We began our lesson by going over some basic film terminology and basic knowledge. Discussing deep focus and shallow depth of field.
What is depth of field? Depth of field is the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus in an image. It refers to how blurry or sharp an area around your subject is. A deep depth of field has more of the image in focus, there is a larger fields of view, to get a larger depth of field there has to be a small aperture (higher f stop) f/16 or more, its used for landscape photography. A shallow depth of field is created when there is less of the background in focus, a higher aperture (smaller f stop). It is great for portrait and wildlife photography and makes a subject stand out from their background.
As mentioned before the f stop (aperture) impacts the depth of field, so does the distance from the subject to the camera and the focal length of your camera which refers to the capability of a lens to magnify the distant image of a subject (for example a camera lens could have the focal length of 50mm or 85mm). The longer you set your focal length the shallower your depth of field. This diagram really helped me visualise and remember all this information.
After briefly mentioning depth of field we moved onto learning about deep focus and its uses within cinema. A deep focus allows the cinamatographer to keep everything in focus, the foreground, middle ground and background. Our teacher showed us a clip out of Citizen Kane that uses deep focus and then set a task for us to find some clips out of films that also use deep focus. I found another clip from Citizen Kane, the infamous clip praised for its blocking and composition, where Kanes parents are speaking at a table while we see a young Kane playing in the snow outside.
We then looked at examples of shallow depth of field and our teacher made us watch the iconic candle scene out of Barry Lyndon. The shallow depth of field makes us focus on the emotions of specific characters and directs the audiences attention. Apparently a special lens was made for this film, that could capture more light and have a shallower depth of field, (also they were filming in candlelight and wanted to use naturalistic lighting, a lens that could let more light in with a lower f stop, helped)
Our teacher went over two, three and four point lighting. We looked at photos taken of a scene from a film and had to figure out where the key, fill and backlight was.
high key lighting
Minimal use of black and midrange tones, there is a dominance of bright light, can be used on a lot of phtotoshoots and music video sets. It is used to adjust the mood and tone of a scene.
low key lighting
Calls for contrast and shadows, it encases the scene in shadow, primarily used in film noir and nowadays in thrillers or horrors.
Practical light- is all of the light within the mise en scene that is meant to be there as part of the set design and story. Barry Lyndon is a good example, the film is mostly lit by candlelight. Basically the light that is meant to be in the shot.
Open faced fixtures- are used for creating hard light and dark shadows, they use tungsten light. Commonly refered to as the Redhead or Blondie, both are examples of open faced fixtures.
HMI lights- Require a high output to recreate sunlight shining into interiors (for example if a filmmaker needs to film a scene set in the morning but currently its night, then they can use a HMI to shine through the window and it will look like it's morning). They are powerful enough to light large areas and are used for exterior lighting also.
LED lights- stands for light emitting diodes, they can be adjusted to different light temperatures and are very efficient as key lights, fill lights and backlights.
Balloon lights - high intensity lamps surrounded by a translucent fabric that softens and diffuses the light, primarily used within the film industry.
Three point lighting- uses a key light, fill light and back light, can be used in lowkey and high key lighting. In class we identified the different lights within film noir clips. Three point lighting brings dimension to a character.
Four point lighting- utilises additional background lights, that give depth to a subject and draw attention to the background.
Carrying on learning about lighting from last week's lesson. We had an introduction to lighting ratios in film. The lighting ratio is a figure given to measure the difference in brightness in two parts of a scene. Essentially the a lighting ratio expresses the relationship between the highlight key side and the consequent shadow filled side of your subject. The higher the ratio is the higher the contrast is. So if your subject is evenly lit and exposed then your lighting ratio will be 1:1 but if your highlight side is one, two or three stops lighter with a lot of shadows then the ratios goes up to 2:1 4:1 8:1 or higher. Photography is done in divisions of two, so when you go up one stop it goes from 2:1 to 4:1. Which means that your highlight side is two stops brighter than your shadow side.
