Category: Experimentation
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Camera & Lighting Tests for ‘Kitchen Sink Drink’
Originally a short film I was tasked with creating for my Film Studies A-Level, I remake it every couple of years to see how I have grown as a cinematographer and filmmaker. I decided to shoot in colour this time, unlike the previous one, with a focus on mixing colour temperatures and static camera movements.…
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Camera & Grading Tests For ‘Brothers And Sisters’
These are a selection of frames from the camera tests I did for a short film I will be shooting this summer titled ‘Brothers and Sisters’. I wanted to go for a very low-contrast but high-saturation look, injecting a lot of blue into the shadows, often front lighting when I can with the sun. The…
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Camera & Lighting Tests For Upcoming Project
Below are some frames of the camera and lighting tests for an upcoming short film I’m working on, nicknamed ‘Gothic Religious Film’. Continuing to experiment with faking anamorphic lenses like in my last blog post, which goes into much more depth on the subject. Also experimenting with a 16mm Kodak 500T film stock emulation. I’m…
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Creating A Classical Hollywood Look
I spent my summer developing a look I will soon use in a narrative piece I nicknamed “50s French Film”. The key characteristics of the look are a monochromatic presentation and a classic cinemascope aspect ratio of 2.55:1. I was inspired by various French films of the 1950s that were shot in black and white that…
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Exterior Lighting Tests
Some recent exterior lighting tests I did.
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Day-for-Night Experimentation
I had read about the work that Yedlin had done on Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019) and Hoytema had done on Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022), and how they had shot a lot of the night exterior shots during the daytime. This proved to have many advantages; in reality, at night, the sky is lighter than…
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Hard Grain Experimentation
I recently watched The Devil All The Time (Antonio Campos, 2020) and loved the brutal and vintage look that cinematographer Lol Crawley achieved. I wanted to experiment with this style, however, much of this was because of the film stock they shot on, but I don’t have the ability to shoot on film. So I…
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Documentary Style Filmmaking
I really admire the documentary-style filmmaking of Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020) and First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018), and wanted to experiment with using my camera hand-held. However, one thing I might do differently, as I am trying to achieve a nostalgic and reminiscent feel to this experiment, is to use longer lenses, unlike Nomadland which…
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Using Light to Create Shape
I really love the dynamic range of the camera and wanted to see how I could use harshly contrasted lighting to create shapes, reminiscent of noir films. I thought interior sunlight would work well for this, as there is no ambient light filling in the shadows as there is for exterior shots coming from the…