Parc Entertainment - A Video Production Company

I love my iPhone. It’s incredible to have that many resources and tools in one device. I’m always interested in learning about new apps that can increase productivity and make my life a little more organized and efficient. Last month I posted a video about Cinemek’s storyboarding application, Hitchcock. Today I wanted to post a little information about Helios. Released last April, Helios is a tool for cinematographers that will allow you to calculate the position of the sun for any given day, at any given time, at any given location around the world. This can be an incredibly useful tool for DP’s working with natural light. Let’s say you have an exterior shoot in Grand Rapids, MI next month, but it’s overcast and rainy on your location scout . With the Helios app, you can instantly calculate where the sun will be at the exact moment of your shoot. It’s a great way to keep track of the ever-changing lighting conditions when shooting outdoors.

This question came to me recently…

We have a cannon XHA1 and are having issues shooting dark objects inside. The pixels within the dark areas become noisy or fuzzy. It seems like lower shutter speeds help this issue but don’t resolve it all together.

If you are shooting video in low light and your camera is set to auto iris, the camera will maximize all available light to boost the exposure. This results in grainy, or noisy video. You can also introduce grain onto your video if you increase the camera’s gain to compensate for low light. Many video cameras with manual controls allow you to control the amount of gain, usually in increments ranging from 0db to 18db.

To ensure that your image is clear, sharp and clean, you need to ensure that there is enough light on set for a proper exposure. If your script requires that you shoot nighttime scenes, or scenes in dark interiors, remember that the illusion of darkness is created NOT by taking away the amount of light on set, but by increasing the amount of contrast. You can shoot nighttime scenes without grain by knowing how to properly light the set.

This question came to me recently:

My videos have been oddly yellowish. I read somewhere about ‘white balancing.’ I have a Sony Cybershot. Do I white balance on the camera during filming, do I do it during editing, if so where? Thank You so much for your help!

Although our eyes can’t perceive it, certain light sources give off a particular color temperature. These varying degrees of color are represented on the Kelvin scale. Tungsten bulbs burn at about 3200 degrees Kelvin, while sunlight burns at about 5600 degrees Kelvin. However, the color temperature of the sun doesn’t stay constant. It’s constantly changing as morning turns to afternoon and as afternoon turns to dusk. Our eyes can automatically compensate for this change in color temperature, but video cameras cannot. So, they need to be calibrated every time the light source changes. Otherwise, the footage can come out with an orange tint, blue tint, or even a green tint.

Calibrating a video camera to ensure correct color representation is called white balancing. Many cameras come with preset white balance settings for different shooting situations - indoor, daylight, cloudy, etc. However, conducting a manual white balance on your camera is the best way to ensure that all colors within your scene are represented correctly. There’s a great tutorial on color temperature and white balancing here. You can also read my production tip for shooting under fluorescent lights, which pose a different set of challenges.

To white balance, turn your camera’s white balance setting to manual. Then, hold a plain, white sheet of paper in front of the camera and zoom in until the paper fills the screen (make sure you hold the paper under the light source under which you will be filming). Then (this is true of most cameras with manual white balance), press and hold your white balance button until your camera confirms that a proper white balance has been set. Then, you’re ready to shoot. Just remember to re-white balance every time you change locations and lighting setups. Read this post for tips on how to adjust your white balance to a warmer or cooler tone.

While in college, I majored in film/video production and minored in art with a photography concentration. When it comes to sketching/drawing, I am capable, but by no means am I an expert. That’s why, when it comes to storyboarding my projects, I am much more comfortable writing out a shot list with simple diagrams. Drawing storyboards is just too time consuming for me.

Pre-visualization is an excellent tool for any video/film project, including marketing/promotional videos for a client. To have the ability to show a client what your vision is (rather than describe it) is a huge plus. That’s why my eyes almost popped out of my head a few months ago when I ran across a storyboarding app for the iPhone. It’s called Hitchcock and it’s from Cinemek. The app allows you to create professional storyboards by using the phone’s camera. Simply take a photo, add in camera directions, and lay it on your timeline. You can even insert music and other audio if you’d like. Once the storyboard is complete, you can export it as a pdf and email it to your client or others on your crew. Take a look at the demo below.

Hitchcock in action! from cinemek / Hitchcock on Vimeo.

Twice this week I have been up all night working as the DP for Filament Artists’ latest short film, entitled “Love at the Grocery Store.” The screenplay was selected as the winner of the Production Prize at the 2008 Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival and will premiere at this year’s festival on September 26.

Shooting inside a grocery store has its particular set of challenges and so I wanted to pass along some things to remember if any of your projects take you inside the same environment.

LIGHTING & TONE

Most grocery stores are lit with fluorescents, meaning that everything will be washed with a flat, even, diffused light. If the tone of your piece calls for high-contrast lighting, you might want to see if the grocery store manager will allow you to turn off the overheads, giving you more freedom to light as you see fit. If this isn’t possible and you still want to create a surreal look with high-contrast, you can always light your subject with hard, direct light, that comes from the side, creating harsh shadows. The hard light will force you to stop down your f-stop. This should darken the background, while leaving your subject properly exposed.

