In this weeks exercise in which we were tasked with shooting a shot reverse shot in two separate locations, I think my group really missed the mark. The shots themselves are fine, but the point of the exercise was to try to achieve continuity across separate locations and in this case, we’ve not achieved that. The main issues here are obviously the background and also the direction of the light. In the master (wide) shot the light (while somewhat omni-directional) is mostly coming across from left to right. This continues into the reverse shot of Jagger, but when we cut to the closeup, this continuity is lost and the higher key light that was on the face from left of frame disappears and becomes a more front-on light. This together with the fact that there is suddenly a brick wall behind our subject that wasn’t that close before makes cutting between shots in this sequence rather jarring.
Outside of class this week I’ve been on a bit of a binge of the Cooke Optics YouTube channel, on which many world-class cinematographers from many different areas of the industry are interviews and provide a great deal of tips and insights into their craft. This channel has been a constant inspiration for me in trying to continue to develop my own work and to get an idea of exactly what is expected of someone who really wants to ‘make it’ in that industry. In particular this week I watched a with cinematographer Geoff Boyle, who has predominantly worked in the commercial field. In the video he talks about how to replicate complicated and expensive professional lighting setups with nothing more than a single lamp, a couple black flags and a couple sheets of poly. For someone like me, who doesn’t necessarily always have access to a great deal of lighting equipment or indeed enough extra hands to really make complicated lighting setups viable, it is a great relief to hear someone such as Geoff explain exactly how little equipment you can use to create rather pleasing looks. The specific lighting setups he mentions in the video would really take very little time to setup and certainly give me some idea of where to start when lighting these types of scenes.
If you’re not already familiar with this channel, I’d highly recommend checking it out at some point. There’s a great deal of incredible videos on here from some of my favourite cinematographers such as Bradford Young (Arrival), Tod Campbell (Mr. Robot, Stranger Things) and Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull). I’ve embedded what is probably my favourite video from the channel below.