Understanding Cinematography E-Book

Brian Hall

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 242

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Cinematography is the art and craft of visualizing and recording the moving image. The cinematographer therefore has to use their technical and creative skills to photographically capture the mood of the film and the vision of the director. Done properly, they add the magic and depth to a film, giving it a defining edge. This practical book explains the principles behind cinematography, as well as the skills of the cinematographer. Having described the equipment, it looks at how to interpret the script and advises on how to find a visual style. Written by a respected cinematographer, it also explains the roles of the camera crew and the importance of working as a team. Fully illustrated with 128 colour photographs.

Leseprobe

UNDERSTANDING

CINEMATOGRAPHY

BRIAN HALL

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2015 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2015

© Brian Hall 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84797 992 6

Dedication and Acknowledgements

For Anne, Sam and Jennie.

Writing a book, I discovered, is like producing a film – it is essential that you have a great team working with you. So in no particular order, thanks are due to Lincoln School of Film and Media (LSFM) students Thomas Rose for many of the photographs and Claire Smith, for providing the illustrations. My colleagues at LSFM, Chris Hainstock, Grant Bridgeman, Philip Stevens for their thoughts on working relationships within a film production team and Andrew Armstrong for tackling the technical issues of the digital camera. I needed a team of volunteers to be the subjects in several of the photographs, so many thanks are due to Tara Clements, Jennie Hall, Emma Simpson and Gemma Hitchcock. Contributions were also gratefully received from Mike Downing (of LSFM) for the front cover photographs and Jai Mansson for the back cover. Permission to use their photographic images came from Caroline Derry, Chester Hartwell, the National Media Museum, Science and Society Picture Library, the Widescreen Museum, Technicolor, Tiffen, Hague Camera Supports and Aaton cameras. The Lincoln School of Film and Media has an impressive range of facilities, so many thanks to Dr Sarah Barrow, the Head of School for allowing me to use their photo studio and television studios. Last but not least to Anne Hall, for her painstaking efforts in editing my work and encouraging me to keep going!

Contents

Introduction

1. Historical Milestones

2. The Crew

3. Camera Supports

4. Cameras

5. Composition

6. Lighting

7. Preparation

8. Shooting an Interview

9. A Career in Cinematography: Oswald Morris BSC

10. Technical Issues

Glossary

Index

Introduction

Once upon a time, in the days before computers and electronic toys, all young boys wanted a train set, and I was no different. I got my train set and over the years enjoyed playing with it and acquired all the extras that made it as realistic a playing experience as it could possibly be. I had several locomotives, lots of track with electric points and even a fully functional coal yard where the coal train would deliver its load via a mechanical hopper system.

You are probably thinking what has that to do with cinematography?

While I still enjoyed playing with the train, I was also developing another passion and that was for the moving image. I was fascinated by what I saw on my parents’ television set (there were only two channels back then, and they were in black and white), but I was intrigued by the process of how they got onto the screen. Who were the people who travelled to exotic locations to make documentaries? And in particular, who was the person behind the camera and what exactly was their role?

One day my father came home from work and told me a friend of his had bought an 8mm cine camera a few weeks previously but was not enjoying using it. I felt a little jealous because I knew I would love to have a go at shooting some film and, even though I would not be in some exotic location, I was sure I could make some great moving images. I wanted to know more about the camera, the make and the model, so I could find out all about it. The next day my father came home from work with more tales about his friend and his cine camera, including the information I wanted. However he also had some much more interesting news for me: his friend’s son wanted a train set! You can probably guess the rest of the story. Yes, I swapped my train set for an Admira 8F cine camera and that is when the passion that turned into my career began.

A LIFE BEHIND THE CAMERA

Trains played another small part in my early years behind the camera, when I got my first job working for an industrial film unit that was part of a large aerospace company. There was going to be an air race from the Post Office Tower in London to the Empire State Building in New York, and the Royal Air Force were going to take part, flying one of their Harrier jets. The pilot was to start by travelling on a motorbike from the Post Office Tower to the coal yard behind St Pancras station, where he would then take off in his aircraft. I was despatched to film a train delivering coal and then get shots of the Harrier jet as it landed in the coal yard ready for the race pilot to take off as quickly as possible. The Harrier jet was a vertical take-off and landing aircraft (it needed no runway) and a senior military officer realized that, when it was landing, the down draft from the engines was going to blow coal dust all over the place, covering the many dignitaries, as well as the press, television cameramen (and me) who were waiting to record it. The solution that was suggested was that we should get the fire brigade, who were there for safety reasons, to hose the whole place down with water so that coal dust did not go flying. It was a great idea and we did not get covered in coal dust as expected – we all got covered in wet coal dust, which was even worse.

