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.