“The Stranger” – Last Scene – Monologue – Presentation

– MOODBOARD –

Week 8

Our group has decided to receive inspirations from feedback tomorrow other than to present what we have got so far, I feel like there is still a lot to decide including casting within this week, before that we are now looking for a lot of similar films for inspirations, but when we actually come to the point that we need to think of a film, my brain turned blank, I knew I have seen something similar but I just couldn’t think of something that is similar to the script.

– Feedback – 

• Read the monologue over and over to make sure we hundred percent understand the characteristic
• Casting – doesn’t have to be a man, an English speaker, can be a woman. Most people might imagine this character must be a male with a murderer’s evil face, maybe we can think oppositely if the character is someone with an ordinary look, this could be even interesting because the character can just be a representation of the ordinary group of people in this society.
• Film ‘Play Misty for me(1971)’, Paul suggested us that we can shoot in multiple locations, we agreed this is an interesting idea but when considering the time we have might be hard to achieve at this stage. Taking Paul’s suggestion, we are considering to cut in between two locations, the beach, and the empty space. The empty space will be in a more realistic form showing himself alone, but the beach will be an abstract form to show another side of the character.
• The effects we wish to have at this stage is 1-2 lights set still, the light on the character’s face will be shifting between hard and soft. Harder when the character walks closer to the key light, softer when walks away from the key light. We have been asked about how we planned to achieve this design of lightings, we are still up to deciding how many lights we want and where exactly we want to set them, and we need to test out the set of lightings in the actual shooting place before our shootings.

Week 7

This week class exercise seemed to be an expanded exercise from last week, at the same location but we experienced what we have learned from last week into an actual scene. From this class exercise, I have learned that it is very important to do as much preparation as possible before the shooting. Robin and us who are considered to be familiar with the classroom already which we stay in the room every week at the same time, although there are still variables occurred during shooting because the weather was different, so the amount of natural lighting we got would be different. On the way to RMIT, Robin positioned himself in the classroom with two students that he planned to cast for today’s scene, he got a picture that he has expected to be.

However, the actual shooting was very different to his expectations, there are always constants and variables will appear in any shootings. During the preparation stage, I believe is very important to take the actor’s facial feature into the plan especially the two actors’ face are different in colour and tone. For example, in this shooting, the two actors we cast were very different with the typical facial features of the two different races. Robin told us that he has never considered Ryan’s face can absorb the lights better than Aria’s because Asian’s facial features are often less sharpen, although in the actual shooting the lights did reflect on Aria’s face and Ryan absorbs the light very well. During shooting, I was wondering why did we use contained shot for Aria’s bubbling, energetic but annoying character, she always needed to move around a lot to better interpret her characteristic but in a contained shot, the chair swinging was distracting audience’s eyes at the right-hand corner which they might ignore what we are actually trying to show. However, we re-framed the camera with moving the camera over to the left-hand side, still contained but tried to cut out Aria’s chair and showing Ryan’s face bit more so the audience can focus on Ryan’s facial expression.

Another thing that I think we are building up our experiences every exercise was the time management issue, in the shootings I did whether is class exercises or assignments I had time management issues during every shooting, everyone is trying to figure out a good way to solve this issue even an experienced teacher like Robin who told me he always thinks we can talk through a lot in a class time, but we went overtime every class because the class exercise took longer than he expected. It is understandable why there is always a crew working together for a film production because people who are well-coordinated can actually save a lot of time than people who have just met. Even though we meet twice a week but we are still not familiar enough to each other which we resulted to be spending longer for every shooting exercises.

Moreover, so far in film lights, we usually do collaborations in a big group during the class exercises and I did enjoy the process. There are a lot of different style of directors, so directors who would like to shoot everything in perfect framing, timing, lightings, weather and etc. Although there are also directors sometimes they need to finish something nice and quick, I remembered once I participated in a studio who films short videos, what they needed is to finish work in time and get their pay in time, if I am working with these directors, what they need from a lighting person would be a functional way to finish the shooting.

