Floor plans

One thing we haven't really needed to do for this film is floor plans - most of the filming has been outside or in spaces where we've mainly used available light, and, particularly in the doctor's office, our storyboards have often been very similar, eliminating a lot of the use floor plans can have.

However, as cinematographer for my Drama project, I had to spend a lot of time debating how to film the project with my director. We used floor plans throughout the process of storyboarding, as it proved to be a very efficient way of explaining our different visions for each scene, and also helped our producer/storyboard artist to understand where we were both coming from.

The following pictures are taken from my blog for the Drama module:

This simple floor plan resulted in these much better drawings:

While I haven't used this method on the cinematography module, it is still something I learned during the module, and is a very important asset to the field of cinematography.

Michel Gondry: enemy of the cinematographer

Considering how good Michel Gondry's films tend to look, and how strong a visual style he has as a director, it's surprising to read an article in American Cinematographer with quotes from the DOP of Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Ellen Kuras, which explains how difficult - not maliciously, but for technical and stylistic reasons - he made her job.

According to the article, Gondry and Kuras began the (pre-)production production process with different ideas about practical ways of shooting the film. Because the film's narrative frequently switches between reality and dreams/memories, Gondry apparently "wanted to shoot the entire movie in practical locations, and he would have preferred... to shoot everything in available light", because "he felt that the more real the film looked, the more you would believe it when the memories melted into reality" and "it was important for him not to get overburdened by the lighting". In contrast, Kuras apparently argued: "even on a documentary, I wouldn't shoot exclusively with available light" (although, from my understanding, documentaries in the USA tend to involve more film-production style techniques, such as lighting).

Gondry's films usually show off a huge amount of technical competence, as I've already suggested in my earlier blog post about his video Knives Out. Kuras states in the article that for Eternal Sunshine, he wanted to call "back to early cinema, where magicians were using live-action practical effects in order to change time and space", rather than relying on computer processing. In contrast to the modern tendency to use computer processing to produce smooth and transparent effects, in one scene Gondry "wanted [Kuras] to shake the camera so we could see it was a handheld effect in camera, as opposed to a locked-off superimposition or double exposure".

When I wrote about Knives Out, I mentioned that the video's lighting appears to have needed a lot of attention to pull off, and Kuras tells us this was also the case with Eternal Sunshine. While "most of the picture was filmed in practical locations", "some studio work was unavoidable".

This was complicated because, as with Knives Out, Gondry decided to use "two [although Knives Out only uses one camera] handheld cameras filming near-360-degree coverage most of the time" - and to make life even more difficult, while one scene in the character Joel's apartment was shot on-set, but Gondry "wanted to recreate the conditions we had encountered on location". In the article, Kuras says that, once the set was built, she was told "all of the ceilings have been nailed down, so you won't be able to light from above" - a cinematographer's worst nightmare considering that most scenes used two cameras covering 360˚.

In one way, the article terrifies me, because it's made me realise how difficult cinematography can be, even on big-budget films. But in a way, the article also encourages me, because Kuras was able to create a very strong film visually, while relying throughout the film on natural and/or practical light sources to light scenes.

Lighting - spotlight

In my storyboard for the doctor's office scene, I suggested a shot in which the ambient light of the room is replaced with a spotlight-type effect to literally make it look as though Gary has been 'put on the spot' by the doctor as he imagines hearing bad news from him.

I took influence for this idea from Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which this technique is used frequently to differentiate between 'reality' and the character Joel's dream-world as he relives memories.

 I only realised after including the idea in my storyboard for the scene that my favourite example of this technique in Eternal Sunshine... is in fact in a doctor's office as Joel revisits the office in his dream-world:

The effect in the film is to create an unsettling, unreal feeling, which is particularly effective as a light is attached to the camera, meaning the 'spotlight' only covers a portion of the frame, leaving the rest of the scene whenever it isn't in the centre of the frame to fade into nothingness.

