My Role as Cinematographer

The role of a cinematographer is to provide a film with its own visual identity, or 'look'. As cinematographer, my input was necessary throughout the whole process of creating our short film, from the initial brainstorming process to editing. I kept in mind the words of Tony Lawson from our masterclass, who said that there are in fact three separate films; the film you write, the film you shoot, and the film you edit, and therefore the cinematographer is important in all of these stages.

During the planning stages, I worked with all members of my group in order to create one shared vision of how we wanted the film to look. As our idea changed so drastically, so did our plan for how we wanted the film to be shot. For example in our very first idea, the silent film, we were going to use colour to portray the feelings of the protagonist, whereas in the second idea, there would be more wide shots to show the girl as she went about her day. In our final idea, we had to work out a way of manipulating the shots so that the audience would not be able to tell that the three characters were in the same room, as this would give away the twist. Therefore, when creating shot lists, I decided that the majority of the shots should be medium and close ups, with the shots becoming more and more close to the faces of the characters as the film progressed, to show how they were being consumed by technology. Their faces could even become partially obscured by the devices in order to stress this. The only wide shot would be the final shot when the whole room was revealed. I wanted this ending to be quite comic, and thought that a tracking shot would work well here.

On the day of the shoot, I was very excited to finally see our plan for the short film come to life, and also to use the Black Magic camera. As cinematographer, I first set up the room so that there were three distinct locations for our three characters; the sofa, a chair and a space next to the window. As visuals are so important, I decided that the characters should be wearing a variety of colours in order to add visual interest, so we tried out a couple of outfits until we were happy. When we started shooting, I worked mainly with the director in order to frame the shots and wanted to make sure to get the maximum possible number of shots from different angles so that there would definitely be enough footage. As our film relies heavily on facial expressions, I managed to get a few in one take by holding the shot on the face of the actor while the director called out various emotions. This saved us time and also many that we had plenty to choose from later in the edit. At times it was very difficult to achieve certain angles without giving away the location of the characters, so for example, we could only use close ups with no establishing shot for the introduction of our third character. My favourite two shots to film were the tilt and pull focus of the boy eating the skittles, which required some practice and concentration, and the final 'reveal' shot, where we used a slow track for a comic effect. Overall, I was really pleased with my role as cinematographer whilst shooting our short film and I learnt a lot about the use of different lenses and filters which I hadn't had much knowledge of before. 

During the beginning of the editing process, my input as cinematographer was still important in order to make sure that the overall 'look' of the film was kept. I helped to select the best shots and takes from our shoot and to roughly put these together before our editor took over to complete it. I also paid particular attention to the cuts and continuity between shots to make sure that any mistakes did not detract from the storyline.