“Cinematographers are not gods, nor can their achievements be construed as heroic. They are craftspeople whose work may be as admirable as any other craftsperson’s, or artist’s”. Robin.

Daily Observation

While I was in China, I had a similar experience. I had a project which was to interview 50 foreigners who chose to stay in Shenzhen. I didn’t worry too much beforehand because I am familiar with the location so I was quite confident with the shooting. I imagine myself being in the space at the hottest time of the day, I didn’t want anything from the outside of the location so I am expecting overexposure, I will just make sure I can see the interviewee well. However, when I arrived I did a test shooting with myself sitting in front of the camera(see below) which everything seemed to work pretty much like what I expected to be, but I have forgotten most of my interviewees are from western countries which means we have completely different facial features, the level of light absorbing was completely different either. Like Robin said, there is always something we may never expect to be there in every shooting, the reason why there are directors who would like to collaborate with the actors they are familiar with as they will spend a shorter amount of time to get everything set.

Myself doing camera testing:

 Cinematographer – Chung Chung-hoon

Cinematographer Chung Chung Hoon is known as one of the most influential filming professionals in the Korean film industries, by researching on Chung I found I have actually watched quite a lot of his work that he produced back in Korea, Chung started to be known within the Asian film industry once he collaborated with one of the most famous Korean director Park Chan Wook and won his admired, rely on their first and most well known collaboration –  film ‘Old Boy’, gradually Chung has become Park’s right-hand man which has also become the way that led his work being known in the global film stage, since then Chung started to work both in South Korea and America, I was attracted to Chung’s most recent work ‘It’ which was released at the end of 2016.

I am not a big fan of horror movies because I feel exhausted after watching them, everyone who has seen the film ‘It’ strongly recommended me to go and watch. I ended up with myself watching the film from the gaps of my fingers for half of the movie, it is still scary when I watched the second time. Although there is no doubt that this is another kind of film produced by Chung that is hard to watch but impossible to look away from it. Chung’s work is always a combination of beauty and brutality, at the first time I watched ‘it’, I paid full attention to the storyline which I didn’t have time to look at any of the cinematography in this film. When I found the film was one of Chung’s work I was very surprised so I went back to watch it over again for this assignment. The second time, I tried to compare with Chung’s past works, I can see ‘It’ belongs to the genre that he is most expertise with. There are a lot of Korean filmmakers who have been influenced a lot by the western filmmakers/ film industry, and Chung Chung Hoon is one of them, the smooth camera movements that he uses a lot in most of his productions especially in ‘It’ has reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s film style.

‘It’ director Andy Muschietti described Chung as a flexible and versatile cinematographer, he is always able to give varies of functional suggestions for the directors to choose from, he always set the basics during pre-production which gives more spaces for directors to choose whether to edit more in post-production. For example, the film ‘Oldboy’ is one of my favorite film from Korea, director Park never likes shots that have a totally dark area so he left little lights in various places with detailed on, this has given director Park freedom to set color grading in post-productions.

Chung is a clever filmmaker with a deliberate insight into the industry, “he never goes for the same aesthetic, each movie has a style that is particular and interest,” described by Muschietti. This ability is relating to Chung’s experience shifting between Korea and the US, working in the US which the film industry is fully developed with its rich history must be very different to Korea whereas its film industry has influenced by its cultural backgrounds. First of all, Chung sees that there is a clear difference between Korean and US film production, “the Korean film production focuses on the end result of the film that is made while the US film production set the required time in filmmaking”. Secondly, while it is difficult for him, Chung can also understand the filmmaker’s passion from both countries. It depends on external and internal factors, including the production teams’ passion and commitment, which impact the quality of the film they make.

Moreover, once Chung has perceived how fast is the Korean film industry developing with the widespread of k-pop, he has now chosen to reside in Los Angeles, in Korea we can rarely see any cinematographer turned 50 and is still working, filmmaker’s generation update and change very fast in South Korea. As the result, he thinks by moving to Los Angeles, he can also meet and collaborate with more directors and crews to broaden his spectrum for his career.

