Transcripts
1. Welcome: This is an introductory
course for people interested in becoming
directors of photography. I'm going to show
you how you can use the basic tools of cinematography
to tell the story. Hi, I'm fields with the rubbish. I'm a film director and screenwriter with 18
years of experience. At the time of this recording, my feature film is premiering
at film festivals. Nowadays, I can enjoy
working with professionals, but where I was beginning, I was my own
cinematographer focus poor, and sometimes even an actor. Over the years, I've learned
that you can accelerate your growth as a filmmaker if you'll get your basics right. That's why I've come up with this series of courses
that are going to teach you the fundamentals of
cinematography one-by-one. In this particular course, we're going to talk
about the tools of cinematography like light, composition, camera
movement, and color. Now, it may sound very basic, but the way you use those for tools distinguishes whether you are a director of photography
or just a camera. Not that there's anything
wrong with being a cameraman. But let me tell you this, when I'm looking for a
DOP for my new film, the first thing that I'm
interested in is if he's interested in
telling the story or he's just a guy that likes
to make pretty pictures. Because I think that the story
should always come first. And being purposeful
in impacting your audience makes
you a cinematographer, a real visual storyteller. In this course, I want to talk about the
main topics that I usually discussed with my DOP when we are preparing
to shoot the film, these four elements, compositions, camera
movement, color, and light determined the
visual style of your film. As always, there will be
examples from my award winning movies which were beautifully
shot by Nicholas Vegas. But in this course, I am also going to feature other examples from
mainstream cinema. So yeah, hopefully
see you in a class.
2. The Art of Dircecting Attention: Thanks for taking my class. Now, cinematography is an art and art of directing attention. Being a good director
of photography is being good in showing the
audience what is important. Mostly it's photographing
actors performances. But it's not only that
you are the gaze of the audience and you are
guiding them through the story. You're taking them to
places they've never been. You're introducing them
to people they never met. You're inviting them to
take a journey with you. And you are the one who is
going to stylize that journey. You're the one that
is going to decide. Is it going to be an
energetic with lots of movement and shifting the attention from
one thing to another. Or maybe it's going to
be very concentrated. Focus where you're just
going to put the camera on a tripod and just observe, is it going to be a
dark journey into the night or is it going
to be a working assign? The screenplay is going to determine some of
those decisions. But you, as the DOP, have an autonomy over how
it's going to look like, how you're going to
stylize your film. In this course, we are going to talk about the
tools that you can use as a videographer
to tell the story. First, let's just say that
every story is different. Every screenplay will demand to be told in a
slightly different way. Even if you have your
own preferences. Two of my films that I have
shot as diploma films in Polish National Film
School are completely different in terms
of visual style. The first film, normal people, the camera is vibrant. Participant of the story. In the second film,
Mother Earth, the camera is almost indifferent to the struggles
of main character. As a director, I
had my reasons to choose the way these
stories were told visually. In my discussions with the
director of photography, I stated my intentions, but the execution of these
intentions was my DOPS job. Both of these films were
shot by Nicolas via guess. He was the one who was
responsible for making most of the decisions regarding how the camera is going to
portray the action. In this course, I want to talk
about the main topics that I usually discuss with my DOP when we are
preparing to shoot a film, these four elements that are going to determine visual
style of your film. Now, my recommendation is to make all the decisions
regarding composition, light camera movement, and color before you're going
to shoot your fell. And then stick to it. When it will be on the set. Limit your creativity
to the confines of the style that you
established earlier.
3. Composition: So the first one is composition. As you probably know, the most generic way
of shooting a scene is making one establishing shot
and then adding closeups. When you're doing it like that, it's important to follow
the 180 degree rule. This rule is a basic
guideline regarding the on-screen
spatial relationship between characters
within a scene. You may have seen my
other course about the 180 degree rule
in cinematography. If you haven't seen it, I
encourage you to check it out after you watch this. Anyway. The most
scenes from my film, Mother Earth are shot like that. There is nothing wrong in doing things by the book, however, it's always welcomed if
you're going to leave your personal mark within
unusual composition. Now, there are many rules of composition like rule of
thirds or rule of odds, are working with a
depth of field or using diagonal lines to
concentrate the attention. You can use opened composition or more common ones,
the closest ones. Um, you can do so many interesting things
with the composition. I'm not going to list all of them is a topic for
a different course. But let me show you one
scene from Mother Earth where we use our
imagination and made an unusual composition
is going to be one of the opening scenes
where the boy hurt himself and the father is
going to patch his wound. The point of the scene is
to show that even though the father is there for his
son and tries to help him, the boy needs more
emotional warmth and kindness and that he's
basically not getting it. Now, generic way of shooting this scene would be to
follow 180 degree rule and make one establishing shot where we see two of them sitting
in front of each other. Also to close-ups of actors. And maybe one close up of the activity of
patching the wand. It's like for camera
angles in total. Now. Now let's watch what
we've come up with. So as you can see, we did the whole thing
was just one shot. I remember our thought process when we were preparing for this. See, I told my DOP
that this scene is about being
emotionally rejected. We blend it during the
rehearsals with the actors. By the way, having
your cinematographer present at the
rehearsals is great. We were able to combine every aspect of this
scene into one frame. When you know what
is the scene about, you can try to capture
it in a way that will put the theme of the
scene in the forefront. You have to be bold and
decisive with your creativity. When you can specify the
purpose of the scene, you can confidently go with
all sorts of crazy ideas. Now, this kind of shots become your signature
on the whole movie.