Life behind the camera is full of surprises, and I had my fair share when several years later I began to work as a BBC film lighting cameraman. During my career, I filmed in more than forty countries and met some amazing and inspiring people, just as I had always wanted to do since I was a young boy. I hope that this book will help give you the basic skills to contemplate a career in cinematography.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

This introduction to the art and craft of cinematography and its role in the production process is for sixth-form students in secondary education and students embarking on a certificate or degree course in film production at further education or higher education level.

The aim of the book is to guide you through the basic principles of cinematography so that you have a solid base from which to develop your skills further. Most skills have a set of technical ground rules, designed simply to ensure that things work, and cinematography is no exception. I firmly believe that it is essential for students to understand these rules before questioning their usefulness or breaking them when going about making their own films or videos.

You will learn about the technology, methods of working and the work of the crew. Producing a film is a team effort. Whether you are a cinematographer, sound mixer, make-up artist or director you do not work alone; you operate as part of a team. Therefore it follows that an understanding of the skills and problems of the other team members is essential, especially when you have to solve possible technical problems together. This understanding of others’ problems also means that on a personal level you will be seen as a good team member – do not underestimate this, as it is just as important as technical ability and creative skills when jobs become available. So even if you do not expect to specialize in cinematography, this book will help you gain an understanding of the techniques and skills needed and how the camera team goes about their work.

Throughout the book you will come upon Tip Boxes, offering brief information I have learned along the way in my career. You will also find the occasional longer excerpt, Professional View, where various specialists explain in their own words how they see their craft.

CINEMATOGRAPHY AS A CAREER

And finally this book would not be a complete introduction to the art and craft of cinematography if it did not look at the career of one of the greatest and most admired cinematographers of his time, Ossie Morris, who photographed his fifty-seventh and last film in 1982. Whilst touching on some technical aspects of his work as a feature film cinematographer, you will see that Chapter 9 is more about the relationship that he had with his crews and the directors he worked with. It comes as no surprise to discover that although the film making technology we use today is far more advanced than that which was available to Ossie, the disciplined way of working and the forging of professional relationships that held true then are still relevant today.

The chapter covers his early passion for film making and his struggle to get into the business. In particular he discusses how he handled his role as cinematographer on Moulin Rouge and Fiddler on the Roof, for which he won an Oscar. He went on to photograph a further seven films for John Huston, including Moby Dick (1955) and The Man Who Would be King (1974). A significant aspect of his development as a leader was during the second world war, where he had a distinguished career as a pilot in both Bomber Command and Transport Command at RAF Lyneham – he was awarded both the Air Force Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

A WORD ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

Understanding the past is an essential part of the story, but the tools and techniques of production that we use today are rapidly changing, mainly as new technologies open up and bring exciting new opportunities. Whilst job opportunities on feature films or with the main broadcast television companies are perhaps reducing, new areas of opportunity are emerging, and the students who are equipped with determination, imagination and the skills of an entrepreneur, along with a good working knowledge of a production craft or crafts, will be well placed to achieve their goals.

Even by the time this book is published, equipment providers will have developed new and exciting equipment that will make the production process even smoother and more affordable for both students and professionals. The changes in technology are rapid, and so this book will concentrate not on any particular manufacturer or the technology they offer, but more on the tools of the trade in general, and how and why we use them. Remember that the art and craft of cinematography is about more than just the technology, and in all probability the technology of today will not be the technology you will be using by the time you graduate; in fact, that technology has probably not been invented yet!

Admira 8F camera.

1 Historical Milestones

Cinematography, or the process of capturing the moving image, is a highly complex, creative and technical procedure that has been developed and refined since its beginnings. There are many specialist books about the history of film making, and cinematography in particular, which are required reading if you are interested in how the art and craft has developed. This book does not set out to cover the history in detail, but it is important to note some of the key moments in the timeline, especially those which will help you compare the rate of development during the first hundred years of its history (1888–1988) to those of the last twenty years.

