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.