Lighting ratios are important to know because you can decide ahead of time what look you want to achieve instead of just randomly guessing what you're doing on set. For example if you want to achieve a very contrasted and gloomy look you can ask your crew for a 8:1 ratio, everyone will be on the same page about lighting and they can get the correct lights and diffusers.
We were tasked with downloading a light meter app and measuring different lighting around us to have a better understanding of how measuring lighting works. A lighting meter is used to measure the exposure of a photograph and it is also used to help determine a lighting ratio on set. The highest reading I got on my light meter app was F32, the shutter is very small to let in less light when I aimed my camera at my window and the lowest reading I got was F1 when filming under a dark table, the shutter opens more to let in more light. (directly linked to aperture)
We briefly went over the main differences in studio and film lighting. Studio lighting is very exposed and evenly lit to draw attention to the main subject that will usually be eye level and speaking to the camera like we see in the news. Cinematic lighting used for film is used to show emotion and to create a mood and atmosphere. The director will want contrast and colour to create shadows and highlights to convey a meaning. We don't need to convey emotion or have contrasted shots in a news broadcast because it's pointless and distracting to the importance of what the presenter is talking about.
Unit 10 is about news and audiences, we have a choice of creating a news show or a talk show for the filmed piece. We discussed the different types of news, news conventions and the typical structure that a news broadcast follows so we could start to think about the structure of our own talk show or news broadcast. The different types of news and techniques are listed below courtesy of the slides that we looked at in class.
The power elite: Stories concerning powerful individuals, organisations or institutions.
Celebrity: Stories concerning people who are already famous.
Entertainment: Stories concerning sex, show business, human interest, animals, an
Surprise: Stories that have an element of surprise and/or contrast.
Bad news: Stories with particularly negative overtones, such as conflict or tragedy.
Good news: Stories with particularly positive overtones, such as rescues and cures.
Magnitude: Stories that are perceived as sufficiently significant either in the numbers of people involved or in potential impact.
Relevance: Stories about issues, groups and nations perceived to be relevant to the audience.
Follow-up: Stories about subjects already in the news.
Newspaper agenda: Stories that set or fit the news organisation's own agenda
There are a number of different techniques used to structure TV news reports:
News package: a pre-recorded, and self-contained, television news story. The reporter is likely to be in vision at the story location and the package may contain interviews.
Actuality footage: for instance - a news reader reports breaking news and a short clip of footage is shown from the event/story itself.
Peice to camera: when a reporter presents directly to the lens of the camera.
Cut away: a shot that cuts away from the main action to a separate or secondary action
Voice over: the audio track of a presenter or reporter, over a video clip and pictures to explain what is going on.
Two-way interview: Studio news reader interviews a contributor or correspondent
Graphics: on screen images used to explain or clarify the story. Often used to show statistics.
Standard out cue: the form of words agreed by a television station, and used by all reporters at the station, to sign off at the end of a story.
TV straplines: the two lines of text that appear along the bottom of the screen on, for example, the BBC News Channel. e.g. 1st line: Baghdad Bomb 2nd line: 40 killed by suicide bomb at market
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zy4rfrd/revision/3 accessed 24/01/21
On Thursday we did a group activity where we had to research a Channel and their commission's to see what Commission editors are looking for and what this says about contemporary audience's. Our group was tasked with Channel 5.
The objectives for our first Wednesday lesson were
Basic studio and camera operations
What does a TV or film Camera operator do?
What does a vision mixer do?
As an activity our tutor made us research the difference between REC 709 and S-LOG.
I Didn't know what S-LOG or REC-709 was at first and it is quite complex. Initially I understood that S-LOG was about colour profiling and was a fundamental part of cinematography. I found that S-Log captures far more information than standard REC. 709 footage can record, giving you more control over the finished image in post-production. Instead of exposing for highlights or shadows when shooting, you can capture all of this information and choose how you want to display it later. The evolution of camera technology means that the sensors in modern cameras are now capable of matching, or even surpassing, the quality of 35mm film. The problem is that existing video formats don’t support the vast amount of information captured by a modern camera sensor. The result: reduced dynamic range and colour information.
