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That
film look
“An
apprentice knows all his tools and an expert knows which ones to use, but a
master can predict when their need will arise.”
One
cannot survive a battle without attacking, defending and ducking in adequate
proportions; the adequacy being determined by the flow of events. Some battles
can only be won by ducking all the time except for the deciding moment. Filming
is exactly one of those battles. You can prepare yourself for every possibly
lighting scenario, equip yourself with the best of hardware, and yet find
yourself woefully out of your comfort zones at the location on the day when all
your training matters the most. To give you an example; you plan an outdoor
shoot and equip yourselves with all the lighting that could be used for a
heavily overcast day, and plenty of reflectors and diffusers for a bright sunny
day. And it pours buckets all through the day. If you didn’t plan an alternate
location, or at least an alternate use of the location, you are stuffed. If you
are a professional working in the field with professional artists and crew, you
cannot shoot the gig without rebooking the entire bunch along with the location,
again. Imagine the catastrophe you’d find yourself in were you to be on an
overseas shoot that had to be planned with permits acquired well before the
d-day. Heavens forbid if the production was running on a tight budget!
So
now that we know how important it is to get the planning right, it is safe to
say; “when you want to shoot, just shoot according to a plan.” And the very first
vector that determines the direction of your planning blue-print is the final
look you want to cast your finished product into. Depending upon whether you
are shooting a broadcast oriented material or screening oriented stuff, you may
want to consider a few factors before deciding the frame rate for your project.
Advertisements, documentaries, soap-operas that are meant for television need
to be shot in a frame rate that will match the utility-frequency of the country
or region the program is going to be broadcast in. For example, for US the
optimal frame rate would be 30 fps, while for UK it would be 25 fps. This is
because the electricity supplies in the two nations are delivered at 60 Hz and
50 Hz respectively. This means that the electric current completes 60 or 50
cycles per second; or the television screens go blank 60 or 50 times per
second, and powers up the same number of time. So if your frame rate will not
be a mathematical match of these magic numbers, your program will suffer the
banes of flicker or banding (anybody remembers the old tuning knob in black and
white televisions).
The
choice of frame rate however is relatively easy if you are shooting a movie
meant to be screened in cinemas, or if you are shooting a music video that you
want to look like a movie for styling reasons (just like yours truly). We all
want a cinema or movie look for our projects and the magic frame rate to get
that look is 24 fps. But the question is why 24 fps and not something else? Let
us tackle this question and some other important factors that determine the
ultimate look that a project will get.
ð Frame rate:
Traditionally
24 fps was the frame rate used for shooting movies as it was the minimum number
of frames needed to make the human mind perceive a continuous display of
photographic frames as continuing motion. Less wouldn’t have worked and more
would have blown a budget hole for the production houses, because back in the
day when filming was done on photographic rolls that were then set by chemical
processing, it was cheaper to have a girlfriend. However that dreamy appearance
of 24 fps on 35 mm film roll became synonymous with cinema, and today we can’t
help but associate that look with the quality of a production. Television looks
and feels cheap!
Before
we go any further it is important to understand why 24 fps generate that look,
and then understand why shooting in any other frame rate and then using a 3:2
pull-down process (or other techniques, the addition of artificial blurring)
cannot generate the same effect.
Using
24 fps means that the motion that you are recording is captured as 24 pictures taken
in a second. Each picture contains the motion that took 1/24th of a
second to complete. Each frame has thus captured a natural motion blur worth
1/24th of a second. When you will use any higher frame rate, say 30,
48 or 60 fps, they will capture correspondingly lesser amount of motion blur;
their pictures will be crispier than the 24 fps records. This is the reason why
television and handycam videos look much cleaner, realistic and bland. They
don’t have that dreamy blurring. So if you want to have the film look for your
project, you need to capture the film style blur.
True,
modern editing softwares allow one to convert 30 or 60 fps footage into a 24fps
result by using various pull-down mechanisms in post-production and then adding
a bit of motion blur to the project, but this cannot imitate natural record.
