Category: Media 2 Studio | Film Light

Chosen film:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

Cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema

Starring Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch

When I first watched this film a couple weeks ago, I immediately knew that I was going to have to pick a scene from it to analyse for this assignment. ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ is set at the height of the Cold War in 1970’s Britain, tells the story of a recently retired British Intelligence agent George Smiley as he is forced back into service in order to uncover a mole operating among the seniority of the secret service. The film, directed by Tomas Alfredson and shot by another of my favourite cinematographers, Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk, Her), has within it many absolutely stunning shots and scenes, but this one stands out as one of my absolute favourites.

This particular lighting setup is so incredibly aesthetically pleasing, and paired with the film stock that has been used, creates this really soft glow to the whole scene. This quality of light was probably achieved by creating a single large light that would cover the entire roof of this set – this in turn was probably created by placing one or more rather thick sheets of diffusion over the entire roof and then shining several strong lamps through it (possibly something like multiple sky panels or kino flo’s?). It is difficult to tell whether or not there is also some degree of intentional fill light in place (by this I mean fill light which is not just ambiently occurring from the set) or whether the filmmakers here are entirely relying on this incredibly soft top light. In any case though, the key to fill ratio is rather soft in that there isn’t a huge amount of contrast between the darkest and lightest areas of the face (with perhaps one notable exception I’ll get into in a minute).

The effect of this lighting setup is this super-soft top light which is filling in almost all shadows in the entire scene, with the notable exception of a slight shadow being cast down over the brow and into the eye cavities of most of the four suspects of being a Soviet double-agent. The eyes of course are a big part of what we as human beings subliminally use to assess whether or not someone is telling the truth, so in partially muting out this area of the face, we begin to lose track of the motivations of the characters in question. This of course carries immense narrative consequence from just this simple and subtle effect, as in large part the major mystery of the film is working out exactly who of the bunch is inauthentic. While this scene does provide some visual cues that could be read as hints as to who ends up being the double agent (I won’t spoil that here because you should absolutely watch this film if you haven’t already), I do appreciate the fact that it isn’t quite so blunt as say for example, a classic noir film, which would often have a very large key to fill differential and essentially spell out plainly the intention of a character by the way it casts them into light or darkness.

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.

This week I noticed a somewhat bizarre lighting event in real life that seems to be a fairly rare occurrence. Right at the time at which it should be golden hour, rather than the sky going a soft golden colour, it skewed more  towards a sort of pink-orange colour. This effect seems to only occur during golden hour just after it has been raining (and even then it doesn’t always happen) and creates a rather strange other-worldly sort of feeling through its very short duration.

Upon recognising this oddly unnatural looking natural effect, I began trying to think of an example for this kind of look in a film, and ultimately the only example I could think of was from one of my favourite films, Spike Jonze’s “Her”, which utilises a similar colour palette of soft oranges and pinks. It seems fitting that this film is the only one I can think of which comes close to the real life look I’m referring to as it’s probably the only film I can think of that seems to reproduce the same sort of melancholic feel that the real life effect gives me. Given how unique this effect seems to be both in real life and in cinema, I’d definitely like to look into trying to recreate it through a combination of lighting and colour grading at some point in my own time as this sort of look is certainly stylistically in line with where I would like to go with my future cinematography endeavours.

The lighting test we performed in the Tuesday class this week (20/8) was somewhat enlightening for me, in that I think upon reviewing it I have recognised another very important reason for lighting (and particularly in replicating natural lighting) and that is mood. By this I mean that it is one thing to closely replicate a light source, but it is another thing entirely to create the same mood – which I believe is in every way more difficult to do. The two examples from this exercise aren’t terribly different from each other, but there is a discernible impact on the overall mood of the shots which I think is happening for two main reasons. 

Firstly, in the shot with natural lighting, the light has a certain softness to it which just isn’t totally replicated in the shot using equipment. The light wraps around Tash’s face in a slightly different way, but enough so that the second shot when placed alongside the first appears much harder than it probably really is. Particularly in the shot without any fill, the contrast ratio is just far to high and the level of the key is too high also. This is remedied somewhat with the introduction of fill light, but I would suggest to really recreate the look of the natural light, the key would need to be far more heavily diffused and/or moved further away from the subject. The second reason I think the mood of the shots don’t line up is perhaps slightly less relevant to the intention of the exercise but still worth bringing up nonetheless, and that is that the actual tint and colour temperature of the light sources don’t perfectly match each other. In the shot with natural light, the colour temperature appears somewhat cooler and there is a very slight green-cast in terms of the tint. Whereas in the shot in which we used a lamp (and later some fill bounced back in) the colour temperature seems a little warmer and the tint moves more towards magenta.