S-LOG
Information is preserved in the highlights and the shadows
REC-709
Highlights are overblown and all the detail is lost in the shadows
S-Log is a log curve which has been specially optimised for digital motion picture cameras to maximise the performance of the image sensor. S-Log is a gamma curve designed to record and transmit as much of the information recorded by your camera’s sensor as possible. S-Log breathes life into your images by preserving the wide colour gamut and dynamic range recorded by the sensor. Then, in post-production, you create the image you want as part of the grading process, with greater artistic control over the finished product. Cinematographers shooting in the current REC.709 standard have to choose whether to sacrifice detail in the highlights or the shadows. S-Log allows you to retain all of this information.
Normal video footage is shot in the REC.709 colour gamut, but material recorded in S-Log is recorded in the much wider S-Gamut colour space. Put simply, the wider the colour gamut, the more colour information can be recorded and the more vibrant and realistic your images will look.
https://pro.sony/en_GB/technology/s-log#MEAE300829WhatIsSLog-s-log Accessed 24/01/21
Our next lessons objective was to
Define Editorial, Bias and Objectivity
Examine Examples of editorial, bias and objectivity
We had to do an activity in which we were divided into groups and had to find out what editorial, bias and objectivity meant to us initially in reference to the media. The exact definitions that we were shown in class are below.
Editorial- The set of guidelines by which the news organisation operates. It includes the news organisations attitudes, policy statements, positions, values and standards. For example each newspaper usually has a political side and is either left wing or right. The way that Donald Trump might be written about in The Guardian a leftist paper, will be different to The Time, a conservative paper.
Objectivity- Not influenced by a person's feelings, interpretations, or prejudice, based on facts; unbiased.
Bias- A particular tendancy towards a trend, inclination, feeling or opinion. For example if someone is having a debate and they cannot back up their opinion with a fact or figure, their opinion will be seen as biased because it's based on their feelings.
The next part of the lesson was to research Mark Duggan and how different news papers documented what happened to him. Mark was a 29 year old british man who was shot and killed by police who were attemtimg to arrest Mark in Tottenham on suspicion of planning an attack and having a weapon on him. Our teacher wanted us to look at the different news articles and news sites that published articles on the event to try and identify any editorial, objectivty or bias. We then moved on to do a different activity in which we looked at a close up cropped photo of Mark that all of the news articles and the news channels used. We all had to say the first words that came to mind when we looked at the photo, words like: hard, smug, dangerous, came up etc. Our teacher then showed us the full photo were mark in fact is holding a heart shaped stone at a funeral. Proving that the news all have an agenda that they want their stories to match, if the un-cropped full photo of mark was shown, the public would have had a different first impression of this man, they would view him as compassionate and kind, not as a gang member or threat. I read a BBC article that was very objective/factual and stated everything that happened on the day that Mark was shot in chronological order including the riots that happened after his death. However they still used the cropped photo of Mark which does have an element of editorial to it because the news wants you to view him in a specific way that fits their agenda.
We then watched an interview that our teacher did with Mark Duggan's aunt, who was the most vocal about Mark's death and how unfair and wrong it was. We were asked if the interveiw had an editorial, objective or biased standpoint. I thought that the interview was editorial in following the classical news interview structure, the questions were not set out to prove any sort of agenda, they were neutral. However there is a bias because the interviewee was close family to Mark, she will always take his side because of how she feels and because she loved him.
This week was dedicated to group work and our organising our pre production and group roles for this unit.
My group was focused on figuring out the structure of our fifteen minute talk show. We discussed creating a contingecy plan for filming our show remotly on zoom and a plan to film in college, using the film studio.
