For health and safety issues from this shoot please click link.
As we have been looking closely at the French New Wave during this project, we have focussed a lot of our footage on being black and white, for this reason we neglected filming anything with particularly strong colour. So whilst in Oxford, we moved slightly away from our brief in order to try and achieve some footage that included some saturated colour. Although, this may not reflect the majority of the French New Wave, other new wave movements, such as that of Czechoslovakia do make strong use of colour in their films.
Sweet Shop
The sweet shop that I have written a previous post about provided us with some excellent opportunities to capture plenty of footage that involved much high saturated colour, due to the sweet packets and shop signage etc.
This clip below, is off the shops display window, as you can see the multicolour lollipops are what drew us to this place. In this particular piece of footage, you can see how there is several reflections through the window, including that of ourselves and the camera. In a typical Hollywood movie this would be regard unacceptable, however, lack of continuity and minor errors in filming such as this is actually quite common for the Nouvelle Vague movement (and in fact several other new wave movement too). This is often due to the incredibly low budget the film makers had to work with and did have the funds to re-shoot material when things like this happened. We therefore decided that this wasn't as much of problem as we initially thought when we first realised it had happened, it allows us to refer our work once more the context of new wave that we are looking at.
Though the composition of the piece, isn't awful, it could definitely have been improved. In particular reference to the photography rule of 'leading lines'. You can see from this clip how the window frame is slightly angled and makes the whole shot look off centre. In filming, we should have altered the legs or the angle of the camera on the tripod, to compensate for the steady slope of the pavement we were on, this would have improved the angle of the shot making it come out straighter. Because of the reflection, we are getting a lot of light reflecting into the lens, making the shot look brighter than necessary. To solve this problem we should have looked at the camera tech settings, and altered perhaps, the ISO, lowering it, to 100, so the camera was less sensitive to the light. Though, narrowing the aperture (an f/11 or f/6) may have had a better effect, not only would less light have got into the camera due to the small lens opening, but we would also have achieved a shallower depth of field, focussing more on the lollipops in shop window, meaning the reflection would be less obvious as it would become out of focus, this may have caused us to need to slow the shutter speed slightly to prevent the shot becoming under-exposed.
MVI 0628 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.
Rainbow Bench
This particular shot was not one that we had planned to take, nor was it in one of the areas we intended to shoot. However, as we passed it, the colours captured our eye and so we took a short piece of footage of it to see how well the colours came out in the footage. The entire shot is in focus, therefore we had shot the piece with a small aperture, f/22. You can see at the very beginning of the piece of film that it was much darker initially, this was because of the small aperture, there was not enough light getting through the lens, so to avoid any unnecessary grain, we slowed the shutter speed (1/40) instead of upping the ISO. The fact the shot was static meant there was no risk of blurring the image due to the slow shutter speed. The composition of the shot generally adheres to the standard rules, the coloured lines of of the bench all direct to the same point, though I feel the is slightly more space to the right of the bench suggesting it is not quite central and so the show balance is slightly off, to resolve this we merely needed to concentrate a little more on the subject placement.
MVI 0630 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.
This clip below, though incredibly short, capture some lovely colour of the trees that surrounded the area we were filming in. The sun makes the greens and yellows come across very vivid. Particularly right at the end where you can see the light shining between the gap of the trees. This piece, could definitely have been shot a little better, though we are only filming the tops of trees, half way through you can see the top of the wall creeping into the shot, though this gives the effect of the camera simply gazing, which is something of new wave technique, it doesn't look as professional as it could have done had we thought about it more. The image i quite shaky, using a steady cam or putting the camera onto the tripod would have given a smoother and more even shot.
Though this footage could have done with being filmed a little slower, as it never really focusses properly. Though this of course could be slowed down in the editing process, slowing the motion of the camera would have allowed it to focus more.
I think we should have thought about the settings more before being to film this, the focus would have been much better had we lowered the aperture to perhaps an f/8 (by using this aperture we can adjust the focus without losing the background of the shot due an incredibly shallow depth of field), though this would have effected the light, we have, therefore had to up the ISO (to an 800 for example) to make the image bright, as slowing the shutter speed would have only made the image blurry again.
An alternative may have been upping the shutter speed to 1/80 or 1/100, to begin with, the would prevent the blurring, though again, this would effect the light entering the camera, causing the image to become under exposed, so ISO would have had to be set higher (800/1600), which could have caused grain.
trees from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.
I chose to put this piece of footage up (below), as it uses a lot of colour. The colour in this almost mirrors that of the colour in the above piece of footage, I felt this demonstrated how natural colour can be just as effective as man made colour. This over the shoulder shot, links in the graffiti on the wall with the design of the back of the subjects jacket. The grittiness of the area, noticeable through the mise-en-scene in the background of the image, is reflective of the new wave as these films tend to show a more realistic and less glamourous side of life, maintaining links with our brief. This type of shot also added to the variety of shots we have taken.
As you can see here, we have used a fairly wide aperture (f/5.6), creating a shallow depth of field, the subject is more in focus than the background, though not so wide that the graffiti on the wall next to the subject is out of focus too. To ensure that the wide lens opening did not cause over exposure we lowered the ISO (100), particularly as we were shooting outside in bright daylight, the light sensitivity needed to be low.
graffiti wall from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.
Soup Bowl
For health and safety on this shoot please click link.
This particular piece of footage (below), was shot during our low key lighting shoot. You can see here that there is only one light source, coming from behind the camera angled slightly to right. Because of this lighting technique, we are getting a great image, the saturated colour is coming out bold and vivid, even the colour of the soup in bold looks bright, contrasting greatly with the perfectly blacked out background.
This is helped along by the fairly shallow depth of field, (the aperture was set to f/4), bringing the bowl into focus, you can see where the edge of the table begins to be out of focus. Because there was so little light in the room, having a fairly wide aperture was mandatory to ensure the image was not under-exposed. This also meant we didn't have to risk making the image grainy by having the ISO at its highest setting. As nothing in the frame was moving, this made it possible to slow the shutter speed, again allowing more light into the camera. However, we did want to maintain this hard lighting effect and so we used and average shutter speed of 1/60.
During this shoot we were using just a single light source (as previously mentioned), this light source came from a portable spot light that included barn doors. Using light sources such as this, and as limited as this, reflect the low budget, bare necessity style filming of the new wave. Using barn doors on your lights is an easy, cheap and effective way of creating low key light, the doors allow you to direct the light beam in the direct of your choice without any extra equipment. They fact that they are easily moved is another aspect of the new wave style, this reflects the outline of our brief.
To see more of the footage taken during this shoot please see 'Editing' page on blog or click link.
No comments:
Post a Comment