Throughout this class my notions of what is most important to cinematography have been challenged regularly, but never more than this week. I certainly fall into the category of being a bit of a ‘technocrat’ – of course by virtue of the fact that I am a camera assistant and it is my business to understand the technical aspects of the camera department. One of my technically focused obsessions has been sensor size. My camera for example (the recently released Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera) has a 4/3 sensor, but due to my notions of the necessity of a shallow depth of field and its associations with a full frame sensor size – I chose to use a speedbooster to bring my camera closer to this look. However this week’s class burst my bubble a little bit (in a good way!), as Robin pointed out that in reality while depth of field is tied to sensor size technically, it more so comes down to your lighting choices and how that facilitates your choice of aperture and focal length.

 

To complement this revelation, I also had another realisation out of class while watching a couple of Hitchcock films (in this case Vertigo and North by Northwest) – which was that this notion of a shallow depth of field being inherently ‘cinematic’ is entirely flawed. Watching these films (both of which shared the same cinematographer in Robert Burks), a common feature became apparent to me – the majority of shots had a fairly great depth of field, and yet are the very epitome of ‘cinematic’. Through this realisation it has hammered home to me that I should be far less concerned with technical elements such as sensor size and far more concerned with things such as lighting and composition. Afterall cinematography is an art form, not a mathematical exercise, and should be treated as such.

 

The exercise we did in groups this week I found to be the biggest challenge we’ve been presented with yet. And in large part I think we failed to achieve the effect that we were tasked with creating. I think that the first shot looks acceptable (aside from the obvious cutter that is in frame – oops!), the lighting is fine – if a little lacking in shape and separation between our subjects and the wall behind them (poor choice of shooting location). But the second shot on the other hand I just don’t think works in any regard. The lighting is even more flat than the last one, the frame is boring (again location choice) and most significantly the ‘sunlight’ looks so fake it hurts (my fault – I was the gaffer for this one). In particular the hard edge of the shadow coming down as the ‘sunlight’ comes out is very distracting (in the first take of shot 2 it was created by tilting the key light down, and in the second take by taking a cutter down away from the lamp). 

 

If we were given more time to complete this exercise or the chance to revisit it I would change a lot about it. Firstly I would prefer to move the actors to the other side of the room and see if it worked with windows behind them or otherwise just move them to the centre of the room so that there is a bit more depth in the background. Then I would try to create more shape on the subjects faces by reintroducing the negative fill we had used in the first shot. And lastly I would try to create the sun-coming-out effect we were after by using a softer source, i.e. either shooting the keylight into the bounce card and then panning the light onto the subject as the ‘sun’ comes out, or if that idea failed I would simply try bringing up one of the blinds on the side of the room to allow more natural light to flood the scene.

Week 1 Reflection:

FILM LIGHT | Reflection Week 1 | Noah Hodgson

 

Week 2 Reflection:

FILM LIGHT | Reflection Week 2 | Noah Hodgson

 

Week 3 Reflection:

FILM LIGHT | Reflection Week 3 | Noah Hodgson

 

Descriptive Writing:

FILM LIGHT | Descriptive Writing | Noah Hodgson

Film Scene: Blade Runner 2049 “Real Joi” Rooftop Scene

 

There are so many elements at play within this scene that makes it such an exceptional achievement in visual storytelling in my eyes. Even within a crowded filmography of excellent imagery from cinematographer Roger Deakins, some of the frames within this scene (and indeed from the rest of this film) stand out to me as some of his best. In particular I appreciate the way in which Deakins utilises practical lights to illuminate the scene and the characters (though it does look as if in some shots there is some very soft fill happening – probably from a large heavily diffused and very soft overhead light). The way in which the green practical lights diffuse through this fog to create a rather ethereal looking silhouette in the first shot of the female character ‘Joi’ creates such a beautiful image which is absolutely bursting at the seams with texture. Moving into the next shot of Joi’s hand the same source is used again to create a great deal more contrast from highlight to darkness – I especially love the way in which the little droplets of water are picking up those green fluorescent tubes.

 

The first shot of Ryan Reynolds’ character K is where this scene truly becomes one of my favourite examples of hollywood lighting – displaying this beautiful contrast between the blues of the city behind him and the same green practical light on his face that had previously been illuminating Joi. This is one of many examples from this film in which Deakins and his production design team utilise colour in the setting and particularly the lighting to distinguish between settings and especially characters. This dual-tone colour palette is further accentuated in the wide shot of the two figures approaching each other – with the soft blues of the city on K’s back and the acidic green of the fluorescent-looking tubes behind Joi.

