Oysters Oysters, Oysters everywhere

I watched a stunning 4 minute video about the past, present and future, of motion picture camera, with the evolution of new technologies, allowing otherwise impossible shot without them. But it got me thinking, with all this new technology, is it advancing the quality of filming or is it making it worse and more lazier.
with the invention of sound within movies the cameras had to be silenced from the loud noises that they often made from running the film, this often ment being put into small silent rooms with the camera opperators, which restricted the creativeness of the shots. This made made the cinematography much less interesting and able to use the cinematography to help tell the story. It wasn’t until much later when cameras became more silent and smaller in which allowed cinematographers to play with the shots.

 

And now it’s happening all over again, with lighting. With more and more cameras coming out with a higher native ISO. It’s allowing cinematographers to become lazy again but this time with lighting. The higher ISO cameras means cinematographers use Oyster lighting more and more, instead of using lighting. This is easily found within indie films, with being on a tight budget the DOP’s use more shots without any lighting involved (Oysters), which intern saves more money with working with a small budget. With comprising of mostly oyster shots thes film take on more of a documentary feel. Which unless that is the goal, can compromise the shots from having a “CINEMATIC LOOK”.

Killing baby's

during the week our group pitched ideas for the game cinematic trailer we are creating. While I was listening to these awesome and fantastic worlds and technical aspects that they were coming up with for the video game a clip poped into my head of a cinematography that I look up to Roger deakens, talking about how film has become more product orientated rather than story and content orientated. While thinking about this I noticed how awesome these pitches were set in but that they were lacking in the actual story and how the characters were affected by things, not focusing on writing a character, in making them easily relatable for the player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zroANjaiZeQ

afer everyone gave tyheir pitches the team had a secret ballet to determine the two ideas that are going to be developed to one idea that well be choosen for the script. It ended up that my idea was one of the two ideas choosen, which im happy about but I realised how hard it was, in that everyone had different ideas for my idea. I understand that it happens all the time with script development and helps evolve the story but I cant stop thinking about the saying “killing some baby's” (in the metaphorical sense sense).

Writing with Light

So the group roles have been decided and I have been given Cinematographer and colourist (the two roles I was hoping for YES!!!!)  But, I’m left thinking. I understand what a cinematographer does in a traditional sense with the medium of film and television but what requires them through a video game and cinematic trailer? So I decided to search about gaming cinematographers and came upon a YouTube video of Eric Monacelli, Cinematographer of uncharted 3 and he says that his aim was to make sure that the gamers “became immersed in that game world” which got me thinking that their essentially exactly the same, in that with both roles, the aim is to “immerse” the gamer/viewer into the world through visuals to tape into their emotions depending on which ones are required for the certain scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2muRt__jynU

Through the week (still thinking about the role of cinematographer I decided to watch “cinematography style” in the documentary vittorio storaro appears in the darkness with a lit household bulb placing it in various positions and as he changes the position, he shows how it can also change the feeling and help “tall a story”.  As someone who struggle literately, Mr Storaro says something that catches my attention, he says how by deciding where to put the bulb, you can write with light. This statement forces me to pause and think. Being terrible with words and describing thing verbally I’ve never been good at telling a story, but I have always been interested anything and everything visual and with visual’s it doesn’t matter about being able to tell a story with words because I’m able to tap into the viewer’s emotions with pictures and write a story with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eobw_x_ky2k