Chris Stones

I'm trying to find a formula to work out safe shutter speed / shutter angle combinations shooting on 60hz. Anybody know how I can work this out please? Thanks chris

I'm shooting a civil war film in Savannah at the end of June and the script calls for a lot of sun set scenes. I've been told we will not be able to shoot all of this at the correct time and on days where we have more extras and time is of the essence we will have to shoot all day and make it look like sun set. How can I do this? Some of these scenes are in a clearing but some are in quite a dense forest. I had thought about shooting the wides at the correct time of day and then cheating on the close ups by not showing the sky and then using large silks to cut the over head hard sun light and use HMIs through a frame to fire in the softer lower angled light, but I've been informed this is too expensive. Out of interest if we did have the budget would this have been the right approach? Obviously the backgrounds in these shots would have had the "wrong" light and would probably have been a bit brighter too but would this have mattered? Would the audience have noticed? So I need a cheaper alternative to the problem. Would gelled tungstens work OK? Or would they end up having to be so big to compensate for their natural inneficiency compard to HMIs and then the gel on top that they would be expensive anyway and need huge amounts of power? Can I rely on mirrors and shiney boards to give me my cross light key? Do I need to approach the scenes in the clearing differently to the scenes in the forest? Obviously putting up silks in the forest and finding areas of sun light to reflect in the correct direction may be harder as so much is shaded. Any thoughts on filters I can use to enhance the look? This is a big project for me (my grad film for the London Film School) so it means a lot to me to get it right, so any advice would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance Chris

Telecine And as far as production design goes it will be mostly exteriors so difficult to dress. Costume will be something I will definitely look at

I want to take the colour and life out of a film I'm about to shoot and was wondering what you would advise as the best way to do this. I know I have options of stock, flashing, ultra con filters, under exposing, grading, etc but I don't really have the opportunity to test all the combinations myself so wanted to know if any of you had had good results you'd like to share. My heart is saying do it in camera but my head is saying wait till grading, what should I do? Thanks a lot in advance

I'm about to shoot a short by the coast and want to open with some time lapse to represent the days passing the protagonist by (and as it looks cool). I'm shooting the main body of the film on 16mm, Fuji F-64D (probably) but was told it would be easiest to shoot the timelapse sequences on a digital SLR, is this correct? Is there anything I should do to help the two formats match? What format should I set the digital camera to? Plus do any of you have any other advice on how to do this? How long should the intervals between shots be? (I know this depends on the length of the final sequence but is there an average?) Thanks

I'm about to shoot a short film on 16mm and I could really use some advice. There is a scene in the film where the lead character runs along the beach at night. There are no lights on this beach but we should be able to position him so that we can see street lights in the distant background. There is very little money for this shoot so the solution to this has to come cheaply. At the moment we don't even have a generator planned so we will be using battery powered sun guns (we will have both HMI and tungsten, 2 of each - not sure what strength 200W ?). The scene needs to be quite dark (for the story) and I don't want to add much light to the subject anyway and make the background turn into a black hole (as we don't have the money and resources to light the entire huge background) so I'm happy with working at quite low levels. I'm open to any suggestions at this stage whether they involve which stock to use, how to process it, and obviously how to best use my sun guns. I really appreciate your help as I'm a bit lost on this one Cheers Chris

I have a shoot coming up which requires exterior night locations in a field or forest involving say up to fifty people. They can not carry any lights as they are trying to sneak behind enemy lines (its an American Civil War film) without being seen. So the only light they should have is the moon. And to top that off at some points it shouldn't be hard direct moon light as the director wants a change when the moon comes out from behind clouds to reveal more. Ideally I'd like two answers, one, which would be a money is no object answer, and the other, if it had to be done on a tight budget (I will be somewhere in the middle). Thanks

The best thing I've read is "Reflections: Twenty-One Cinematographers At Work", by Benjamin Bergery. Its doesn't just discuss lighting set ups but I'm sure you'll find the whole book a great resource. But I agree, there should be more books with this type of information