Filming in the city

One short sequence from the film has Gary walking through the street following his visit to the doctor. For this scene, we had to rely on natural or available light, as we mostly filmed outside.

We began with a tracking shot which I operated (to keep individual contributions even, we each operated one shot, as the scene only needed four shots in total). This took several takes, mainly due to my own clumsiness in nudging the dolly as I tracked backwards, and also partly because the Sun intermittently went behind clouds, and so the lighting changed a couple of times mid-shot.

At the end of the scene, Gary retreats to a quiet spot in the city in which he enters a 'mental retreat', leading to the scene we filmed in Grindleford. For this quiet spot, Christi suggested using a car park in the city centre, which proved to be atmospheric and exactly what we were looking for:

Notes about colour

Although, in terms of the narrative, the woods scene immediately follows the sequence with Gary walking through the streets, we chose to use different-coloured clothes for the two scenes:

The contrast between the orange t-shirt Gary is wearing in the city scene and the pale blue shirt in the woods scene reflects the contrast in mood between the scenes.

While orange is typically interpreted as emodying energy, and often aggression, light blue generally is seen as having calming connotations.

As Patti Bellatoni writes in If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die:

Year after year, our color investigations show that in a blue environment, people become passive and introspective. [pg. 82]

This is in keeping with the narrative of our film - Gary wants to be passive, but (as in the street scene in which he's wearing orange) is forced to be constantly on-edge by his paranoia. In terms of introspectivity, Gary has entered a mental retreat, as he struggles to find his inner peace.

Following the theoretical analysis further:

In the presence of a paler, cooler blue, they wanted to be quiet and still. [pg. 83]

Similarly, in our film, Gary seeks peace and quiet in this mental retreat, contrasting with the busy, loud and obnoxious atmosphere of the city.

The contrast between the blue of his shirt and the orange-brown of his trousers is also a natural contrast, as we can see by looking at a colour wheel - blue and orange are naturally in opposition, and this contrast is particularly common at the moment for colour grading - shadows are typically pushed towards the blue-green end of the spectrum, while the mid-range is typically pulled more towards skin tone, as we can see in typical modern Hollywood cinema, such as the Transformers films:

Filming - doctor's office

For the doctor's office scene, we struggled to find a location to film in, and ended up booking a small edit room on the univeristy's campus:

Jacob has asked me to give him credit for this photo.

I was able to borrow posters and a stethoscope from the hospital my dad works at, which helped to decorate what's obviously an edit booth to look more like a doctor's office.

Unfortunately, although we had found an actor to play the role of the doctor, he became unavailable on the day we filmed, so Poppy stood in instead.

The size of the room was less than helpful, but above all else, lighting proved to be a problem. The overhead lights in the room couldn't be turned off, meaning lighting effects had to be reconsidered - I had suggested lowering ambient lighting for one shot to give a spotlight/'deer-in-the-headlights' look, which wasn't possible due to the lighting restriction.

Instead, we shone a pair of Dedo lamps on Poppy's face during a sequence in which Gary's paranoia takes hold of him. Each lamp shone on one side of her face, and we used different coloured gels and different intensities to give an unnatural, exaggerated look of menace to the doctor.

Another storyboard - House scene

At the end of our film, Gary rushes home following his dream sequence which we filmed in Grindleford. Poppy's description of this scene in the script is a short paragraph:

...and so, as I followed the script closely, there wasn't a lot of coverage needed for this scene, and so it resulted in only taking up four frames and (overall only three shots) of storyboard:

The first frame immediately follows a shot where Gary grabs onto a branch in the woods. The intention is that the tree branch 'turns into' a door handle.

I assumed that it would be possible to have Gary slump down against the door as he enters his bedroom. However, we arranged to film the scene at Christi's house, and the pictures he uploaded to our Facebook group suggested otherwise, as there is no door to the bedroom:

This just meant that we would have to show Gary run up the stairs and perhaps into a corner to roll into a ball in instead.

Storyboard - Doctor's Office

Below is my storyboard for the scene in the film set in a doctor's office.