The first lesson of this week was about how journalism has changed over the years with a focus on documentaries. We looked at a famous Austarlian journalist and documentary film maker called John Richard. We watched a BFI interview in which John talks about how he started in the industry and how strict journalism was, it was disciplined and he was taught to write using the economy of language and accuracy (the theory that fewer words lead to greater clarity), without using cliches, writing had to be spare and precise. These principals shaped his journalism and his understanding of moving images.
After moving to London in the early 60s and working with Reuters and The Daily Mirror, John became chief correspondent and reported from all over the world covering many wars, including Vietnam.
Our teacher made us watch a doumentary about Veitnam made by John Richard early in his career called 'Cambodia Year Zero' and then had to watch one of his most recent documentaries 'The Coming War on China' and discuss the differences, whether that be the technical differences or how the information in the documentary was delivered then and now. Initially the older documentary is of worse visual quality, shot on film and it used photos to accompany what John (the host) was talking about, the documentary had a slower pace because of this and it limited what sources could be shown to accompany the information in the documentary. 'The Coming War on China' is obviously different due to technological advancements in cameras and post production equipment. There are more cut aways, voiceovers, and there is more video footage being shown alongside the host's dialogue. Therefore the pacing of the documentary is quick and we are consuming information at a much faster rate. I found this interesting, it is evident that the rise of technology and mobile phones had made it easier for humans to find and consume information, we have become used to being overstimulated with sound and moving images online and on social media, therefore we can absorb information at a very quick rate, which has changed the way in which we consume media and how films and advertisements are made today. In my opinion the theory of economy of language is not that accurate anymore. A slow paced documentary like 'Year Zero' would not be successful in today's market.
Documentaries fall into a genre of journalism. My interpretation of this lesson was learning about how journalism has changed visually with information being given to us much quicker, and how journalism has become less strict and structured in how it's written and delivered.
Our second Wednesday lesson learning objectives were:
- List what makes a good interview
- examine examples of interviews against this list
We went over the different types of interviews and specifically what makes a good interview.
Does it depend on the type of interview? What should you do? what might change?
The key elements to a good interview is to
Research and being prepared- Always come prepared with notes, know your subject and the interviewee and what the interviewee might say
Know your objective- What do you want to get out of the interview? most interviews will have and agenda
Know when to keep silent and don't interrupt -If as the interviewer you're struggling to interject catch the other person when they breathe or make a small pause.
Always stay professional and polite
Our next task was to watch an interview that our teacher did at an EDL protest. We were put into groups and had to answer some questions in a document about how we would conduct the interview and what we would ask if we had to conduct and interview at an EDL protest. My answers are listed below.
You are going to an English Defence League (EDL) protest
It is for a TV programme looking at racism in Britain
The programme is documentary-style
You are the host
You want to show what happens at an EDL demo
You want to see what their views are
You want to speak to them about their views on Muslims
What is the objective of the interview?
To find out the EDL’s views on Muslims and their general views on Islam
List 5 things you would research about the EDL to prepare for the interview:
What is the EDL
The history of their organisation
Their purpose
List 5 questions you would ask:
What is your organisation? what is the EDL?
What motivated you to join the EDL?
Do you agree with some of the extremism that has been associated with these demonstrations?
What is the end goal of the EDL what does it want?
How do you join the EDL? How do people find members?
List 5 ways you would make this a good interview given the context (look back at the list if you need!)
have a clear objective and be unbiased
Don’t involve emotion be editorial you don’t want to anger the demonstrators and ruin the interview
This week our class was meant to go on a trip to the Natural Science and Media Museum in Bradford. However we couldn't because of the national lockdown. Instead our teacher gave us an activity which was to research and look at the museum's website and virtual exhibits. We then had to choose a specific topic and exhibit and present what we researched and found out about the topic to the class.
I decided to research the early history of moving pictures because it was something that i was not 100% familiar with, and I wanted to learn more.