4. Light: Now let's talk about light, which is another very powerful
tool in your arsenal. Light is most commonly
use to create mood. That has Malik went as far as filming the whole
film in magic hour, which is a time of a
day just after sunset, and just before sunrise, is producing warm
colors of gold, pink, and blue is considered
very photogenic. Light function in your film can be reduced to being pretty, but you can use light as a
tool to tell your story. Let's watch another
scene from Mother Earth, where a father finds a
wound on his sons, make serve others. So moving in and finish those
that are sick. My mental model batches. We should do Mason, you play a view at
the shelf, cool. Movie to your mouth. We have the convenience of it. Was that them yesterday
we stumbled on us. It used to CJ's pagoda. So you always can you
stick your thumb, you don't want to go. Now, the whole scene
is dark and you can barely see the figures
are father and son. The only element
that you can see clearly is the wound when the
father puts a lamp on it. This was done on purpose to focus audience attention
towards the wound. At that point in the story, we needed to show the wounds shape and
that the boy wasn't aware that he is wounded
by lighting the scene. That way we were successful in showing the auxins that
this one is important. Now, they are going
to remember it, which is going to pay
off later in the story. I like operating light
because it lets me glued. What is unimportant in this particular
moment in the film?
5. Camera Movement: Now, let's talk about the
camera movement simply by deciding if you want a camera that is reactive
to your main hero, you can introduce a lot of
empathy for the protagonists. If you have a protagonist
that is not really a likable, you can help him out with
the camera movement. In normal people. The main character, Daniel, is a violent criminal
that is trying to change his life after
leaving the prison, since it's not very empathetic
character right away, we decided to go
with the camera, which is very close to him, sometimes even physically close. The movement of
the camera is very responsive in regards
to the character. I feel that being so
close to the character helps in adopting
his point of view. Conversely, if you know that the character is a very
empathetic anyway, like a young vulnerable boy who wants to save an old org chart, which is the only thing that his deceased mother left him. You don't have to worry
if your audience is going to like your character
enough to root for him. You can have the
camera that is very static and washing the
situation from the distance. That way, you can
create shots that are more symbolic and
aesthetically appealing. This approach will provoke the audience to look for a
deeper meaning of the story. Again, it all depends
on the story. Apart from that, you can also consider how long each
shot is going to be. In. Traditional camera setup is going to be few
seconds for every shot. But you can go ahead and plan, seen as a master shot, which means that you
are going to shoot the whole scene in one
uninterrupted take. Steven Spielberg is known
for his so-called one Earth. As you can imagine, master shots are hard to
make production wise. You have to have a
lot of time on set to corral graph them correctly. Sometimes it's worth it. I always tell my students
that you have to have a good reason to make
a scene in one take. This is a scene from my
feature film, faith break. Let's watch. I decided to make this scene
in a master shot because I wanted to introduce the audience to the
world of this young man. The audience already met him before as a drunk and the thief. So in this scene, our goal was to show him
in a more positive light. As an organizer of
this crew party, I decided to shoot
it as a wonder to immerse the
audience in the party. And then he notices a
beautiful girl, and he cut it. So there you have it. Camera movement is the third
of the main cinematic tools.