Take for example an actor walking towards the camera. As the assistant-cameraman
will pull the focus to keep the actor in sharp focus, using position markers, actor’s
body’s different parts will have a different amount of motion blur in every
frame. While the leg moving forward will have more motion blur, the one rooted
to ground behind will have progressively decreasing amount of blur, with
practically nil amount for the toe planted on the ground. Softwares cannot
imitate this graded effect. Moreover it’s the actor who’s walking, not the
ground beneath, and the stationary objects around. I guess you get the idea!
So
if you want the look of 24 fps, then that’s what you need to shoot your project
in. However, as I mentioned, planning is the key. You need to break down each
and every scene before you even set your foot on the location to do the shoot.
You need to know exactly which scenes will be over or under cranked
subsequently, so that you can adjust your frame rate accordingly right when you
are shooting. Besides, there could be other reasons to have a different frame
rate than 24 fps as well. My upcoming music video for the song “Show me the
woman that you are” has been shot in 25 fps. This frame rate not only gives me
the look extremely close to 24 fps, but it also means that my song could be
played on television in majority of the world without any pull-down needed. But
the biggest reason was; I wanted to have a liberty to slow the footage down by
a frame, for that would give it an extra smooth and dreamy slow-motion effect,
without altering its quality in any way.
ð Lighting:
An urban legend often propagated around is that the
films have a different look than television because of the lighting used in
them. Again, it depends upon the planning that you put in behind the project (and
we are talking about each and every scene over here) before you actually shoot
the project. If you are shooting a candy-pop video or a chic flick, no wonder
much of your shoot will be with glamour lighting at 1:2 or 1:4 ratios at the
most. But the moment the scene or story shifts into the dark zone, you may want
to alter your lighting to 1:8 or even more contrasting ratios. Shooting a mean
manly look in any project will demand a lighting that would highlight the
contours of a face. And then there are different styles of lighting that can be
used. Most dark music videos and movies employ a lighting style often
classified as short lighting (as opposed to broad lighting where the broadest
part of the subject is well lit while shadows are limited). Then there is Rembrandt
style lighting often employed in super-hero or gothic styled movies.
But all these lighting techniques are used in television
serials as well. There is no difference as such in the lighting techniques. But
one difference in the way lighting is used in a television production than a
movie set is the way background is projected on screen. Television products are
generally shot on a handful of sets that are meant to be used again and again
over a long period of time. During this time the sets may even become highly
elaborate with details that make up the background. On the contrary movies are
shot using sets designed for a single project and often are not highly
detailed, unless it is an extravagant epic being shot. Thus backgrounds in
movies are generally lit in a way to create deep shadows that mask missing
details in the background, yet pull the effect the set is designed to fake.
This works in conjunction with the other principle, that on a huge screen the
audience’s point of interest should solely be the characters, or whatever the
director wishes to focus their attention on. Hence lighting has no role to play
in determining the look of your project beyond your artistic caliber. A bad lit
project may still be able to pull a film look, although a bad lit project will
look pathetic.
ð
Lenses,
sensors and close ups:
Let’s start this part of the topic with a simple
statement: shoot close-ups using long lenses (70mm and above). Now before I
explain this statement, let us first have a look at the difference between the
two types of lenses; wide angle lenses and telephoto lenses. Imagine you are in
a room and your friend is standing outside the window. What happens when you
walk up to the window to talk to your friend? Your friend being closer to you
appears larger, and you can see a whole lot more of the scene behind him, but
only if you want to. Otherwise you can focus directly on your friend’s face.
This is exactly what a wide angle lens (like 14mm) does; it gives a wild field
of view around the subject with great depth of field details, but blows up the
face of the subject in focus, making it appear larger. Now imagine stepping far
away from the window and looking at your friend with a pair of binoculars. When
you zoom in, your friend may look the same size as if you were standing next to
the window, but there is only limited stuff you can see in the background, and
more so if you only focus on your friend’s face. This is what telephoto lenses
(like 70mm) do. They take you close to your subject, cut out most of the things
in the background that are not directly in their narrow range of view, and keep
their face as it is. And this lack of distortion of the face captures a
flattering image of the talents that you are shooting. This is the reason why
you should always try to shoot close ups with telephoto lenses. Most people
will look good with them, and will hate their blown up faces captured by wide
angle lenses.
