This week we continued with cinematography basics but this time more focused on video (moving picture).
A movie is a story told in pictures (moving images) which consists in capturing the light reflected or produced by a subject (exposure). In order to capture the amount of light desired, we will need to take care of the type of lens/optics of the camera (focus), the lens aperture (amount of light let through), the camera shutter (speed of aperture and closing of the lens’ blades), and the digital sensor of the camera that captures and process the light to store it in a digital file.
Depending of the exposure set, the image can be brighter or darker. Generally, the image should be balanced by the mid-tones. If there are too many highlights or whites the image will be over exposed and if there are too many shadows or blacks, the image will be under exposed.
In order to reach the desired exposure value (EV), we will need to take care of the ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. With the ISO, we can change the sensitivity to light and can be measured from 25-6400 or more. The more sensitivity added, the more noise in the picture, so this only should be increased if really necessary. With the aperture of the lens (f), we can add more or less light as well as depth of field (DOF – focal point of an image). If the aperture of the lens is wide, the DOF will decrease (shallow) and more light will come through, whereas if the lens opening is small, the DOF will increase (deep) but the light that comes through will be low. With the shutter speed (how long takes to the blades of the lens to open and close, measured in fractions and seconds), we can expose the sensor to more time of light or less. With a fast shutter speed we can freeze motion in the scene, but with a slow shutter speed we will capture blurred motion instead (more light comes through). In cinema, this is measured in frames per second (fps – frame rate) and depending of how smooth we want the movement to be or more realistic we can make it higher or lower. Shutter angle is used to describe the relation between shutter speed and frame rate in cinema (cinematic motion blur), which has a golden rule that says that shutter speed should be set to double the frame rate.
Another important aspect to take in consideration is the type of focal lens used (distance between top of the lens and image sensor and measured in mm). The shorter focal length, the wider the angle of view and vice versa. Also, the digital file in which we export our video (MP4, MOV, AVI, ProRes, etc), will also determine the quality desired depending on where do we want to reproduce the final video (social media, TV, cinema, etc).
The assignment of this week is to shot 2 to 3 seconds videos from the city (using our personal phone cameras) and put them together in a short video (can add music too). As I live in Cambridge, I decided to show the life in this city which has a slower pace and it is not as big and noisy as it is London.
Most of the scenery has been filmed with a long shot, since my phone’s zoom has a really low quality and it doesn’t look as neat. However, I tried to add a zoom in and I also used some pans following subjects in movement to give more dynamic to the video. I tried to use diagonals and leading lines in the composition of the frame to add some depth to the frame. Finally, I put it together in Adobe Premier Pro and colour-corrected it to have a consistent style.