Since fluorescent bulbs cast an even, diffused light, your subjects can come out looking drab, flat, and uninteresting. You will need some additional light to help create more natural skin tones and make colors that pop just a little more. However, reflectors alone won’t get the job done. They just won’t provide enough reflected light underneath fluorescent bulbs. And aiming a 1Kw or 650w tungsten at your actors will create an obvious difference in color and tone.

To give your shots a warmer look under fluorescent lighting, start by using your tungsten lamps and reflectors together. Mount a large piece of white foam core onto a c-stand and then bounce light from a 1Kw lamp onto your subject. The result is a soft, diffused light that isn’t overbearing, and yet one that warms up the scene a bit more. And I always recommend a little rim lighting to help your subjects stand out more from the background.

Bear in mind that the above solution assumes that you want a natural, warm tone for your project. If the mood of your film is a bit darker and somber, then you might like the sterile, flat, “blue” tone that the existing lights create.

LIGHTING & COLOR

Shooting under fluorescent lights can affect the white balance of your shot. If not properly monitored, the lights may cause the color of your shot to drift slowly from a cool tone to a warm tone, then back again.

However, I’d advise you to look back at our previous post for a more extensive look at shooting under fluorescents. To that article let me add that using a Kino light bank will be a big help. Kino’s do use fluorescent bulbs, but unlike the bulbs installed overhead in a grocery store, these bulbs burn at a constant color temperature. This will give your shots more accurate color representation while maintaining a consistent look with the rest of the lighting in the store.

Fluorescent lights might also appear green on camera. A green tone might work well for your project if the mood is more sinister and the location of your story more urban, decayed, or threatening.

Look for the comedy, “Love at a Grocery Store” at this year’s Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. The screening is tentatively set for 9pm at the Alabama Power Building.

Many of our video projects are shot on location, but every so often we have an opportunity to so some green screen work for a client. Shooting a subject against a green screen will allow the video editor to remove the green background and replace it with another of his or her choosing. Green screens are used every day on the evening news when the weatherman delivers the forecast.

Working with a green screen can be tricky, because if not done correctly, you will have nightmares in post production as you try to key out the screen and insert your own background. My recommendation is to shoot some practice footage first before you start work with your client.  Here are a few things I’ve learned from my experiences:

1. The green screen should have no wrinkles or folds. Any imperfections across the surface of the green screen will result in shadows and hard lines that will be difficult to key out in post.
2. The green screen should be evenly lit. There should be no shadows and no fall off. The light should be soft and diffused. A light meter will help ensure accuracy.
3. Create distance between the subject and the green screen. Any light reflecting off the green screen and onto the subject should be eliminated. If not, your subject’s edges will have a green glow when the screen is keyed out. Move your subject as far away from the screen as possible. Then use flags to block any reflected light coming from the screen.
4. Shoot on a format with the highest-rated color space possible. MiniDV has a color space of 4:1:1. You can use it for green screen work, but it isn’t the best option. Just be aware that there will be some challenges in keying with MiniDV footage. The edges on your subject won’t be perfectly clean. However, if your video is intended only for the web, MiniDV will work for you. Consider this video we produced. It was shot on MiniDV and the client was satisfied with the green screen work. Formats like DVCPro and DVCProHD have a color space of 4:2:2, making them better for keying.

Learning the proper video production techniques takes practice. There’s always something new to learn and the more time you spend shooting and editing, the better your craft will be.

Understanding as much as possible about the physics of light will greatly improve your skills as a cinematographer. I recommend reading Placing Shadows as a good reference. For my location work, I normally use an Arri kit consisting of one (1) 1000 watt lamp with chimera soft box, two (2) 650 watt lamps, and one (1) 350 watt lamp. The kit comes with stands, scrims, gels, and diffusion; each accessory giving me the flexibility to manipulate the light.

The Arri kit provides great latitude in an easy-to-transport package. Recently I have also been utilizing china balls while on set. China balls are a great addition to your lighting package and they have several advantages. However, consideration must be given to the type of look you want to achieve before you decide to use them, because china balls aren’t right for every occasion.

The first thing to consider is the fact that the light coming from a china ball is difficult to trim. You’re dealing with an even and diffused light source, so you will need flags and c-stands to control how the light spills onto the scene.

Second, if you want to utilize a low-key lighting approach to your set, china balls are probably not the way to go. Since the light output is even, the contrast of the subject is reduced.

Third, china balls are difficult to gel. You can always purchase daylight balanced bulbs or tungsten bulbs to match the color temperature of your scene, but trying to color correct with gel is more challenging than using lamps with barn doors.

With these considerations in mind, china balls have some great advantages:

Light Output

China balls give you a nice, soft, diffused light source with little effort. If you want to achieve the same look with a lamp from an Arri kit, you would have to add a chimera, or diffusion, add some scrims, adjust the lens, etc. With a china ball, you can simply put it on the stand and plug it in.

Quick & Efficient

China balls are quick and easy to set up and use lower wattage bulbs. If you need to shoot a number of on-camera interviews during a grueling run-and-gun kind of day, a china ball is a great asset.

