Cinematography 2

Research in practice, being within a group, hearing and seeing.


To start the day I watched 10 minutes of The DIVING BELL & BUTTERFLY
Even ten minutes gave an flavour... Titles beautiful use of xrays, soft focus, with a nice gentle french vocal.

Opens with a POV shot from patient, waking in from a coma. Shots of fragments of faces, eyes, blurring in and out, with occasional blips of black. Nicely framed and close.

Then Read a little of Auden & Documentary and Masc - Steps right in and argues what is a workers film? As the 30's saw documentary subjects being focused that way but a lack of clarity of that meant. For a worker, by a worker, with a worker and what was a worker? Lack of class analysis suggested, yet also clear. Workers, or the working class are not uniform in thinking and being but are connected by their/our relationship to the means of production. Do we live without selling our labour? Can we? Older versions related directly to manufacturing but there is still a power, in a smaller group of workers in Britain concentrated and vilified for daring to taken any action, expect anything. RMT, RMT, RMT.

It did ask questions around gender noted the invisibility of a woman, cut out of the screen, the story the frame. That is important to note, the history of women documented is also limited, those who create, those that are portrayed, subjects, stories, and focus.

Then back to Cinematography -

Hitchcocks rule - Size of character related to size on screen

Overlap
Size change
Verticol - Above and below - Japanese
Horizontal - Eyes scan from L - R (West)

Linear perspective - 15C
Alberti - 1406 -77 Italy pre Renaisance
'Battle of xx' Converging lines
Visual depth

Foreshortening
Use of body - hand in front of shot, larger..

UCCELLO - 1432 'Caravaggio - 1601'
Supper - Low light and high contrast

Looked around for a minute, of a room of 13, two thirds men. 3 women write notes.

Haze filters out more longer wavelengths than shorter ones. - Depth

F STALKER - 15 years before Chernoboyl

CHIROSCURO
Lighting technique (Italian R)
Self Portrait - Rembrandt 1629
'Graduations of light & dark'
= low key lighting


F Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick 1975)
Kubrick wanted to show how life would have been, no film stock could capture such low levels of light, until Nazi's began to develop a lens. Later Ziess developed it with an .7 Fstop allowing double the apperture of normal light.

Content of piece - the framing mirrored formality of society through the slow shot.

F 'In one'
No camera movement, long static
Individual Challenges Frame

Many filmmakers reacted to Hollywood mainstream by using long shots.
Abbas Kiorostami - 'filmmakers only make one film in life' its just broken into cinematic fragments. Does not want people to feel guilt but think and consider.

PLAN SCENE - Each film one shot
F TOUCH of Evil

Consider what tools we have to experiment and develop mood.
Tripod, Angles, Aperture, Focus

Also noticed how no-one wants to speak, the silence of doing. Don't want to be seen as leading but doing. Interesting, perhaps we have text and fb to engage so leave gaps in reality.

Cinematography @LSBU - People, place, space

Was always drawn by this session but scared, dam scared that I would want the detail, want what the real options offered me but they're not options are they?! I can't afford to get lost in detail... I can. I can and I can chose that too.

We had SONY XDCAM PMW-EX3 - shoots 60fps and has a lot of extras and lenses which give me film quality at 1/3 of the price. We tested out lenses to see and feel the differences in small groups. Much more fineky... and filters which could shift lift, adapt light and move light. One filter which would be good to use would be the polarising one, which is shooting from the outside in, from outside a car or bus and to take off the reflections. Got to touch a camera and lense or two.. was good, the quality, the control....

With the class who I did FCP with which is funny, they seem nice and I remember one or two.
Tutor is gentle and was interested in the project I was doing, her partner was the son of a miner and from Derbyshire and what that meant.. so much to say and do. The layers. She is open to share and interested, good to share the ideas and see how and what people think about them and what they might want to contribute. The energy the possibilities. Saw GK too, the man who runs all the technical things here and more. He had encouraged me to take more of the undergraduate modules which he could see from the footage I would have a better understanding of the work I was creating and how and why. To develop an ability to understand and articulate the astethic which is a key part of this piece, the form and content are important. Not just one. One without the other would not make sense and would deny the context and contexts within which we operate.

She showed us Ak - Seven Samouri -(just changed this link, wiki talk about it better than imbd which is commercial titles not why or who. it tells me/ us more not selling us the product but the process, context and how it made a difference to his career and where it is in relation to others). who used mainly long lenses, this gave the background and foreground equal balance, like in Japanese art. Makes the context more or more equal. Its not just this character, this but this is also part of that and that is moving too, together. A dialectical relationship, movement is important to me.

Suggested two key books:
Grammor of the shot - Thompson
Cinematography: Theory and practice - Brown 2002