Hugh Thomson

Sometimes the story calls for it, like in Man Bites Dog and other mockumentaries. Sometimes it's just a style thing that doesn't really add to the film at all. There's a huge difference between shaky and handheld. The Son by the Dardenne Bros is a great film using hand held camera. No music, very little dialogue, not too much cheap exposition. A very "fly on the wall" kind of film. A couple of Herzog's old films use handheld camera, and they're awesome. He probably just couldn't be bothered taking a tripod into the Amazon. Some of Christopher Doyle's stuff is amazing too. Very spontaneous. I guess the old masters didn't use it because the old cameras were just too heavy and they would go through camera operators like wildfire. The visual language has changed a lot since then and it's completely okay for mainstream audiences to have a shaky camera. I'm not saying that it's a good thing, though. 24 really gives me the shits. Haven't they heard of storyboarding? Line crosses, whips, zooms etc. When the Blair Witch Project was at the movies they handed out motion sickness bags. I remember walking in and thinking, "Yeah, right." About an hour into it I wished I'd picked one up!

I've been wondering about shooting in black & white... If you shot in color and added green or red filters digitally before converting to black & white, would there be a considerable loss in quality/exposure/anything? I know this is pretty weak and should just learn how to shoot B&W properly, but it could stop you from losing green stuff against red if you didn't know what you were doing. (Which I don't!) I guess this would only be useful if you were shooting on film, in which case you'd be shooting on B&W film stock.

I am about to start working on a cinematography related thesis, and looking at focusing on the work of Asakazu Nakai & Kazuo Miyagawa (both worked with Akira Kurosawa). I am particularly interested in the shots utilizing vertical recession, a form of perspective used in early Asian art from Japan, Tibet, India etc, before Western perspective (vanishing points) was introduced. This was done by shooting on a long focal length at a high f-stop from an elevated position. Characters in the foreground are not much larger than those in the background. The actor's position is made apparent by his/her height in the frame. I am assuming that this was done in films like Seven Samurai because it is a very Japanese form of traditional composition. Basically, I was wondering if anyone could name a few other films/cinematographers that draws on culturally specific techniques in their work. Either that or any cinematography that directly mimics an artist. It could be anything such as color scheme/theme/perspective and so on. Any help would be very much appreciated, I have to start writing this thing soon!

Rabiger has two books. I don't have Directing the Documentary, only Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics. It's worth getting. There's a lot of good stuff on working with actors. There is also a fair bit on writing/narrative beats. A friend of mine highly recommended Directing Actors to me. I just borrowed The filmmaker's Guide to Production Design by Vincent LoBrutto. Haven't read it yet, but it's one of the few production design books out there.

Oh yeah. Please, whatever you do, don't make it anything like Once Upon a Time in America. The age reveal/seamless passage of time/transition just smoked hogan. Just thinking about the scene with the mirror and the string symphony playing Yesterday makes me cringe. Sergio Leone's done some cool stuff, but that film isn't one of them. Too many of those WTF moments. The midnight frisbee ninjas that hang out under the bridge? WTF? If you haven't seen the movie, I probably sound like a bit of a loony, but if you have seen it, you know what I'm talking about.

Step by step aging tutorial This should help. Be warned though: latex make-up is very fuggen hard to pull off. I don't know if this will help or not, but it's the best "How to..." guide that I've found on the net. Make-up FX There's a step by step process showing how to make masks and whatnot. It tells you what to use, how to bake it and everything. It's a very complicated process by the looks of it. I've tried a few things. All of my stuff looks really, really naff. Good luck.

Yojimbo - (DoP-Kazuo Miyagawa) Like a lot of Kurosawa's other films, shot mostly on very long lenses but with lots of light. High f-stop kept things in focus. All of Kurosawa's stuff looks amazing. Tetsuo (Shinya Tsukamoto) - Some very wild cinematography. Stop motion. Everything. Very inventive; definitely not polished. Lots of hair in the gate, which makes it that much cooler. Pi (Aronofsky)- Some really cool high contrast shots. Making it b&w in post is a good idea. Unless you really know what you're doing. Greens and reds look the same in B&W, so you wouldn't get the image you were expecting. B&W FILTERS MORE ON B&W It's easy enough to put on "filters" in post.

That looks pretty cool, Ryan. We're shooting in very different conditions, there is no canopy where I am. I thought pine was evergreen(?), so i guess it's dying (one in ten of the 60 ft trees have fallen down too). The look of your forest reminds me a bit of Snow Falling on Cedars. There are a few scenes in similar surroundings and you should probably watch that for some ideas. I'm in Australia, I've heard that the light here is quite different to that in Europe and North America. It's usually quite hard and rarely overcast, especially where I am.

We just had our first shoot the other day. It seems it takes a lot of room to get a mid shot at 90 mm. Funny that. I'd have to agree with you Mr. Vale. It was a bit pointless driving two hours out to the woods and not showing them. The forest is very, very dense, i was afraid that if they were in focus that it would be too chaotic. I haven't really shot much on film before. I guess my question is, what's a good contrast ratio for faces in a day shoot? Where would be the best direction to use the reflectors? from near the camera? from the dark side of the face? thanks for your help.

I'm a student shooting in a rotting pine forest (no leaves/no dappled sunlight). I'm having trouble thinking of ways to make it more visually interesting. I'm shooting on Super 16 with an ASA of 200T, which goes down to 125 ASA with the daylight filter. On sunny days the bright spots read at about F-stop 11-22 and about 4-5.6 in the shade. Lots of trees casting lots of shadows that make the contrast ratio a pain in the butt. On cloudy days about 2.8 everywhere. No lights, just a bunch of silver reflectors and boards of polystyrene on C-stands. I've decided to shoot at 70mm-90mm for most of it at 4.0 or 5.6 to make the actors stand out from the blurry background. I'm hoping to shoot must of it with the sun coming from behind the actors to give them a rim light, reflecting light on their faces, making the backlight about 2 stops hotter. If it's cloudy I guess I'd go for a Miller's Crossing kind of look. Any tips on how to make this more interesting? And what to do for wide shots with too much contrast between bright/dark? It's being telecined, put on mini-DV and edited on a computer. I suppose that lowers the acceptable contrast range to about 6 stops, so should I expose somewhere between and let the grader worry about it? (apologies for the long post)