 

Painting: Edward Hopper – “Night Windows”

 

I chose this artwork in particular because I really appreciate the very realistic look it achieves in an urban environment and the way in which it captures a frame which could prove difficult to achieve on a camera (due to the difference between the lightness of the interior room and the darkness of the exterior building and the dynamic range that would be required to capture both). This piece in particular displays something that I find to be sorely lacking in a great deal of big budget productions and that is to find beauty in the mundane. The lighting of this artwork is extremely simple – it all comes from a single source (a regular household light fixture) which gives off a fairly cool yellow light. The exterior of the building is just barely bright enough to make out details, casting the eyes focus through each window frame and in turn informing the audience to pay closer attention to the details of the interior. The shadows that are cast onto the window sills are quite jagged and defined and help to establish the pieces realistic but moody aesthetic.

The real magic of this piece I think lies within the way Hopper is able to portray an entirely mundane environment and to force the viewer to notice the beauty in its simplicity. Even for someone such as myself who is crossing over from an entirely different artistic medium – there is much that can be learned from this ‘less is more’ style approach. A lot of feature films tend to utilise complicated lighting setups which unarguably are often very visually appealing – but largely fail to mimic reality (of course they aren’t necessarily trying to). Despite this though, I often find that some of the most striking moments in film occur when the visuals don’t distract from the storytelling – but rather enhance it by whatever means necessary.

This week is where I’m really beginning to get excited about this class. While the previous two weeks were spent largely going over fundamental concepts of camera and lighting work that I was in large part already rather familiar with – this week we have finally begun to enter more uncharted territory for me. In particular I found learning about the use of the Zebra function to be extremely helpful for me. I have known for a long time that this functionality was available in most cameras but I didn’t really know what it specifically did or how to use it. In particular, knowing that setting the zebra to display on 70% luminosity will allow me to correctly expose for caucasian skin tones is an incredibly helpful piece of information which I will absolutely be putting into practice next time I’m operating a camera under applicable conditions.

 

Overall I was happy enough with our exercise from this week (referring to take 3). I filled the role of DP/Camera Operator so naturally I am going to nitpick the camera work a bit, but the main thing I did notice was that the camera movement was not great – a bit ‘janky’ I would say. I was happy with the framing and the staging of the action in between the camera movement but I did find the shakiness of it – despite being on a tripod, to be rather distracting. One aspect of the movement I was happy with though is the way the camera movement is motivated – it doesn’t move until Barney noticed Rachel approaching. This was something we had noticed wasn’t working in the first couple takes and altered for the final take. Another technical aspect I was unhappy with was the focus – the shot at any given moment is far too soft. I don’t know if I hadn’t setup my viewfinder correctly or if I just wasn’t paying enough attention but that is definitely an area for improvement.

 

I was happy enough with the lighting. We ended up just placing a bounce to the left of frame to try to balance the foreground with the background – which I think is serviceable enough given the objective of the exercise, though still doesn’t look incredible. I also appreciate the way the practical light on the wall behind the subjects is creating a sort of backlight or hairlight which is helping create some separation between the subjects and the background – though I do think this would look better if the colour balance had been set to a more neutral point and it wasn’t such a warm orange colour (my bad!).

This week we began to have an in depth look at the elements at play that affect exposure and how to manipulate them to achieve an intended effect. As I’m a bit of a camera nerd, these little tips and facts were not something that I was unfamiliar with – however I find that it’s always helpful to reinforce knowledge I already possess and to of course pick up a few little bits of information I did not already know. For example, this week we were shown how to correctly setup the contrast and brightness of a viewfinder so that what we are seeing through it is accurate to what the camera is actually recording. As I have generally worked with a small monitor mounted on the camera rather than a viewfinder this was not something I was even aware you could do, or indeed needed to be done. Now that I’ve been shown how to do this and have used a viewfinder a little bit more I can definitely say that I feel far more comfortable using one in conjunction with – or even instead of a monitor in the future. I might add that it was also extremely helpful to learn that you can adjust the focus of the viewfinder to suit your eye – though given my poor eyesight I may require more correction than the viewfinder could really offer.

