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.