First Film Is Underway!

Today, I would like to discuss the first film I will be posting on this blog. My very first project (which was a horrific failure) was a horror film based off of the popular game "slender" wherein  the main character was chased down in an abandoned house by slender. The project was a massive failure due to overestimation of how much editing we could do in "post" (post production). At the time, we could not film at night so my editor, who was as well still fresh at the time, decided that we could probably make the sky dark and fix the shadows and make everything look like night time in post. He got about four seconds done in the span of ten hours. Needless to say, we abandoned the project.

Since I now have a little more experience, I had decided to attack the horror genre again with a more original idea in terms of the character of the antagonist. This project promises to be interesting, as I have no experience filming at night, and I have never worked on a project that has lasted more than two weeks. Yesterday, we officially started filming for the first third third of the film (the film will come in episodes), and have gotten around a third done of the first episode.

 So far, the biggest problems we are having seem to be cinematic continuity and exposure, which I will go over in next weeks blog post. The first episode should be finished within a reasonable period of time, and when it is out I will proceed to analyze it and give my opinion of what I did well and what I did poorly. Before I end this post, I would like to apologize for the quality of it, I have only gotten around four hours of sleep after a full night of filming, and so I am extremely tired. 

The Rule of Thirds

When we look at a film or photograph, there are a number of subconscious things our minds look for and either enjoy or don't enjoy. There are certain areas where we can place objects of interest to make them pop out to the average eye. This is called The Rule of Thirds.

 Basically, you split the LCD  or viewfinder of your camera into nine equal parts, like in this image taken from http://digital-photography-school.com/rule-of-thirds:

Why do we do this? It has been tested that the mind will look at any one of the intersections of these points more so than the center of the shot. What is the first thing you looked at when you looked at this picture? Personally, I was drawn to the eye of the bee, which is right on one of the intersections. So, by placing subjects of interests along the lines or on/close to the intersections, you draw more attention to them.

 This translates to cinematography by allowing the cinematographer to make objects of interest pop out compared to the rest of the shot. For example, if you were doing a horror scene wherein the antagonist is stalking the protagonist, a facial shadow of the antagonist in the window placed on the upper right intersection as the protagonist walks away towards the camera in the center would draw attention to the shadow and would increase the feeling of suspense.

What is Cinematography?

Before I start actually posting lessons about cinematography, it would help if we knew what Cinematography is. Cinematography comes from the Greek roots kinema, which means "motion", and graphein "to record". Put it together, and the result is "To record motion". So what does a cinematographer actually do? Well, Blain Brown, author of the book Cinematography: Theory And Practice says the following: "At the heart of it, filmmaking is shooting- but cinematography is more than the mere act of photography. It is the process of taking ideas, words, actions, emotional subtext, tone, and all other forms of nonverbal communication and rendering them in visual terms". What a Cinematographer does is take a story and makes it look so realistic that you can't help but be absorbed into the movie. However, you can't simply hold a camera and hope that a movie will come out of it.  There are a lot of factors that go into making a good film, and again in the words of Blain Brown: "... everything in visual storytelling is interrelated: the sets might be fantastic, but if the lighting is terrible, then the end result will be substandard".

What I'm All About

Hello! For this blog, I intend to study the art of cinematography for a whole entire year by studying film techniques and creating films of my own. I have a deep love for the camera, and so I thought I should learn more about it, and in the process possibly provide some sort of teaching for others to look at. This blog is going to be directed at people who want to possibly learn more about cinematography as well as hopefully those who would like to critique my work, because I can only get better if I know what I'm doing wrong! I'll try to post a video a week, whether it be on current projects, a finished project itself, or how-to's for certain things. I will also try to post some of what I learn about the intricacies of cinematography as I learn them. I will also be combining my blog with two other blogs studying video editing and choreography, so expect to see links to their blogs as I post things. Throughout the entirety of this project, I will be using a Canon Rebel T3i DSLR and a glidecam HD-1000, with some other fittings added on when necessary. The picture on the upper right is a picture I took of my lens cover.
So, without further or due, my name is Nath, and welcome to my blog.