But what if the space available to shoot a scene is
limited, as was the case we found ourselves in when we were shooting the music
video I mentioned above? Once again this is a problem that can be easily
avoided by adequate planning. A director’s friend in such a scenario is a crop
sensor camera. Now we all know how movies were originally shot on 35 mm
photographic films. Modern day DSLRs come in two varieties. There are those
with a digital sensor (to capture the image) which is equivalent to a 35 mm
film (for example Canon Mark III). These are full-frame sensor cameras.
Whatever lens you will use with these, the lens will behave as one would expect
it to behave with a 35mm film camera. Then there are those who have a
crop-sensor; a sensor that is smaller than the size of a 35mm film. These
sensors cut out the edges of the frame if you were to shoot the same frame with
a 35mm camera. Red One, a camera that gives the same depth of field as a 35mm
film camera, is still a crop sensor camera. Depth of field is not the same as
the stretch of the other two dimensions that you record. My saving grace was
this camera. It is not only an industry standard unit for professionals that has
revolutionized the way high budget movies are shot, but being a crop sensor
camera, it behaves like crop sensor cameras. When you use an ultra-wide angle
lens with a crop sensor camera, it only ends up being a wide angle lens. And if
you use a simple wide angle lens, that will end up as a normal lens. This is
because a crop sensor does not gather the same amount of two dimensions as a
full frame sensor would have in the same situation. This helps when you are
shooting in tight locations.
So the question is; what lenses give the film look?
The answer is; any one of them. The lenses can determine how your subjects will
look on the screen, they can determine how much background the audience will be
able to see in a shot, but they cannot determine how much motion blur will be
captured by the camera. The lenses will not determine whether your lighting was
good or bad. You may find a telephoto lens to be a good option to shoot
close-ups, or you may use a 35mm lens with a depth of field adaptor to shoot an
elaborate scene involving a lot of characters where background needs to be out
of focus. The trick once again is in planning your scenes well in advance.
ð
Neutral
density filters and aperture:
Why should you use filters (including for indoor
scenes)? The use of filters is linked to the use of an extra wide aperture.
Generally you should be using lenses capable of pulling f/1.4 or f/2 stops.
This opens the lens aperture wide, giving you a wider field of view. It is akin
to opening up the window of your room as wide as you possibly can, to look at wider
scenery. Think of movie scenes where a character is standing or walking in the
middle of the screen, and how wide around the character you can see. After all,
you cannot fill such a massive cinema screen by putting a character in the
middle of it. The other obvious use of wide aperture is that it decreases the
depth of field. So you have a wider field of view, but a shallower depth of
field. Thus the objects in a scene, other than your talent, that could be in
focus are limited to a shallower range. This helps in keeping audience’s point
of interest fixed on what you want them to focus on.
But opening up the aperture also increases the
amount of light flooding the camera sensor. Now this is good in a way that you
can shoot most of your scenes at an ISO setting of sub 800, thus reducing the
noise levels, but it also creates the headache of dealing with the highlights.
Luckily we have neutral density filters, just to take care of this problem. But
the ND filters not only help in taming the highlights, they also serve another
role. These filters further reduce the depth of field, thus driving the
audience interest into your talents even further. And of course these filters
keep the dust away from your lenses, thus saving you the trouble of wiping the
lens surface clean again and again.
Now there are many other tricks that could be
applied post production, to enhance the look of what you have shot. But no
amount of software fiddling can replace the advantages of nailing the project
with actual glassware and globes in the first instance. You can modify colours
of the project to give them a specific look, like say washed out colours with a
grayish tone in case of “50 Shades of Grey”, or the notorious greenish tinge of
war movies, but these are only artistic after effects. If however you wanted to
shoot a feature film but ended up shooting the entire movie at 60 fps, you are
straightaway starting with the disadvantage of an over-realistic motion. The Hobbit
trilogy at 48fps hasn’t fanned super-charged debates without a reason. So plan
carefully.
Fatal Urge Carefree Kiss “Amanpreet Singh Rai”
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