Some camera ideas

Right, today I’m going to discuss what sort of ‘look’, in terms of lighting and photography that I want to try and achieve on my final project.

Aperture
The main idea that I have always run with is that I want to use a ridiculously small depth of field. This has mainly been inspired by watching too many Quay brother’s films; where your always catching glimpses of things moving about but there all out of focus so you are not sure what is going on. In an interview with Nick Wadley, in his essay Masks, Music And Dances of Dream, in the book Pix 2 the Quay’s talk about how they shot Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1987) using a wide angle lens with the aperture “wide open” so that the set would drift “off into infinity”. They also deliberately over-exposed everything to give it a luminous effect.
I have done some tests with this and you get some nice effects with objects moving in and out of focus as you animate. You can also get some beautiful things going on with focus pulls; especially if you use a wide-angle lens since there is a bit of distortion. I’m not sure if I want to over-expose anything though, obviously I need to do some tests when the set is built but I think it could be just a little bit overpowering, plus I don’t want the entire film to look like I just stole it off the Quay’s and it might clash with the trap-dooresque feel I’m going for with the storey and character design.
Even if I don’t deliberately over-expose, it will still be a problem because of the wide-open aperture that I want to use. This can be overcome by getting a neutral-density filter for the camera or putting some sheets over the lights, which is a lot cheaper because I can nab them from the media store so it is free. I would have to do some tests to get the right grade but that shouldn’t be too difficult when I decide what kind of exposure I want.
If worse comes to the worse I can always deal with this in post since I will be shooting using RAW’s but I’d rather get it right now to avoid extra work later on.

Lenses

As I mentioned earlier a wide-angle lens gives some nice effects when pulling focus. I want to use a wide angle on my establishing shots or anything that sows a lot of the set. For the anything else I think I will use a lens with a long focal length to avoid too much distracting detail and provide better framing of the subject. Plus it will allow me to position the camera further away from the set, giving me more space to animate but it will make the whole scene appear flatter, hopefully the small depth of field will hide this.
I’m also toying with the idea of using a fish-eye lens, I don’t know how I will get my hands on one, I assume they have them in the photography store, and I don’t know if you can get them in different focal lengths. Since I am using quite a lot of forced perspective on my set anyway this might be just too much for the viewer to take in but its worth a try to see what it would look like.

Filters

I think it was when I was first discussing my storyboards for this project that I mentioned I wanted to make a filter to create a ‘through the key-hole’ type look to the film. Since then I have seen this effect in a lot of stuff on the telly and in the odd film, so I need to find out what this filter is called and see if I can find one.
Georg has shown me a filter that creates a really cheesy starburst type effect on light sources, which I naturally think is the greatest thing ever. I can’t remember what the filter is called but I will probably bee using it. I’m resisting the urge to go all Top Gear with graduated filters as cool as they are, mainly because I think it will be too much to visually take in, especially with the way I am now going to animate my main character but if I have some spare time I might have a play with some filters to see what the set would look like.