THE EARLY YEARS

Once photographers had begun to master techniques for recording still images, they naturally wondered how they might record moving images. This started to happen in the 1880s when early pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), Louis le Prince (1841–1890), Thomas Edison (1847–1931) and William Friese Greene (1855–1921) began to develop and patent their various techniques.

It would be wrong to credit any one of these people (or others) as the inventor of cinematography, as they all played their part in discovering methods of filming and recording moving images. However, it is interesting to note that there is an inscription on the monument to Friese Greene in Highgate Cemetery in London, which refers to him as ‘The Inventor of Kinematography’.

We can state quite confidently however that the Roundhay Garden Scene and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, recorded by Louis le Prince, a Frenchman living in Leeds, are the oldest pieces of recorded motion picture material and date from 1888. Le Prince had built and patented a single-lens camera – a clumsy box-like device which recorded images on paper ‘film’ at between twelve and twenty frames per second. (Interestingly, 1888 was also the year that George Eastman registered the trademark Kodak.)

Of course these early experiments of Le Prince and others simply recorded, in black and white, events as they happened and with the camera being confined to only one position. Yet despite this lack of sophistication, or even a sound track, people flocked to makeshift cinemas to see the films which were being produced by these early pioneers. However, camera equipment, materials and techniques soon improved and the filmmakers were able to document these events more fully. This was to be the start of ‘documentary’ film making as we know it today.

Fig. 1 This is the memorial stone on the grave of William Friese Greene in Highgate cemetery in London. The wording claims he is the ‘inventor of kinematography’.

Fig. 2 Louis le Prince (1841–1890) recorded the first moving image in Leeds in October 1888. The Roundhay Garden Scene was shot at twelve frames per second and lasted for just over two seconds.

Fig. 3 Louis le Prince’s camera which recorded the images on paper ‘film’ 64mm wide. The upper lens is the viewfinder, the lower is the photographing lens.

SILENT MOVIES

Some film makers also started to experiment with fiction production, and so began the dawn of the golden era of the silent movies, with comedies being a special favourite with the audiences. These silent comedies as they famously came to be known, featured comedians such as Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and Oliver Hardy 1892–1957) and Buster Keaton (1895–1966). Although the films themselves were silent, more often than not their slapstick style of comedy was enhanced by a live piano accompaniment of mood music that would complement the story being told on the screen.

One of the pioneering film-makers actually went one step further with this mood music by introducing it whilst filming on location. Reflecting on some of his experiences, in an interview he gave to the BBC programme Yesterday’s Witness (1969), British teacher turned film-maker, George Pearson (1875–1973), told how he and his crew would, with great difficulty, take a piano on location in order to help the artists give a more ‘creative’ performance. In the grand tradition of film making, nothing got in their way, and even mountains did not stop them getting that piano there.

The desire of film makers to shoot works of fiction saw them also recording plays being performed in theatres. They would place their camera within the audience, simply pointing at the stage, and it would not move from that position throughout the performance. Their camera simply recorded the performance as though it were a member of the audience and as such was photographing it from a detached and impersonal point of view.

However film makers soon discovered that if they removed the audience, they could direct the performance themselves and importantly break the action into separate shots and sequences. By moving the camera from its fixed position in the auditorium and onto the stage itself, they could now photograph the action from the best possible angle and change the shot size so that they could move the audience’s point of view closer into or further away from the action taking place on the stage. We now had long shots, wide shots and close-ups. But the most important point was that the film makers were firmly in control and now had a director who could take control of what the audience was seeing.

What was developing was the technique that we now take for granted and call single camera production or simply film production, the definition of which is ‘making one camera look like it is doing the job of several cameras working simultaneously’.

Tip: Read about the Silents

Read Paul Merton’s book Silent Comedy, in which he traces and examines the evolution of the art of the silent comedy and the people both on and off screen who developed and mastered it.

THE TALKIES

The 1920s saw the beginnings of the talkies, with early films shown with sound effects or music in the form of recordings, synchronized to the film. Later, the soundtrack was added optically to the film itself. Of course the recording of the sound track in the film studio or on location was a complex task which unfortunately posed new problems for the early cinematographers, in particular the sound equipment picking up the noise of the film travelling through the camera. The solution they came up with was to place the camera and the operator in a large soundproofed box, called a blimp.

