Cinematography project report

This is a report on of the work we did on our cinematogrpahy project.

We had three location we used on our project

1st the botanical gardens

2nd the attic room

3rd the basement

each had various challenges and different lighting situations that we had to deal with.

for example the botanical gardens, filming there in high noon at summer, gave us alot of light, almost too much, and we had to use two neutral desnisty filters to stop down the lighting coming into the lens, we did not want to relay on shutter, because we wanted a nice motion and not a digital styled one like 1000/1 sec shutter. we stayed at 100/1 sec. our aperture was at 2.8 because we wanted to have selective focus and not make it too deep and also not to stop down to much and allow lens diffraction to happen within the lens, which could result in loss of resolution and even added grainyness. We set the white balance to sunlight and we slightly adjusted for difference in lighting, i think by the end of the shoot we bumped up the shutter to 250/ 1 sec shadows was not too much of a problem on the shoot and when ever we changed location in the gardens you could see from the highlights where the source was coming through, but it did not give us shadow cover. I feel like the scene in the garden are maybe a bit warmish in tone, this maybe be due to the white balnce filter on camera or from atmosphereic effect , it felt a bit hasy on the day.


in the attic location, we had one skylight window in the room that gave us sunlight and we kept with that , without any suplemental lighting. the props in the room alloud us to keep with the red theme. and that contrast with the white made a mood that would stand in contrast with the rest of the film. for her break down, we shut the blinds on the skylight and set up to dedo's set to 3200 Kelvins and manuely white balnced them, I thought 3200k would give a warm tone similar to tungsten. we then set them with red filters and placed them up either side of the wall with pictures, to fill up the frame with even flat red, the resulted in a flat tone that was interesting and gave us more lighting options later on in the next location. i think a problem was that light was still coming throguh dimly past the skylight blind. the fell on our actress. we intercut this with shot from earlier filming that was a close up of the actress applaying make up badly. that had a light red fill and a harder side light on one side for effect.


In the basement location i wanted to create a contrast to the upstairs location and keep things interested. we applied two dedos and a 400 kino flow again we set the dedos to 3200k and the kino was dimly lit only applying the lightest of fills to the actress and wall, a dedo with red fliter placed behind the camera provided a front key, and another dedo with red filter was applied as a sidelight to the wall, we wanted to use coookies to provide a dingy gothic lair look and to add more dimentionality in the scene, we first tried putting them on the kino and brightening it up, but the light was to diffused and did not do anything, we the moved our on the spot cookie, made out of cardboard, to to dedo's where they work more effectifly, we applied it to our key and it created an interesting effect. then camera was using similar camera settings 100/1 sec 2.8 aperture. allthough i think our actress in the for front could of been underexposed i think it still created a really interesting effect and dimensionality in the scene, and we can still see the acting and emotion presented by the actress.

we used both tripod and hand held, we used tripod for most shots to add an element of formality, but we moved to hand held for shot when the character state of mind is fragmented, i think it created a nice effect at time, that is'nt subjective handheld, like a camera man is there but represented the pycological state of the character. the film was shot over two days, very quickly i feel like more planning should of gone into the lighting and shots, and that crew mentality in filming could of been improved, as we could of finished in a day. but i don't think it was to bad considering the quickness that we filmed it in.