Comfortable

Since China balls use lower wattage bulbs, they don’t give off nearly as much heat as other tungsten lamps. Therefore, your talent can work under them for longer periods of time without getting too hot.

Affordable

Not everyone can invest in a Kino-Flo or Arri kit, but China balls are great because of their pricing and availability. No-budget filmmakers can grab a few of these lights, get out with their cameras and their friends, and shoot some great looking footage.

Shooting exteriors can be tricky, because you have less control over the light falling onto your scene. It would be nice to have access to a one-ton grip truck with shiny boards, silks, butterflies, and HMI’s. But most often you won’t have the budget to acquire all that extra gear. Even without all the fancy grip and electric toys, you can still get some fantastic exteriors. Here’s how:

1. Pay Attention to the Time of Day - Shooting in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is low in the sky is ideal for exteriors. Conversely, shooting at mid-day when the sun is at its highest will produce nasty shadows on your subject, creating unwanted contrast. If you have to shoot the exterior of a building, scout the location first. Find out when the sun is hitting the front of the building. If the sun is at the back of the building and the front is in the shade, your shot won’t turn out very well.
2. Invest in Lens Filters - Filters are great additions to your camera package and give you a little more control over the way your exteriors look. When placed over the lens, a filter will manipulate the light entering the camera. When shooting on cloudy days, the scene will look flat and gray. Adding a warming filter to the camera will improve skin tones and give more saturation to your colors. A definite must-have, in my opinion, is a circular polarizer filter. A polarizer has a number of different uses:

• Increases the saturation of blue skies - You’ve probably seen video footage shot outdoors where the sky looks gray or even white. Adding a polarizer to your lens will block out the haziness of the sky and will intensify the blues, giving the sky a rich, natural look. You can rotate the polarizer to adjust the intesity of the color.
• Reduces glare - If you’re shooting footage of a lake, river, or ocean, a polarizer will cut down on the amount of sun glare coming off the water, reducing intense highlights within the scene
• Eliminates reflection - If you’re shooting through a window, or a car windshield, a polarizer will reduce reflection off the glass, allowing you to see through the window.

3. Use Reflectors - Even if you can’t purchase large shiny boards or flex fills, sturdy foam core will do the trick. You can use the boards to reflect sunlight back toward your subject. Bear in mind that if you place your subject in the shade, you will have to contend with the contrast between the shaded foreground and sunlit background. If you expose for the background, your subject will be too dark. If you expose for your subject, the background will be over-exposed.

A shoot scheduled at the right time of day, coupled with a few well-placed reflectors and the utilization of lens filters will ensure great exterior footage, even with the smallest of crews.

In film production continuity is incredibly important. In short, continuity refers to the consistency of actors, props, plot points, locations, events, etc. seen by the viewer. Filmmakers must make sure that if an actor opens a door with his or her left hand on one shot, he/she must do it the same way in subsequent takes. There are people on set whose job is to watch out for these visual errors. It can be very difficult to keep track of all the details within a particular shot, but careful consideration of continuity will make the film seamless.

Last weekend while shooting a scene for my upcoming short film “If Only,” we ran into a situation that demanded we pay careful attention to the light falling onto the set. That particular day we began filming around 6pm while it was still daylight. It was an interior scene staged against a large window. I wanted the scene to take place in the late afternoon, but I knew that we would never get the coverage we needed before sunset. It was up to our cinematographer to match the lighting in subsequent close-ups with the daylight we saw in the establishing shots.

Fortunately, we were shooting 720p/24p on a Panasonic HVX-200a. All of our footage was on our P2 cards. The beauty of P2 is that every take it itemized as a separate file. Therefore, users have the ability to go back to any take without the need for rewinding tape. Rewinding tape to review footage can be risky due to possible time code breaks and the potential for recording over important footage. However, with P2, my cinematographer and I were able to review our wide shots from earlier in the day, examine the way the light was falling onto our actors, then match the close-ups accordingly. I think the results were excellent. This is another reason why I am a big fan of solid-state recording.

In a post last week I discussed how camera operators should always properly prep and label tapes in an effort to make post-production a more efficient process. In today’s discussion I want to mention how patient camera work is vital to an editor.

Ideally, any director of photographer would love to have control over the location - lighting, grip, camera movements, etc. but by nature, some projects are suited for a documentary approach. This means that you have to capture the action as it happens, and often you get no second chances. Some cinematographers thrive on this run-and-gun approach, but others feel stressed by the environment, worried that they will miss something vital. Those that feel a bit panicky will often shoot footage that never seems to settle. This is a nightmare for editors, because they never have a really nice steady shot to work with.

So, the word of the day for aspiring cinematographers and camera operators is “patience.” Once you frame up a shot and get your focus, let the shot linger. Give the editor plenty of pre-roll and post-roll that can be used in the final piece. Even if some loud commotion from behind startles you, don’t be too quick to whip the camera over to see what’s going on. Get your shot first, then pan over to capture the other scene. If you spend your day constantly whipping the camera around from shot to shot, you won’t capture anything meaningful for the editor. As a documentarian, there will be things you miss. It’s inevitable. But sometimes, choosing not to shoot something leads to capturing a truly remarkable moment in places you least expect.