Research: What is Cinematography
Cinematography is the art of photography and camerawork in film-making.
-Oxford Dictionary
Cinematography is vital in creating visual media text as it is what keeps the story coherent and essentially puts emphasis on important mise-en-scene and characters and at the same time set the tone and setting. Cinematography is a versatile tool in filmmaking that can have a big impact on the audience and their experience through, as mentioned, putting the focus on the right things to establish the genre and what to focus on, on top of making the piece actually pleasant to look at and have an idea what is going on.
There are many different shot types to serve different purposes, some of which serve the same purpose but are there for flavor. A film consisting of the same shots all throughout wouldn’t be very good.
The extreme close-up and close-up shots are focusing on the character’s face to emphasize their emotions, often excluding the background or blurring it for total focus.
Next up, the medium shot is at a distance that shows the upper half of the character’s body, excluding the legs. This yet again focuses on the face, however, the focus is split with the body language the character would be showing.
A full shot would be showing the entirety of the character, head, body, legs, and all the beauty. The emotional aspect of showing the face is not the most important part, instead, body language is the main focus in these types of shots. This can be used to contrast a character against something else in the scene or perhaps just show the state the character is in through combinations of movement and mise-en-scene.
Going even further, a long shot would work like a full shot, except it is farther from the character, putting more emphasis on the place the character is in relative to the background and setting completely focusing on the atmosphere.
An extreme long shot would make the character tiny in contrast to the background and location, often purposefully showing that as a form of the message if it is part of the story and trying to portray some sort of meaning. Like a lone desert strider being but a minuscule being in the vast, vast hills of sand.
Moving on to the more nuanced shots, an over-the-shoulder shot is exactly like it sounds like, placing a camera behind the character and focusing on whatever it is the hero is looking at, putting emphasis on the area and having the audience focus on it. A point of view (POV) shot shows things from the perspective of a character, aiming to put the audience in the shoes of the hero and possibly resonate with them and be engaged even more. Lastly, an establishing shot simply establishes the area the film is taking place in, showing the surrounding area and setting, and giving the audience an idea of what period it is.
The shots can be taken at various angles with different effects. The first angle would be a high angle, with a shot being taken above the subject being used for situations where the scene aims to portray the said subject as less powerful and smaller in contrast to something big and scary per se. A low angle would have the opposite effect, portraying the subject as strong and forceful. The less basic ones would include angles like the eye level which has the purpose of not overdramatizing the shot and giving the audience a ‘familiar’ look of sorts seeing how we see everyone at an eye-level angle in our daily lives. There are other peculiar angles such as the dutch angle, a tilted angle aiming to show the psychological uneasiness of the subject.
Next up, there are different camera movements that serve different purposes. Most of the movements are simple, however, their combinations can create good complicated effects overall. The first simple movement that can spring to one’s mind is the zoom. A zoom can refer to both zooming in and zooming out, it is used commonly to put a focus on a specific point, or sometimes just used as a means of showing movement. Similar to zoom, a Dolly movement is a more natural way of showing the aforementioned movement. In the dolly movement, the world around moves with the camera, unlike in the zoom. Next, a pan movement is when a camera remains stationary and rotates horizontally on that central axis to follow something or show the surroundings. A tilt movement is just panned movement but vertical. A slow tilt upwards on a subject works like a low-angle shot, making the subject appear bigger and more important, with the downward tilt having the opposite effect. A pedestal is like tilt, however, the camera in this movement is not fixed in place, and instead of moving angles, it moves positions, up and down, often following some sort of subject and putting the focus on them. A truck movement is exactly as it sounds, moving sideways as if strapped to a truck. Truck movements work just like pedestal, however, it is horizontal, unlike pedestal.
Moving on the Composition is what one would expect the word Cinematography would actually mean. The composition can be defined as the way elements of a scene are arranged in the shot. Shot composition is the same and refers to the way visual elements are arranged to convey the desired message.
The first part of using composition is the proportions in the scene. This is the most obvious part of the composition and is put simply as whether or not the subjects and mise-en-scene in the shot fit together and relate in terms of scale and size.
The next important thing to note is where the emphasis and focus are put. The audience needs to be directed to where to look to have the intended experience and receive the meant message. If done wrong a viewer can end up focusing on something completely unrelated to the plot of the media text and miss out completely on a vital part. Using different types of shots, angles and movements mentioned previously correctly would prevent that.
There exists a technique of sorts, a technique so simple yet so effective. It’s called the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is just dividing the shot into 3 by 3 rectangles (yes, it has to be rectangles or it won’t look good otherwise), with lines separating these rectangles. The rule is to place the things you want the audience to focus on to be placed on the lines. And as for the things you want the most focus on, put them on the intersections.
Look at this frame from the Mr. Robot drama series. In this shot, the face of the character is placed on the intersection of the aforementioned lines, and the rest of the body is aligned with a line running across. The lines of course don’t stay in the final product. You don’t necessarily have to always use this trick but using it often just makes the scenes look better.
In Breaking Bad, through the rule of thirds, an emphasis is put on the gun pointed at the road for a more dramatic effect. You can probably visualize the rule of thirds’ lines and see how it helps the gun be labeled as an important piece of mise-en-scene.
Finally, the depth of field. The DOF (Depth of Field) is both a complicated and easy part of cinematography. The DOF can be defined as “the distance between the closest and farthest object in an image that is in apparent sharp focus”. To put it simply, some things would either be blurred because of their distance or everything would be in sharp focus. These two types of DOF are known as shallow and deep respectively.
Take this shot from ‘The Hateful Eight’, everything here is focused which makes this a deep DOF shot. Deep DOF images often are used when there isn’t a need to focus on something specific for psychological and emotional value, since that’s what shallow depth is for. The deep depth shows everything in the scene, sometimes for the purpose of showing off the beautiful background, like that snowy forest in the shot.
Now take this close-up shot from ‘Blade Runner’, complete focus on the character and the background is blurry. This shallow depth of field is most often used to put significance on a character and focus on the emotional aspect even further, perhaps even having the audience resonate with the hero. The background is blurred out since it is of no importance here and isn’t particularly interesting either.
Overall, that about sums it up for Cinematography.
There are of course more aspects that are far more complicated and arguably do not really fall under cinematography but still relate to it nonetheless, such things I would discuss in my other blogs that are up to you if you ever wish to read them.
(Knowledge incorporated from school lessons and source: StudioBinder et al. (2023) The art and craft of Cinematography explained, StudioBinder. Available at: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cinematography/ )