I suggested a lighting change for this scene to accentuate Gary's (the main character) paranoia. On the first frame of the last page shown above, I suggested changing the lighting during the shot to give a sppotlight-type effect, which would mean turning down the ambient light whilst increasing the brightness on a Dedo. The idea was to literally create a 'deer-in-the-headlights' look.


As with the Grindleford shoot, we each storyboarded our own ideas so we could incorporate an even mix of each group member's ideas into the project. This also meant we were able to bounce ideas off each other, and come up with ideas we wouldn't have thought of if we hadn't each shared our own visions for the film.

For example, while the storyboards for the doctor's scene all followed Poppy's script quite closely, meaning they all approached the scene in a very similar way, looking at Jacob's interpretation of the scene gave me an idea for a more technical shot. He suggested zooming on on Gary's face as he imagines hearing bad news, which gave me the idea of including a dolly zoom to add drama to the effect:

Another 'sequence shot', or intense choreography

The band OK Go are well-known for having exuberant music videos for their songs. In 2012, they uploaded a promotional video to Youtube of a (somewhat) 'acoustic' version of their song Needing/Getting.

According the the video's description on Youtube, 'OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles', and the video took '4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording'.

The result is an impressively-choreographed reproduction of Needing/Getting, of which a studio recording was released in 2010, with the band's frontman driving a car through a course set-up with different instruments, with microphones attached all over the car.

Obviously, the video was 'made in partnership' with Chevrolet, who provided a budget of 'somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million' (according to this link), but overall I think the video gives more of a 'wow-factor' for the band than an advert for Chevrolet - but that might just be my opinion.

Considering the complexity of the shoot, and that the filming took places over 4 days, it isn't exactly a long-take, or much of a sequence shot, although to watch it,  it's obviously a series of sequence shots edited together to make it look like a continuous take.

Either way, it's something else to aspire to, like Michel Gondry's 'Knives Out' video.

The video:

Lighting Changes and Sequence Shots

Through the many music videos and adverts he has written and directed, Michel Gondry has developed and/or shown off practical techniques and effects. One of the most impressive examples is his music video for Radiohead's 'Knives Out'.

The entire video is a continuous take in which the camera slowly pans around 360˚ a number of times. As the camera spins, the set continuously changes - props are added, removed or changed each time we see them.

Technically, the video must have been incredibly difficult to pull off (if for no other reason than that it's a continuous take, meaning everyone involved had to 'get it right' at the same time), and obviously took a lot of planning, both in order to choreograph the cast and crew, and also to co-ordinate camera movement and lighting changes.

Throughout the video, the camera moves freely with a level of shake, suggesting that it's hand-held. At 2 minutes in, however, it lifts to a birds-eye-view, suggesting that a crane was used for at least part of the video, if not the entirety.

What was probably most difficult to get right out of all the visual elements in the video is the lighting - the set isn't filled with sources for practicals, and the 360˚ angle combined with crane shots must have made the task of lighting the set nearly impossible. At first, I would have thought everything was lit from above to make it easier, but the crane shot tells me that at least part of the light is carefully framed out of windows.

And to make lighting even more difficult, there are a number of quick lighting changes choreographed, that dim ambient light and introduce sources from underneath bed sheets, for example, before shifting back to the norm.

Naked Framing

From person to person, framing can either be overlooked in favour of one of the many other important elements in cinematography, such as depth of field, lighting, colour, camera movement, exposure, etc., or it can be given too much attention to the detriment of the other elements.

Either way, framing is a very important consideration for the cinematographer - it can reveal or conceal things depending on what the desired effect is. Good framing can draw the viewer into the emotion of a scene; bad framing can draw away from the emotion and make a shot look cluttered and messy.

Mike Leigh's 'Naked' uses subtle humour to (somewhat) lighten up the film's gritty realism. One of the best examples of this is comes from the framing of the the screenshot below, in which the character Johnny tilts his head to produce a composition that turns a decorative wall clock into a halo.

