THEN you start moving out towards the wider shots.
If you have three hours on a scene it means you’re spending most of your time on the shots that will get used the most, the close ups. If you go wides first you typically burn a lot of time lighting a wide shot that usually only gets used at the beginning or the end of the scene in the edit. Then you’re rushing in to get close coverage against the clock and often I find the staging CHANGES as the actors run the scenes a few times. So now your close ups don’t match the staging continuity of the wide shots. Or if theyr’e crying they run out of tears by the tie you’re in getting the close ups.
So shoot the close ups first, then the wider coverage. Sometimes you run out of time. Amazingly you still have a scene in the movie if you shoot the close ups first. If you run out of time and only have wide shots, it’s a really boring scene and you’re looking at pick ups.
And actors generally prefer it. Not all, but a lot of them do. They come out hard from the start. As their energy wanes though the scene, it doesn’t matter cause you tend not to read it as much in the wides. It’s also especially good for comedy performance because you’re not wearing out the jokes in wide shots....
THEN, once the wides are done, I’ll rock star in with a small camera like a G2 and kick everyone out of the room aside from a boom swinger and myself and the cast.
The we go to it. I’ll get inserts, trades, switch the coverage, basically try and shot the scene like it’s a one-r. Actors by this point are revived by this new camera that’s in their face and that they can FEEL moving when they have bid internal moments...it’s push-in on their FACE as they agonise with a choice. It works well as a condiment.
Already posted but heres the example...
https://www.flickr.com/gp/johnbrawley/70n6JL
Bah filters. I do prefer in front NDs because I always have trouble with internal NDs and don’t trust them. And often I use diffusion, so there’s two filters. Add in a few dozens candles and it’s a nightmare.
Tungsten is a wonderful light source. Bad for the planet, very energy in-efficient, 90% of the power dissipates as heat. LED is closer to 50%.
But nothing bests it for spectral response.
If you have a couple in front of your camera, your camera will never see that colour unless that colour exists in the light you shine on that object.
It has to be able to reflect that colour back.
Most people don’t realise how “peaky” LED lights are. Lot’s of holes in the spectrum that means those holes of colour aren’t in your shot.
This is how you get pallid and colourless skin tones.
Yeah and if it’s hard and direct, someone can walk through it and because it’s overexposed it “prints” white even on a 5600k balances camera, BUT the light bouncing off the other surfaces will be warm. So you can have ambient daylight say, like in the corridors of The Resident, but this nice warmer fill / mix of sunlight...
Dichoic are great, but get super hot.
I use gel sometimes on tungsten if I need to get to 5600K rather than HMI which is also, not as bad as LED, but can still be very uneven in terms of spectrum.
This is true. What it means typically is that the red channel will clip before the blue channel and so it in effect reduces the DR...or makes the same DR with more noise
So on The Great it was another good reason to go Tungsten lighting as the “white” point. This meant the candles wouldn’t be as orange as they would be if the cameras were balanced to 5600K.
Yeah for a while a lot of people were using 80D and 80C filters but it didn’t really make that much of a difference.
No worries and it’s nice to talk about the craft a bit more instead of sensors overheating conspiracy theories...
JB
