A Cinematographer's Guide to Crafting Astounding Images and Telling Better Stories
We bring a light into the darkness. We find the magic and structure the movie.
(Gordon Willis, ASC, Cinematographer of The Godfather)1
The importance of cinematography and its relationship to storytelling—whether you're shooting shorts, feature fiction, documentaries, news, weddings, or music videos—cannot be underestimated. To be a good shooter, you need to think like a cinematographer (whether or not you're doubling as the director). And cinematographers are fundamentally storytellers—the ones who translate a writer's words into images that draw viewers into the world. Without a compelling story, you simply have disassociated images. Beautiful images without a story may look good, but to get an audience to watch your digital film, the story is key, even if that story is a visual poem (such as Philip Bloom's “People” series or his compelling short doc, A Day at the Races, featured in Chapter 10, or a short story with no dialog, such as Vincent Laforet's Reverie). Indeed, not-so-perfect images tied to a compelling story will hold an audience more than strong images linked to a poorly conceived concept or story. If you need to cover the basics, including tips on writing good dialog, take a look at Chapter 7, “Telling Better Stories with Your DSLR.”
Cinematic style is essentially the way to express yourself through filmic language. Just as authors use words to describe a scene, a character, and action or a painter uses pigments and dyes to give form, shape, and color to a canvas, a director and cinematographer will use camera movement and lighting to express themselves. Indeed, the words cinematography and photography are interrelated—meaning to write with movement and light (graph: write; cinema: movement; photo: light). Shooting with a DSLR—a digital tool that approaches the mythic film look more nearly than any other video camera preceding it—you need to think about shooting your projects by means of camera movement (and stillness), as well as by light (and shadow). These are your fundamental expressive tools in telling your story.
If you ask cinematographers how to attain the cinema look, likely they'll respond against your expectations. You're really not attempting to create a mythical “film look,” but rather trying to create the look and feel of the story you're trying to tell, cinematically The first part of this book examines how to create the best possible image for your story. It includes several setups as described by working cinematographers who have created a look that matches their story's intent.
The desire to attain a cinematic look with video was born out of the stark and flat pixilation of the video image, as opposed to the sharp but creamy soft look of film. One of the main reasons filmmakers have avoided using video cameras to shoot their movies (despite the potential huge savings) revolves around the inherent quality of the video look—an aspect of resolution and sensor property when it exposes light digitally. Furthermore, the video look also stems from an established way we perceive video in broadcast television—such as very contrasty images, facial tones not as natural as in film, very little details that can be seen in the shadows—so everything is often lit evenly, brightly, and results in the “video look.”
This book shows you how to move away from the video look and will help you attain a cinematic look with DSLRs. But the ability to attain this look is highly subjective and what some people may tolerate as acceptable, others may cringe; however, very few can deny that a good story, well executed, trumps any kind of look. As a DSLR shooter, your goal should be to help reinforce the look and feel of a story through better cinematography. Not only are the stories you choose to tell up to you, but how they look and feel to an audience derives from the choices you make when shooting; the shot will feel different if your protagonist wears red versus green, for example. As Jon Fauer, ASC, says, the style—the look you're trying to attain—is what will grab an audience's attention. In a commercial, he notes, “You are trying to sell a product or idea, but you are also trying to grab people's attention, with the cinematography, the lighting, composition, and camera movement.”
Allen Daviau, ASC, cinematographer for such films as Peter Weir's Fearless, Stephen Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, and The Color Purple, among others, discusses one way he works with a director to get the “look” of the story: “looking at films, stills, paintings, and tear sheets out of publications.” He continues by discussing how Raoul Coutard, cameraman for Jean-Luc Godard, used a similar approach:
For a scene that shows a gentleman walking through a door, the left side of Godard's frame might have been inspired by a genre noir film from the ’20’s and the right side of the frame might have come from a poster he saw that morning on the Metro.
Just as there is no formula for writing a script or directing, there is no formula for cinematographers to create the look of a film—it's drawn on art, storytelling, a passage from a poem, a photograph, a poster, a visit to a museum, and much more. The inspiration and art come first. The technology—like the painter's brush—is used in service to the art.
The cinematographer for such television shows as Malcolm in the Middle and Dawson's Creek, Levie Isaacks, ASC, says that a cinematographer creates “the look of the film” by how “[y]ou select your film stocks. You select the kind of camera movement that you want to do. You select your lighting style: contrasty or not contrasty and the colors. Out of all those elements, you create the look of the film.”
Andrew Laszlo, ASC, cinematographer for Shogun, explores the look of the film as a way to choose a style. This style, or look, should be drawn from “the subject matter,” the story of the film, he says. After reading the script, Laszlo notes how “images begin to form in your imagination and in your vision.” He wants to “impact the audience” with these images, so he “enhances” this reality:
I have to bring something to that reality that will affect the audience as they look at the picture. Is it a happy day? Is it a sad day? What can I do to create an impression, an emphasis? Techniques and tools come into play—lenses, film stocks, filters, focal lengths, all kinds of gimmicks that an individual artist may come up with and say, “This is what I feel; this is what I'll do to enhance the image so it will serve the story best, as depicted by the script.”
Like Isaacks, Laszlo realizes that the tools of the cinematographer are vast: film stock, lighting style, camera movement, lenses and focal lengths, filters—not to mention the time of day, the use of scrims, flags, and reflectors, lighting ratios, tone and color, and so on. Filmmaking—even more so than theater—is one of the most difficult art forms to master. A painter paints, a novelist or poet writes, a sculptor sculpts—all arts that are conducted in one medium (most of the time). In film, many different art forms and technology comprise the cinematographer's palette.
As a video shooter, you need to consider shooting like a cinematographer, not a videographer. So the first few chapters of this book cover the main elements you need to consider to make Canon DSLR video look more cinematic, and give you these techniques on a low budget. You don't need the full equipment package of a Hollywood production team (although that can help), but you can achieve this shooting solo, if needed. So the information in this book is useful not only for independent filmmakers, shooting both documentaries and fiction, but also for event and wedding shooters, video journalists, as well as students.
The first three chapters provide the foundation, the basic tools needed for shooters to craft a cinematic look with large sensor video—from composition to exposure. The fourth chapter describes how you can shape a cinematic look by manipulating the picture styles of DSLR cameras. Chapter 5 covers audio recording—one of the most important aspects in making a good film, while Chapter 6 presents the postproduction workflow. As I define these tools of the cinematographer, I include examples of how shooters approach them in their projects. The goal isn't to master the entire art and craft of cinematography in these chapters, but to expose you to some of the basic principles so you can begin shooting projects cinematically, to help express the film look.
The final chapter of this part, Chapter 7, “Telling Better Stories,” is one of the most important, for if you do not know how to craft a good story, then your images will contain little meaning and will unlikely attract an audience. There are many books on telling stories, but this compact chapter provides you with core information so you can start telling better stories right away.
1 Fauer, J. (2008). Cinematographer Style: The Complete Interviews, Vol. 1, (p.395). American Society of Cinematographers.