Sensors and rolling shutter

In my last post, I posted a video which involved a lot of fast movement and panning. Naturally, motion blur is going to occur with a sequence like this. However, a problem common to DSLR cameras is rolling shutter.

Rolling shutter is when, as with a camera sensor like the CMOS used in my Canon 550D, a frame isn't recorded at an exact moment - that is, part of the frame is captured slightly before another part. This leads to objects becoming warped when applying camera movement such as panning, or when an object passes the camera very quickly.

This leads to vertical objects appearing to 'lean' to one side on the recorded image.

Google images gives a good example of this in a photograph of a train:

This article explains why this occurs with most common consumer cameras. As the article states, CMOS sensors used in DSLR cameras typically use a rolling shutter rather than a global shutter, meaning that it "actually exposes different portions of the frame at different points in time, “rolling” through the frame" - although, this is due to the sensor "telling different portions to become light-sensitive at different moments in time",  rather than a physically-rolling shutter system.

CMOS sensors using a rolling shutter system are said to be more energy-efficient, which probably explains their usage in consumer products. This makes sense, but also makes it difficult to 'pull-off' quick motion on a small budget without it becoming distorted like the picture above.

Experimenting in the garden

Using the same technique (using the tripod itself as a counter-weight) as mentioned in my last post, I experimented with this 'makeshift Steadicam'.

I tested it out at different heights to see how a Steadicam can give different effects when used at different people's eyelevels, but the most fun result I got was when I flipped the whole thing upside-down and tried to see how it would look for a guinea pig trying to escape from owners that forget to feed it.

I rotated the video back using Premiere Pro.




Running around with a DSLR highlights one of the biggest problems with this type of camera - because of the rolling shutter effect, the video looks much shakier and more blurred than it ordinarily would (although, to be fair to the DSLR, this was also filmed with a shutter speed of 1/50, which gives much more motion blur than it would if it were doubled to 1/100).

Cheap Steadicam

Because I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll never be able to afford a proper Steadicam, I've been looking around online for cheap alternatives.

A popular way of getting a similar effect to a Steadicam is to just use a tripod and try to counter-balance the weight of the camera at the top with the tripod itself at the bottom. This means the tripod has to be held at a certain point, and the balance can be adjusted by extending the tripod's legs more or less to account for different camera and lens weights.

This technique is explained more clearly in this video (which can't be embedded here, so I'm posting the link instead):

https://vimeo.com/36206229

And another video (which CAN be embedded):




During the shoot in Grindleford, Poppy brought along her tripod, which she'd attached a weight to to get a similar effect. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet that explain how to build Steadicam-like systems on a budget, and most recommend using a weight to act as the counter-weight (which seems totally illogical...). Poppy used the same technique as is explained in the below video, but just attached the weight to a tripod rather than putting together the rest of the 'Steadicam'.

Camera log - Grindleford shoot

I've compiled a camera log sheet for the two DSLR cameras used for the Grindleford shoot, which will hopefully be useful when it comes to editing the film.

Before the shoot, Poppy compiled this shot list taking different people's ideas into account:

The shot numbers in the camera log below correspond to those on Poppy's shot list above, with the exception of shot 18, which Poppy added on the day.

Storyboard - Grindleford shoot

We agreed to each storyboard the scene individually, show each storyboard to the group and then take ideas from each person's vision for the film and put together a single storyboard.

I took influence in the first shot from a sequence in the first half of Scott Pilgrim vs The World in which the character Scott is in a trance, and the editing cuts abruptly several times through time and place - in one shot Scott is playing bass at his band's practice, before his bandmate's head enters the shot shouting 'Scott!', and the camera cuts to a mid-shot of these characters in the same position only now they're walking down the street.

I used this idea in my storyboard - the final shot of the preceding scene will show the character scrunching up his face with a brick wall as the background - in my storyboard, the opening shot of the following scene will still be filmed against the brick wall, as he opens his eyes again, before cutting to the new location of the woods.

Here are scans of my storyboard for the woods scene: