How are angles used in dialogue?

Aim:

On a few occasions, we’ve set out to shoot some dialogue in a tutorial and the director and camera operator just plonk the camera down on some arbitrary spot and shoot from there. No thought is put into the height of the camera, or where it’s been placed. This reminds me of my earlier endeavours in making short films – I had no motivation behind where the camera was put, simply because I didn’t have any idea what my options were. I think this leads to awkward, amateur-looking dialogue exchanges. I’d like to get a better understanding of why one would choose to place a camera in one position over another to cover dialogue, and to get a feel for a few shots used by professionals which I think look good.

Step 1: Watch for some examples

To start my investigation, I watched one episode of the high-budget American TV drama Better Call Saul. While watching, I took screenshots of every single shot in every scene with dialogue, to be analysed later. In the end, I took 418 screenshots – the below image shows just a few of them.

Step 2: Analysing the shots

At this point, I printed off all of the shots from a few of the scenes (like a reverse-engineered storyboard) and made observations when I noticed interesting phenomenons.

Observation 1: A very low angle makes character’s eyelines look up.

The low angle in these shots make the two characters look like they are looking up in the frame. However, the fact that their eyelines aren’t pointing directly at each other doesn’t feel like a problem. This could be because the shots are close mirrors of each other, because they seem to be taken from the same place, or maybe because they are both simply looking in the correct direction.

Observation 2: A slight low angle makes characters look intimidating. A slight high angle makes characters look vulnerable.

In this scene it looks like the man in the suit is puffing out his chest slightly, but this is probably at least partially the result of the camera placement. This is consistent with the age-old adage that a low angle makes someone look powerful and a high angle makes them look weak.

In these shots from another scene, I see this again. The intimidating character is shot with a slight low angle, and the vulnerable character is shot with a slight high angle. This does subtly contribute to establishing the dynamic between the two characters, and builds tension as it feels like the character in green is danger.

Observation 3: I can tell the angle of a shot by comparing two objects on the centre horizontal of the frame.

I was very excited to realise that I could “prove” that one shot has a different angle to another by looking at the relationship between the same two objects across shots. I worked this out from these two sequential shots. In the first one, the character on the left (Nacho) is sitting on the car. His head is below the top of the fence behind him in the frame. In the next shot, Nacho’s head is above the top of the fence! This looked like a clear indication that the angle had changed, and this was easy to confirm with the use of a diagram.

Observation 4: There is a direct link between the tightness of a shot and the height of the camera.

This was the biggest revelation for me. In thinking about the height at which the camera is positioned, I noticed that wider shots always seemed to have a lower camera placement. I also realised that even though the camera seemed to be lower down, the shots didn’t look angled – in fact, they looked straight on. Conversely, I realised that tighter shots generally had the camera positioned higher, as high as eye level with the actors. With some scribbling on some paper, I was very excited to realise that this was a very simple and demonstrable concept. Even though it’s simple, this could be very valuable as a starting point for getting an idea of where to put the camera – higher up for tight shots, and lower down for wide shots.

This shot, one of the widest in the scene, demonstrates this relation by being quite low down but also level.

This shot was a great demonstration of this concept. We start on a medium wide shot, and Mike (the bald man on the right) walks towards the camera. Instead of tilting up, the camera itself moves up to keep Mike in frame while remaining level, as the shot on Mike gets tighter.

Finally, this close up on mike has one of the highest camera placements of the scene.

I was also excited to realise that this concepts means that the camera will always be below (and sometimes well below) the eye level of the actors for almost any shot!

Step 3: Working more things out through drawing diagrams

During and after looking through all the shots from the episode of Better Call Saul, I drew many diagrams to try to wrap my head around the concepts I was coming up with. Here’s a photo of all of those notes, but I won’t try to explain them all (they were a work in progress!). Below, I’ll describe some of the ideas that were the most developed.

Finding 1: A longer focal length lens is more consistent with it’s angle.

As shown in these diagrams, the upper and lower bounds of a shot with a short focal lens will have a much higher and lower “angle” to them than the actual level of the camera. This separation becomes less profound the longer the focal length, until a theoretical point on a camera with an infinitely long focal length, in which the whole shot would be one line going straight in the direction the camera is pointing in. 
When applied to an angle, you can see that a longer focal length lens will make the angle more consistent between differently placed subjects in the shot. A short focal length lens can result in the shot having a “high angle” on one subject when the shot is in fact a low angle, with the camera pointing upwards. I think these shots with short focal lengths making objects’ relationships less “directional” is more common in amateur productions. I found that in the episode of Better Call Saul, an effort was made to keep things that are in a line, presented in a line.

In this shot, a low angle is used from below the level of Kim’s head. This makes us look “up” to both her and Saul. This should could have easily been shot from above the level Kim’s head, but then the consistent direction would no longer be preserved and this effect would be lost.

Finding 2: The “Cones”

Using a lot of maths involving angles and similar triangles, I came up with a theory that there are cone-like regions, like the ones depicted below, within which you’re able to shoot certain shots from (such as close ups or long shots) if you want to restrict the tilt to within a certain range. The up-down height of the cones depends on how much of an angle you’re willing to shoot at, and the left-right length of the shaded “useable” region is determined by the range of focal length lenses available to you. I may go into further detail in explaining and exploring this theory in the future if I find it to be useful in my studies. 

Finding 3: Confirming relation between tightness and camera height

To check this theory I came at earlier, I cut out some of the shots I liked and arranged them on a graph – shots with a higher camera placement were put higher up on the page, and tighter shots were put further to the right.

This produced a trend going up of closer shots having the camera positioned higher up, confirming my theory from earlier. There were some outliers which had more of a low angle than appeared standard. I think this is because this scene in particular featured two powerful characters, and they are being conveyed as such through the use of a low angle.

Step 4: The Experiment

After all this theorising, I decided I’d like to have a try at recreating some of the shots from the scenes that I considered useful or interesting. I chose the the shots in the three scenes depicted below.

Here are all the shots I recreated, side-by-side with the original, with my comments.

This shot works well. I could have made it wider, and also used a longer focal length to narrow the depth of field. I was restricted by the space I was in, which is often the case. A good filmmaker should be able to improvise to work around these kinds of problems.

This shot was duplicated very well. The low angle is very exciting.

This is another exciting low angle shot. As I predicted, the camera was in the same position for this close up as it was in the medium shot.

I think I replicated the angles well in this shot. I usually don’t like seeing the roof in a shot of an actor, but it is clearly a stylistic choice here and it looks bold.

This shot is very cool. I ended up using an angle that was slightly too low – the original shot is more level than the rest of the shots in this scene. However, the positioning of the character in the middle of the frame still looks very nice.

I didn’t get the horizontal angle quite right here. The camera should have been closer to the female character to be more in line with the characters. I think showing two characters more straight on, with the camera perpendicular to their relative position, is a dull and common amateur look.

I struggled with this shot because I couldn’t get far away enough to get a depth of field that shallow. I did have the aperture completely open and with a filter to minimise the depth of field, but the original filmmakers clearly had much more space to work with in this scene.

I think this shot of mine looks really good – it’s one of my favourites. However, the depth of field still isn’t quite shallow enough to match the original, because of the space available to me. My actors were likely also too close, making it harder to have one in and one out of focus.

This was one of the weaker shots of the exercise for me. In my low quality printouts, I couldn’t see that Kim’s shoulder was meant to be in the shot. I also ended up shooting my actor too far to the centre of the frame, and not filling enough of it vertically. I think that I should have had the camera positioned further to the left, meaning my actor would be facing relatively more towards the camera.

The lighting difference between the two versions of this shot are so significant that it’s hard to compare them. Like the last shot, I perhaps should have moved the camera across to the right, closer to where the actor was looking.

This shot was quite well done. I could have used a higher angle.

This shot was also quite well done. It could have been improved with a shallower depth of field if my environment allowed for it.

This was my recreation of the shot in which Mike moves towards the camera, and the camera moves higher. I didn’t quite go far enough – the actor on the right didn’t get close enough to the camera, and the camera didn’t rise high enough. I wasn’t able to rise the camera very high or very smoothly while just using it handheld, so I’d like to ask Robin how a movement like this would be done in a professional context.

This shot was fairly well replicated. My angle may have slightly been too low, or I may have been using a focal length that was slightly too long.

I needed to position the camera a bit higher and use a higher angle for this shot. I can see now that the original shot was too high for my handheld set-up, and I would have been able to pull this off more easily with a tripod.

I should have used a longer focal length lens for this shot. I can see that in the original version, the characters appear to be brought much closer together than they are in my one. In addition, I can see that my angle was too low.

The last shot of the day was also the one with the least accurate angle. The camera should have been significantly higher, but without a tripod this was almost impossible. Now I know – if I want closeups with two heads at about the same level in the frame, the camera is going to have to be very high.

Step 5: Conclusion

This exercise has made me much more confident in my ability to shoot dialogue scenes. It has given me some great ideas on how to shoot dialogue in bold and interesting ways. It has also given me insight into where amateur filmmakers often go wrong. These include not being confident in or even aware of their use of high and low angles, as well as having shots which are too perpendicular to the scene rather than being closer in with the action. I am honestly very excited to be able to apply this new perspective to my future works.

Week 5 Tuesday Reflection

Week 5 Friday Reflection

TSIC Week 6 Friday Reflection

Week 7 Tuesday Reflection

Week 7 Friday Reflection

Week 8 Tuesday Reflection

TSIC Assesment 2: How are angles used in dialogue?

In this class we shot the scene with the nervous pacer and the crossword aficionado. We slowly arrived at our location, with me making a detour to print off a crossword. When I arrived at the set nothing had happened yet, so I took the role of director and started getting things moving. We had about 45 minutes to shoot the scene.

I spent a while trying to decide upon my first shot, because I wanted to start strong. I wanted to start on the crossword solver and tilt up to the nervous pacer. This turned out to be harder to execute than expected. We started off by trying to use a very long focal length from far back, but from the angle this created we couldn’t see the crossword. We ended up getting closer and using a shorter focal length, but I still think the shot we ended up with didn’t show the crossword clearly enough. We could have moved closer and used a shorter focal length, or just used a seperate shot to establish the crossword.

After this shot the rest of the crew was worried that we were moving too slowly. Like other exercises we’ve done in this studio, the first shot did take a lot longer than the rest, because at that point we also had to visualise the whole rest of the scene. With any amount of planning in advance, this visualisation process could be significantly shortened.

The next shot was shot from a lower angle and looked really good, but it was also fairly similar to the last shot. If we had more time, I would have gone back to have a different approach the first shot.

Next, we got a shot of Natalie walking up to the camera, with the camera at her eye level. From my assignment 3 investigations, I knew the camera would have to be quite high if I wanted the shot to be straight on when Natalie got close enough for the shot to be a medium close up. We did this and I got the result I was looking for.

From this point on we moved through the shots quite quickly to make sure we covered everything. I’m less happy with some of the shots we filmed towards the end of the piece, but considering the time we had to get the exercise done I was happy with the result.

Today we started by watching back the exercise we had been working on for the last two tutorials. I think the end result was great. The cuts were smooth, and I loved seeing Jonah’s reactions.

There are a few things I thought could be changed. I didn’t like how we couldn’t see Vanessa’s bag or the table it was on. It made this shot feel like it was suspended in space – I didn’t have adequate context. Seeing more of the rolling chair would also have been nice.

It was interesting to hear that almost all the choices made in editing were forced to maintain continuity – the takes weren’t quite the same, so couldn’t be cut between easily. I think this came about because as we progressed through the shoot, the actors got a better idea of what they should be doing, and “improved” their performances. However, this exercise has showed that the director, actors and continuity checker need to have a strong idea of the blocking of a scene right from the start, and then stick to that from the first shot onwards.

Today we finished off filming the scene we’d started blocking before the break. I was put in charge of the audio.

The director immediately set up the camera in a strange position. Like I noticed in an earlier tutorial, the height was all wrong. Last time the camera was far too low and tilted up, and this time the camera was far too high and tilted down. The camera was also far too close to the actors and using a short focal length lens, when we wanted to be using a longer focal length lens. This seemed to be anther case of just setting up the tripod at an arbitrary place and to an arbitrary height, and framing the shot from there. As I’ve brought up with Robin, I would like to look into bringing more reason and motivation into this camera-positioning process, rather than just shooting from wherever the camera happens to be. I pointed out that the crew should move back and use a longer focal length lens, and they agreed. They proceeded to move back about a foot which made almost no difference. Eventually, Robin initiated the move right back to allow for the use of a longer focal length lens, as well as the lowering of the camera. I really liked the resulting shot on Jonah.

I didn’t push my suggestions to the director too hard because I felt wasn’t my job to do so. The director seemed to be spending enough time on the shot she had already set up, advice from other crew members would only slow the process down further. Maybe this is just what happens when someone is new to directing, which most of us are.

I learned a few things in my position as audio recorder. Firstly, I learned that a boom mic operator should swing the mic around to follow the action. I used this technique to record Vanessa’s entrance to the scene, as announced by a bag dropping, followed by the dialogue exchange between the two characters. It was an interesting challenge to move the boom without making any noise, and without getting in the way of the actors or the shot. I could occasionally hear the microphone’s cord bumping against the boom as I moved, which I realised was a problem. I think this would have been fixed if the cord was properly taped to the boom, or maybe I just needed to develop a better movement technique.

I also worked out that different ventilation vents in the room were making different sounds, which produced a different overall background hum depending on the direction in which the microphone was pointing. This could be problematic, but it also helped me realise that it was ideal to have the mic pointing straight down at the actors from above.

In this tutorial we started by looking at light, which I was looking forward to. Learning how to white balance felt like the last missing piece in my understanding of basic camera operations. However, I also learned that white balancing isn’t all that useful. This is because it’s easier to keep the shots consistent, and then make any desired changes in post (I adjust colour temperature and green/pink balance in my work as an editor all the time).

We started our investigations into colour temperature by first learning about the terminology and background knowledge.

Traditionally there has been 5600 K (kelvin) film for use in daylight, and 3200 K (kelvin) film for use with incandescent lights.

This is fairly confusing because kelvin is a measure of temperature, like Celcius. But when the kelvin increases, why does the light colour get more blue? Blue is a cold colour! It became apparent to me that there were a few things going on here that were working in the opposite way I’d expect them to, and the Wikipedia article for Color Temperature refers to these apparent contradictions multiple times:

“The fact that “warm” lighting in this sense actually has a “cooler” color temperature often leads to confusion.”

“…blue occurs at higher temperatures, whereas red occurs at lower temperatures. This is the opposite of the cultural associations attributed to colors, in which “red” is “hot”, and “blue” is “cold””

According to this Wikipedia article, what we’re measuring in kelvin when we’re talking about Colour Temperature is the “radiated heat flux” of an incandescent bulb. So an incandescent bulb which is running at low power and is literally cool to the touch will look very orange, and have a low kelvin measure.

An incandescent bulb which is painfully hot to touch will look white hot (moving towards the blue side of the scale when compared to the underpowered bulb), and will have a higher kelvin measure. I can see this very clearly in the two brightness settings on my bedside table’s lamp.

To me it makes sense that the sun, which is significantly hotter than an incandescent light bulb, will have the hottest kelvin rating. The sun’s light does look blue when compared to incandescent bulbs, especially upon stepping outside into a bright day after being inside with just artificial lights for a while. It also feels natural to me that the blue flames on a stove are hotter than the orange flames.

All this means that the kelvin rating of a camera setting or film stock is referring to the kelvin of the lighting that it should be used in. It also means that this camera setting or film stock will be “shifting” the colour temperature in the opposite direction to compensate for this coloured light, bringing the whites to a more true white. I made this table to clarify this:

This leads to a fascinating case of two wrongs making a right. When I found that 5600 K film is film that makes an image’s colour temperature look warmer, I mistakenly figured that a higher temperature in kelvin marked on the film or camera setting is suggesting a greater “warmth” that this film or camera setting brings to the image. I was right for the wrong reason!

The last thing I’d like to find out is why we naturally think that blue looking scenes are cold, and orange looking scenes are hot. In class Robin showed us a clip from a film which looked very blue, which was meant to show (and did show) that the scene was very cold. But based on my findings so far, the bluest light would come from the brightest, most sunny day! A cold day should look orange! This distinction goes strongly against my intuition which says that hot days are orange and cold days are blue. This confusion is clearly demonstrated in the google images results for “hot weather” and “cold weather”.

On my own, I figured that our eyes adjust incredibly well to bring the colour temperature of any light source to a neutral level. On top of this, because we associate heat with orange (because of the sun and fire), and cold with blue (because of snow and water), we just feel like a blue world is a cold world and an orange world is a hot world.

After talking to Robin about this, I found out that the reflections from the ground and other objects also contribute to the colour temperature of an environment. Because snow is white, it reflects a great deal of additional light, making the colour temperature of a scene more blue! So the ski mountains I’ve been to really did look blue, it wasn’t just in my head! And that must be why ski goggles often have an orange filter on them!

Finally, I realised after this class that nothing ever “is” a certain colour. Colour is just the way light bounces off something. If a pair of pants look one way in a change room and another way outside, it’s not like the colour we see outside is their “true” colour. It’s just the colour we see in that particular light. With this in mind, I can see why getting a “correct” white balance all the time is unnecessary.

This was the big day!

We started by heading out to the location our director had scouted. On our first shot, we realised that as the camera and actors moved from the shadows to the sunlight, the change in lighting was too drastic. This made the shot logistically impossible. Eventually, we decided to move to an area with more consistent lighting. This was a good example of how a film crew can plan well ahead but also be flexible enough to make adjustments on the day.

The new shot was a combination of two shots in our original plan, which was now one long take. This is a trend I’ve noticed come up a few times in our exercises, and I think most of the time it’s arisen as a result of of convenience rather than motivated choice. I think this could be problematic, and I’d like to do more thinking into why a director would choose to use a long take over a few shorter shots.

After that shot, we moved inside. Once we got set up, we spent a while trying to get a shot right from one particular corner. After a few tries on this, I suggested that we move the camera and try doing it from somewhere else. I got this idea from my editing work – when the camera operator films the same shot 15 times trying to get it perfect, the editor can only ever use one of them (and they’re usually all about the same anyway). It’s better to get lots of shots from different positions, so the editor can take bits from each of them and have more wiggle room in their edit. Through doing this, the director might even find a shot they like much better than the one they had visualised in their head!

The last shot that we had planned was the reverse shot from the top of the stairs. We filmed this without too many problems.

At this point, we were ahead of schedule and the crew seemed to be more or less happy to finish up. But between us we still had some ideas for additional, more interesting shots. The first one was a high-angle shot from up in the staircase, which Isaac had found earlier while wandering around. The shot ended up looking really good.

After this, I took control of the camera to get some more options from outside. Firstly, I filmed the automatic doors opening – something different and interesting that could be easily cut to. Next, I got the actors to run through their movements from the start of the script a few times and filmed them from a few different angles. These included from behind them (the plan was to film them from in front), and from far away with a tree obscuring the shot. I thought this one looked really good, like a kind of surveillance camera. It fit the creepy tone of the piece. However, I was trailing behind the actors when I should have been ahead of them, anticipating their movements. This was just down to a lack of experience on my part, so it’s good to have that learning lesson now.

Finally, I got some establishing shots, because they weren’t too hard to shot and they could be a good way to start the scene. Again, just more for the editor to work with (as we were told to do in the exercise brief).

In this class, we got a glimpse at a messy creative process lead by Robin playing the part of an arrogant director. It felt like a situation that could be a reality out in the field, so it was an interesting learning exercise.

I was a camera operator, so I did my best to capture what the director was describing. I had some ideas of my own on how the scene should be covered, but I thought that if everyone was giving the director advice it would get very annoying very quickly for him. As he was the director, decided to trust his judgement and just make sure I did my job. In hindsight, if anyone was going to give the director coverage-related advice, it would be the camera operator.

Afterwards, we started getting ready for our big group filming activity on Friday. There wasn’t much we could do at the time other than distribute roles.

Our director Tyler had an idea in his head for the shots we’d use, but I was struggling to understand his explanations as he talked us through it. He proceeded to draw out his ideas but the drawings were also very difficult to understand. I had a similar problem conveying my ideas when I was a director in the previous week. I could take away two things from this. Firstly, I need to reach a higher level of familiarity with film terminology to be able effectively communicate with my fellow film crew. Secondly, it’s very important to be able to draw good looking and clear storyboards. This is something that I will practice.

Week 3 Tuesday Reflection

Week 3 Friday Reflection

Week 4 Tuesday Reflection

Week 4 Friday Reflection

Scene Analysis 2

Scene: Back to the Future II ending scene

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyDlTUZR9Hc

Right at the start of this clip, we get a fairly long take that moves us from pointing down at a ribbon on the ground, to panning up to Marty’s with a billboard behind him, to dollying around to show the road behind him. Based on the out of focus billboard, we this shot was likely filmed with a long focal length lens.

In the next shot, we are shown Marty’s back before he quickly spins around to face the camera, and this is followed by a shot of a car approaching him.

At this point of the scene, each of the shots are mostly in line with the road – there aren’t many angles. We get about 5 back and forth shots of Marty and the mysterious individual seemingly facing off, like I’d expect of a western movie. Once the second character is introduced and he and Marty get physically closer, as well as find out who each other are, we start to see more angles.

I’m interested by this camera movement, which occurs while the mysterious character’s face is revealed for the first time. The camera is raised and tilted down slightly as the character walks towards it, and we go from a medium long shot to a medium close up. This could be to allow us to properly see this character’s face, while also conveying the intimidating nature of this forward movement.

After the postman gives Marty his letter, we hear our first line of dialogue that is delivered off camera. This is because we, like Marty, are expected to be more interested in the letter (and his reaction to it), than what the postman is saying. The shot proceeds to dolly in while the postman is still talking, further putting the focus on the letter.

In the second dialogue exchange between the postman and Marty, we see much more of both characters in both shots – a more dirty, over the shoulder look. This makes the shot look less standoff-ish and more friendly.

This transition progresses all the way to the point that both characters are facing in the same direction and are physically close in this medium long shot, demonstrating a full transition to the two characters being on the same “side”.

To finish off the film, we get another great long take. To start with, the camera is lowered from a crane to meet Doc’s eye level. The background, including the fiery tracks on the ground, are out of focus. The depth of field is kept short at least in part because of Doc’s close proximity to the camera. Marty runs into the shot from out of focus (but still clearly in view). As Marty nears the end of his run, the focus is shifted to a few more feet away from the camera. From this point on, the focus follows Marty as he gets closer to the camera than Doc ever was, and then moves away once again to confront Doc. This change in the point of focus can be observed in the change in focus of the background – out, then slightly more in, and then out again.

The film is then finished by a great two shot which dollies in and pans up to change into a close up of doc, followed by a long shot which moves backwards, which is appropriate for the “to be concluded” end title.