 

Upon reflection of exercise two I’m finding myself feeling much the same way as I did last week. Once again I’m fairly happy overall with the first shot, while I find the second to be somewhat lacking. The first shot I think actually looks rather nice for the most part. Exposure isn’t amazing – I think that the background is definitely too bright compared to Jagger in the foreground, which at least to my eye, is leading to the eye wandering away from the actual subject of the portrait. However the subject isn’t totally underexposed and there definitely isn’t any information lost so I probably could recover this during the colour grade in post, by masking out the background and better matching it to the exposure of the subject – but I think for the purpose of this exercise we were supposed to have presented a correctly exposed shot in camera, so there is definitely improvement needed here. While exposure could have used some work, I think the other technically aspects are more or less on par with my expectations (ignoring the fact that I’m reframing while rolling). The shallow depth of field we were supposed to create has clearly been executed correctly and somewhere in between shaking the camera around everywhere trying to find my frame, is a spot I’m happy with (specifically around the 01:24 mark of the video). As I’ve already mentioned, I was not quite so happy with how the second shot turned out – though I did anticipate this would be the case, given that generally it is accepted that you wouldn’t really want to shoot a portrait on so wide a lens. The greater depth of field that we were supposed to create is quite clearly present, so I suppose we were at least successful in following the parametres of the exercise. However on the whole this shot is really rather unflattering – due largely in part to the lighting decisions. The choice to light Jagger from directly above with a hard light is most definitely not something I would do again given the chance to revisit the exercise. Though I’m aware this was a conscious choice due to having to get a correct exposure using a more closed down f stop and no lighting equipment, it still isn’t an excuse for creating what I feel is not a particularly appealing image. If I were to repeat the exercise I would have probably shot closer to something like a 24mm lens, moved Jagger back away from the light source slightly, and opened up the aperture just slightly – enough that it would allow us to move Jagger back from the light and still get correct exposure while also maintaining the required depth of field.

So far this studio seems to be everything I was really hoping for it to be. As I’ve spent some time now working in the camera and lighting departments of many different shoots, I’ve slowly but surely developed the ability to assess and acknowledge the lighting conditions of a location or set and have spent a whole lot of time running around setting up lights for DP’s and gaffers. But through doing more of this it has occurred to me that a key skill set I am missing is the ability to take what I’m noticing about a space and then apply it directly to how I would light it. Constantly I will be on set and think I know how to setup the lighting configuration the DP has asked for, only for them to tweak it just slightly, but enough that it just takes the shot to that next level. That rare and difficult to achieve ability of getting a shot just right is really what I’m hoping to come a little closer to through this course.

 

The main revelation of this week for me was a simple one in regards to the difference between hard and soft lighting. At one point in class I commented on a film scene being soft lit, only to then be told by Robin that actually the light source was rather hard. Upon looking deeper into this it occurred to me that yes, the source was indeed hard – not soft. But really the DP seemed to have still created a soft look using this source regardless. This got me thinking about how a lot of the time the aesthetics of a film can come down to interpretation and also in large part context. I feel as though a light which is motivated in a scene (i.e. it is naturalistic) but still hard as a result will often feel less intense than a light that is used expressively (i.e. it is not necessarily motivated by something within the diegetic world of the screen). I suspect this rather complex concept is something that either myself individually or the class as a whole will look into in greater depth at a later date.

 

Reflecting upon exercise one I think the biggest thing I noticed was that I actually preferred part 1 (the shot in which no bounce or cutter was used), which I find interesting as I assumed that it would be the opposite way round. Looking at the second shot it is very apparent that I rushed it and probably didn’t pay close enough attention to what I was doing. Had I given it another moment to assess what the lighting I was using was doing (in this cause the bounce was placed to the right of frame) I might have realised that in doing this I was actually creating a ‘flatter image’ with far less contour and shape than the first part. The first image is lit with only the light coming through the four open windows – with the ‘key light’ in this instance being behind the camera and the ‘fill’ or ‘edge light’ coming from across the room to the left of frame. I actually think this creates a fairly flattering image, though if I were to repeat part 1 of the exercise I think I may have moved my subject across to camera left a little so that the key light wasn’t coming in quite so flat – and in doing so create a little more shape on the left side of the face (from the camera’s perspective).

 

Looking purely at exposure of the two shots I would say that again I am happy with the shot from part 1, and unhappy with part 2. The first shot I would deem to be ‘correctly exposed’ while the second I would say is somewhat significantly under – though probably not to the point that the information would be unrecoverable in post-production corrections.

 

As discussed in class there were some framing issues with this exercise across the board. I think that perhaps I am a little less guilty of this than some others – particularly looking at part 1, though even in this shot upon reflection I definitely would have cut out just a little bit of head room to avoid distracting the eye. For part 2 however I would certainly agree that the framing needed more thought put into it – the headroom is better but the frame overall feels far too cluttered. If I did part 2 of the exercise again I think I would consider framing in just a little tighter and panning the camera to the right just a touch, to cut out some of the distracting negative space that is created by how far to the right of frame the subject is placed.