Although this device solved the noise problem, by confining the camera to the inside of this box it greatly restricted the cinematographer’s choice of camera angle and also meant that the camera could not be mounted on a dolly so that it could be moved during a take. Because of these physical restrictions some cinematographers complained that the arrival of sound had put the art of cinematography back twenty years! But film-makers are an inventive bunch and before long a soundproof cover which the camera could be fitted into (also known as a blimp) was made and meant the camera could once again become mobile.

In 1928 the decision was made to shoot films at the rate of twenty-four frames per second, which is now the standard frame rate, although twenty-five frames per second is the standard rate in Europe for shooting film for television. This increase resulted in better quality sound and also reduced the flicker seen on films shot at the previous standard of sixteen frames per second. (Incidentally, this flicker also gave birth to the phrase ‘going to the flicks’.)

Fig. 4 In order for the microphones not to pick up the sound of the camera mechanism pulling the film through the camera, it and the operator were enclosed in this sound-proof booth often referred to as the ‘ice box’. The camera was unable to move whilst shooting.

Fig. 5 The camera could be taken out of the ‘ice box’ when a much smaller device called a camera blimp was invented. This now allowed the camera to be mounted on a tracking dolly in order to change shot size whilst filming.

THE COMING OF COLOUR

Until the 1920s cinematographers were using orthochromatic stock, which was sensitive only to blue and violet light, causing a range of colour problems. Artists appeared to have black lips, or their blue eyes were rendered as white, so makeup and filters on the camera had to be used to counteract these issues. This discrepancy continued whilst film manufacturers were developing an orthochromatic stock that was more sensitive to green and red light, which would record those colours a little more accurately. Eastman Kodak and other manufacturers had in fact been offering cinematographers a film stock which was sensitive to all wavelengths of the visible spectrum, but this panchromatic film stock was much more expensive than orthochromatic stock and was not used until the price was reduced.

Some black and white films had been colour tinted as a way of adding dramatic effect, but film manufacturers and cinematographers had been pursuing other ways of shooting and exhibiting films in colour. The first process which attempted to achieve this was the British Kinemacolor, invented by George Albert Smith (1864–1959) and developed commercially by Charles Urban from around 1909. In this system, black and white film was exposed in a special camera shooting at twice the normal frame rate, with each exposure being made alternately though a filter wheel containing a red filter and green filter. Unfortunately this process was not a great success, mainly because cinemas had to be equipped with special projectors that could reproduce the process. Even though these projectors were installed in around 300 cinemas across Britain, Kinemacolor finally fell out of use a few years later in 1914.

Another two-colour system similar to Kinemacolor was introduced by Technicolor in 1917, and by 1934 it had been developed further into what became known as the three-colour process. In this system, two strips of 35mm black and white negative film, one sensitive to blue light and the other to red light, ran together through one of the apertures in the camera. A third film strip of black and white negative film ran through a separate aperture, behind a green filter. Once the black and white negative images which represented the colours red, green and blue in the scene were processed, they were then used to produce a final colour print via a complex process using matrices and dyes. This colour system was used to photograph such films as Gone with the Wind (1935) and hundreds of others and Glorious Technicolor and Color by Technicolor were to be the measure for the hundreds of other colour systems that were developed, nearly all of which were judged inferior.

Christopher Challis BSC, in his book Are They Really So Awful? recalls that in 1937 he got a job with Technicolor on Wings of the Morning, the first colour feature film to be made in England, working alongside highly trained staff brought over from the United States. He spent five months locked in a darkroom, loading the magazines with the three separate black and white stocks that would be exposed simultaneously in the Technicolor camera. Every day a black and white rushes print was made from the previous day’s negatives before they were shipped back to the US for colour printing. This resulted in a gap of several weeks before the colour prints were returned. He tells the illuminating story of one occasion when no amount of pressure from the producers could achieve the return of a scene shot in Ireland. It later transpired that the Technicolor laboratory in the US was finding it next to impossible to get the post boxes red (in Ireland they happen to be green!). Having to expose three separate rolls of film through the camera meant it was heavy and cumbersome and, in addition, a lot of light was needed to make an exposure. The speed or sensitivity of the film was equivalent to an Exposure Index of 5 (EI5), while digital cameras of today operate with an EI of around 250.