6. Color: Let's talk about fourth
tool, which is color. It seems very basic, but if you think about it, it's also something that can
help you to tell the story. We all have our
preferences about colors. We all have our favorite color. As a director of photography, you're not allowed to
have a preference. The story, once you to choose
the palette that fits. So similarly to a light color is usually used
to create a mood. We associate vibrant colors with optimism and desaturated,
washed out colors. Or we see as the pressing. I encourage you to think how the color can help
you tell the story. You can use color to focus audience
attention at something. The most striking example of this is a girl
in the red coat. In Schindler's List. The whole film is
black and white. It was stylized to remind cinema of the
forties and fifties. In few scenes across the movie, you see a girl in a red coat. It's a little light motif
that keeps coming back. And it culminates when the protagonist sees
this read the code on a dead body is clear
signal that he feels remorse. So without the red color, this would be just another
dead body on the pile. But when we recognize
the red coat, we immediately
remember the person who was wearing it in
the previous scene. This body on a pile is
not anonymous anymore. It's a tragic death of a child. Now, is it subtle? No. But does it work? Yes, it does. Now, you can be more
subtle with the color. Pedro Almodovar is
well-known for using the color to focus viewers
attention to his characters. He would usually light up
everything on the set and make the actors wear
clothes that have vibrant or contrasting colors. Another thing is
that you can use the color to separate
different plots in your film. Stephen Sada by Eric, did that in traffic. This film have
several plot lines and every plot has its
own dominant color. You can also use color to mark certain location and
environments in matrix. Whenever we were in the matrix, everything had this
greenish tint to it. The real world was
bluish that way. As an audience member, you can watch long scenes where there is
back-and-forth between these two realities and
you never get lost. And finally, there is also a
symbolic value of the color, something that is completely another level in terms
of utilizing the color. Tell the story is the
situations where you create the association of
certain elements of the story with a
particular color, e.g. in the film, blue is
the warmest color. The color blue symbolizes love. It's against a
common association that people have
with the color blue. Blue is actually
the coldest color. But in this particular story, film makers associated
this word love. Now, while you're watching it, you may not realize this, but your brain processes
signals over time. It impacts your
unconscious mind. The way it works is this. After seeing scenes where
the main character, Adele, is in love and seeing a lot
of blue color around her, your brain will associate
blue with being in love. So this way, you are unconsciously
associating this color with a particular feeling. You might just feel it
without understanding it. So this four tools, composition, camera,
movement, light, and color, are the most important
tools that you have at your disposal
as a cinematographer, you should work to incorporate
that into your movies. Cinematography or
videography is essentially working with the unconscious
mind to tell the story. I want to emphasize that
during your preparations, you should spend
the time to make all those decisions regarding the style of your story and
then stick to it on the set. You should establish
the visual style of your film before you're
going to start to shoot it. Of course, making a movie is a creative process and you
can change some things, but it's better to
begin shooting with a clear vision of
what you want to create and then spend the time onset trying
to enhance it.
7. Class Project: For your class project. First, I want you to pick a C. It can be as seen
from your movie, but it can also be a re-creation of a scene
from the film that you like. Then make a photo
storyboard of the sea. A photo storyboard is a
series of pictures that imitate how the shots
are going to look like. You should make one picture
for every camera angle. You've seen the charts that
I showed you in the lessons. So you know how to do it in terms of the production quality, the equipment, the actors, It's totally up to you. The real quality of
your production depends solely on your ideas and your
focus on telling the story. You can use any equipment. You can use the camera in your phone if that's
all you have. In terms of the performances, you can ask your family or
friends to pose for you. Make it fun. And now, the most important thing while making the big teachers use one or more tools
that I told you about in this course to convey the
main theme of the scene. This is the most
important thing. Try to be creative and
really step out of the box. For me, it's always fun to explore new ways of
expressing the story. As always, I'll be uploading my own project to
the project gallery. So you know exactly what
you're supposed to do. Be sure to post your project. I'll give feedback
to every single one. Good luck.
8. Good Luck!: Thanks for taking my class. I hope I made you look at
the cinema in a new light. If you've learned
something valuable, consider making a review of the course and posting
your projects. I noticed that most students who watch my classes
don't do that. Please be the one who
makes the effort. So others could benefit
from your evaluation. Also, reading your reviews
keeps me motivated. Teaching online doesn't
bring a lot of money. Nothing compared to
screenwriting and directing, which is my main job. So if you want me to
keep making more, please let me know by
dropping a positive review, especially that I consider this course as an introduction. There is a lot of nuances to the principles I
told you about e.g. light can be used to create
a mood in the scene. But what if the light tells a completely different
story than the dialogues? What if the cinematography is the counterpoint to what
the actors are doing? If you're interested,
I would love to make more courses with a
full-on analysis. Just let me know
if your interests. Now, the best way to check
out my courses is my website. You can find there how this course fits into
my other classes. I encourage you to check it out, since I'm on all sorts of different platforms and this
side is always up to date. Was more. Thank you very much
for taking my class and hopefully see you soon. Bye.
Piotr Złotorowicz, Screenwriter & Director