References:

https://ascmag.com/articles/it-fear-itself (Film IT)

Group Interview with Cinematographer Chung Chung Hoon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r7sGevKI-g (interview of Chung Chung-hoon for the 4th AFA Nominee in Best Cinematographer)

Group Interview with Cinematographer Chung Chung Hoon

By looking at the class exercise from week 6, I think the purpose of this exercise is a demonstration, manipulating the different quality of lights on the different shape of faces will better explain why we need a lot of time to work out what sort of lighting we need for each scene. Dan and Max have a completely different shape of faces, Asian’s face usually are less sharped and outlined, so I can see more shadows is showing on Max’s eye socket when the light is very hard and without any filled lighting. Whereas Dan’s face is flatter comparing with Max’s face so he had fewer shadows on him during the use of hard light.

One thing I found very interesting and I heard everyone else did also is the shadow of the big clips, this once again reminded me the power of film lights. In our everyday life, we might have never thought about when an object is close to the light source, it’s shadow will be less sharped. This is something we might have seen every day but we would never consider how to convert the lights in an actual scene. When the clips appeared closely in front of the lamp(key light source), it’s shadow became blurred so when it is moving, the clips look like the shadow of leaves. This is a good skill to grasp when I am shooting something that needs to create a shadow of leaves.

When the light sources are adjusted to the softest, it was interesting to see the soft light was working similarly on both of their faces but when it was hard lighting, they had different effects. I can see there are reflections of the key lighting bouncing off from everywhere possible in that room, so Max and Dan’s left face looked like were being lit up with filled lighting but it’s actually just reflections.

– Monday Class –

In this class, we’ve learned about how to make sure our viewfinder works efficiently before we start filming. We have also started a new topic on camera coverage.

I found this very interesting and I was also very surprised that we were actually going to touch on this topic in film light, but I really like this topic because I am always curious how the filmmakers/cinematographers chose where to set the camera. The first exercise we did on camera coverage was Robin given as few scripts to read first and then let us see how does the director actually set the camera, the purpose of this exercise was to let us experience how differently can the camera coverage being designed in those scenes.

Question: the relationship between camera coverage and light

It is always important for a light person to give a functional suggestion on lighting to the director, whether the director wants the scene to be done as quick as possible, or wants the scene to be perfect with lightings. Remember an example Robin showed us in class, by looking at script only, I thought I would shoot this scene as an over-shoulder shot from the boss’ point of view, or I would divide the scene into two different shots one from the actress’ perspective and the other would be the boss’ over-shoulder shot. The cinematographer’s idea was very well arranged and I was very surprised that how this scene was arranged to a one-take shot. Think about I am the cinematographer who needs to arrange the lightings and set for this scene, and the director wants to shoot it nice and quick in a one-take to keep the lightings be the same throughout the scene, this will be our job to work out a functional way for the director to shoot the scene.

– Exercise 8 – 

The purpose of this exercise firstly is to experience the dynamic range in an actual shooting or film producing process, secondly, learn to solve problems on the dynamic range during real shootings, probably solve it by editing (post-production) or using film lights to improve the over or under exposed problem. Thirdly, I guess is also an exercise for us to experience camera coverage because Robin has divided the class into two big groups to see how each group will arrange the camera.

The first shot which is the first challenge we faced and took us a long time to solve it. The camera was supposed to pan from the left to the right when two actors walk from the lift to the exit door. Although the light outside is too bright even we tried to use indoor lighting with different angles to improve the overexposure. Whenever the camera pan towards the door, the exposure will suddenly turn overexposed. We ended up to understand the fact that the brightest area cannot be evenly exposed with the darkest area in the same shot, so we did post-production which is editing to refine this scene, we cut before two actors were about to enter the brightest area which has effectively avoid any overexposed in this shot.