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 tends to use wider lenses. Using longer lenses makes the audience feel like they aren’t intruding on the events, instead, observing; detached from what’s happening, as if they are thinking back on a memory.
My friends were visiting for the weekend and, as it was summer, I took advantage of the opportunity to capture the beauty of summer sunlight. Summer light is different than any other time of the year; the brightness and warmth of the sun shifts the blue of the sky to a warmer tone, and the harshness of the summer sun creates a beautiful ambient light. This light also let me see the flaring of these lenses in action; when not actively searching for flares.
For the interior half of the video, I wanted to use a hard top light. This is something I feel I have shied away from with my cinematography; I tend to use a softer light from the side or slightly above. But, I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and use a hard light straight down from above. This resulted in a very nice look; the table acted like a bounce board, bouncing the light back up into the subjects’ faces, the wood tone creating a lot of warmth in the shadows of the subjects’ faces. This controlled the contrast of this setup, stopping the shadows from being too overpowering.
I didn’t want to colour-correct the variations in exposure between shots as I thought it felt reminiscent of older movies when exposing for film would be a gamble that wouldn’t always pay off, resulting in a few slightly darker shots in a scene; leaning into that nostalgic and vintage feel for the experiment.
Most of my colour grading process for this experiment was just slightly exaggerating what was already captured in camera; the saturated and warm blue of the sky, the warm greens, and pushing the highlights warmer and lowering the whites, giving the project a glowy and faded look.
I also used the fine-grain 35mm overlay I used in my last experiment, adding to the nostalgic tone of the project. Again recreating the halation characteristic of film stock.
However, I am not a huge fan of the exact movement of this camera when using it hand-held. It feels a bit too jagged and abrupt with some of its movements, not how hand-held camera movement feels in professionally made films. To solve this, in the future I might mount it on my tripod, while keeping the tripod at its shortest level, and holding the tripod. This would add more weight to it, making the hand-held movements smoother and much more desirable.
I really love how this experiment turned out. I think the colours and light look gorgeous, and I do think I achieved that nostalgic and reminiscent feel.