What theatrical cinematographers were looking for was a ‘real’ colour film, one that recorded all three primary colours on the same strip of film. This came along in 1950 when Kodak announced the first 35mm colour negative film called 5247. This was a monopack made up of three separate emulsion layers – one sensitive to red light, one to green and one to blue. It had a sensitivity to light equivalent to EI16. When in 1952 an improved version came along, it was quickly adopted by film makers, making the three-strip Technicolor (and others) obsolete.

Fig. 6 Three Strip Technicolor camera from the 1930s. The Technicolor camera was used on many motion pictures that carried the credit ‘Color by Technicolor’ such as The Wizard of Oz and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Fig. 7 Inside the Technicolor three strip camera. Three strips of black and white film were each exposed via filters, to the red, green and blue elements of the scene. Through a complex process these images were later combined to produce a colour image of the scene.

CHANGING FORMATS AND TELEVISION

The early acceptance of the 35mm gauge as the standard format for shooting, distribution and exhibition had a momentous impact on the development of the cinema, because it provided a uniform format that could be shown around the world. However by the 1950s cinema attendance was falling, and producers needed to get audiences back into the cinemas and out of their front rooms where they were watching the competition: television.

They needed to give audiences something that television could not at that time, something that today we take for granted – colour images, stereophonic sound and wide-screen or panoramic vision. This resulted in the development of a number of wide-screen systems, such as Cinerama. In its original form, the use of the Cinerama process meant that the production was filmed on three synchronized 35mm cameras, mounted on one unit. Each photographed one third of the picture, the right camera shooting the left side of the image, the left camera shooting the right side of the image and the centre camera shooting straight ahead. The resulting footage was shown on a deeply curved screen that covered an arc of 146 degrees, closely resembling the human field of vision, including peripheral vision. Going to the cinema was again seen as a special event and its popularity meant that other wide screen systems such as Super Panavision and Todd-AO quickly followed.

By the 1950s and 1960s, advances in camera equipment and lens design, along with more sensitive and better resolving film stocks, opened up great opportunities for the cinematographer. Cinematography was at a turning point, with two key elements at the forefront: the new colour film stocks, allowing the cinematographer to use and manipulate a palette of colours instead of only shades of grey, and the smaller size of the equipment at their disposal, which allowed far more mobility.

Fig. 8 The Cinerama camera was in fact three cameras that were locked together to produce an image that was 146 degrees wide. The left camera photographed the right third of the image, the right camera the left third and the centre camera the centre.

THE BBC

In January 1956 the BBC’s Television Films department, which had twelve staff cameramen, was moved to the newly acquired Ealing Film Studios in west London. These studios had been home to the famous Ealing Comedies such as Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico. For forty years the Television Film Studios (TFS) as it became known, pioneered the use of film in television and developed and nurtured both the technical needs and importantly the creative staff in the areas of cinematography, sound and editing. By the end of the 1970s TFS had sixty-five staff crews consisting of a cameraman, assistant cameraman, sound recordist and lighting electrician, shooting documentaries and drama on 16mm film in all corners of the globe. (It was claimed that these film cameraman shot more film stock than Hollywood.)

The BBC worked closely with manufacturers such as Arriflex and Aaton to develop film cameras which had the best technology for television film production, and with Zeiss to develop wide aperture lenses that made it possible to shoot in very low levels of light. This allowed cameramen to develop new and more creative ways of working in both documentary and drama production. Along with the training scheme for new entrants to the department, this contributed to the development of technical and creative skills not seen anywhere else in the world.

THE MOVE TO DIGITAL

Since then development has not stood still. Lens design by Cooke Optics and Zeiss and film stock development by Eastman and Fuji, have resulted in moving images with amazing resolution. However, it is the move to digital film production that is at the forefront of development today and this is where you, as students, join the cinematic journey.

2 The Crew

When members of the public see a film crew in action they often ask ‘Who are all these people and what do they do?’, and to be fair it does appear that it takes a lot of people to make a film. For the camera crew there is no standard size or composition because it will vary greatly depending on the type of production, its budget and to some extent whether it is being shot on film or digitally. Whatever the size of the crew though, there is always only one person in charge of capturing the images and that is the cinematographer. (Throughout this book we will use the term cinematographer, but the role can also be referred to as Director of Photography – DoP – or Lighting Cameraman.)