More on lighting for different shades of skin

Lighting for Different skin tones

This is a good article that gives background behind how film stocks were created to make particular skin tones look realistic. 

Boots Riley: ‘In film, the more personal you get, the more universal you get

Born in Chicago in 1971 and moving to the city of Oakland, California, six years later, Riley was steeped in politics from an early age. His parents were social justice organisers and their son followed suit, joining the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labor party at 15. In 1991, he formed hip-hop collective the Coup and went on to release six politically charged albums, notably 1998’s acclaimed Steal This Album.

Making movies was a long-held aspiration – Riley studied film at San Francisco State university and spent years honing the script for Sorry to Bother You. His persistence paid off: the film was described by the New Yorker as “a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury”, while AO Scott in the New York Times wrote: “If you’re not bothered – also tickled, irked, mystified and provoked – [by Sorry to Bother You], then you’ve fallen asleep on the job.”

Read the article: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/25/boots-riley-musician-director-sorry-to-bother-you-interview

Lighting for black people- what we can learn from Ava Duvernay!

People of a certain age (and certain hue) look back on old high school yearbook pictures with mixed feelings. Chances are, the more melanin you had, the less likely you would show up as anything more attractive than a smudge, a muddy smirk — or worse, a lurking presence — as you hovered in the back row of the chess club photo.

Part of the problem is that racism was built into film processing. Until the 1990s, professional film developers compared the skin tones in photographs against a universal guide known as “Shirley cards” which helped them figure out the right mix of chemicals to process a photo properly.
The Shirleys were always white and demure.

Directing styles and particular looks- the Auteur idea- Wes Anderson and David Lynch

Color

McArthur Park - Cutting on Action to music

MacArthur Park from sarah lewison on Vimeo.

shot length- a matter of style and form

https://stephenfollows.com/many-shots-average-movie/

Spike Jonze- How they Get Here

DIRECTOR HOMAGE- READINGS TO INSPIRE YOU AND A VIDEO

WATCH: George Lucas in Love

Read: Elder - these are a selection of short interviews with directors. Please read this and pay attention to the detail and depth- and personal content in the questions and answers in these interviews. These are a model for you to use in your writing about a director. I recommend the book too- it will be placed on reserve for your class, in case you are interested in any of the directors in this book- posted below


Table of Contents from Robert K Elder, The Film that Changed my Life. 30 Directors on their ephiphanies in the dark  On reserve at the library

Narrative Homage

The auteur theory of cinema proposes that directors have styles and they should be recognized as artists much as we might identify the style of a painter or musician. For this project, we run with that idea.

The auteur theory, which was derived largely from Astruc's elucidation of the concept of caméra-stylo (“camera-pen”), holds that the director, who oversees all audio and visual elements of the motion picture, is more to be considered the “author” of the movie than is the writer of the screenplay.Jul 20, 1998

This page features a series of works by students in RTD365A and clips from films by professionals that highlight aspects of their particular aesthetic focus.

Student film and below inspirational director Michel Gondry

bonus content! Michel Gondry film with David Cross as a turd

TErry Gilliam (12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Wes Anderson

Terrence Malik Motifs

Malick Motifs from Rachel Glassman on Vimeo.

One more of Malik: film uses a monologue

New directors:
Website of new directors


Dave Meyers- mostly music videos and commercials
https://www.radicalmedia.com/us/directors/dave-meyers?reel=commercial

Terence Nance (An oversimplification of her beauty)

Swimming in your skin again by Nance

Music video directors



2 clips from Orlando by Sally Potter who makes films where characters challenge traditional gender roles

Kuleshov effect

Three pairs of images from the film experiment carried out by the Russian psychologist Lev Kuleshov around 1920. Kuleshov discovered that audiences interpreted the actor's expression (the right of each pair, and all identical) in relation to the image it was paired with (left of each pair). The actor was perceived as hungry, sad, romantically intrigued, etc., depending on what was edited together with the actor. Kuleshov's results significantly influenced the development of montage theory.


Wherein two unrelated shots are connected in order to create a meaning, or to provide subjective motivation to a character.

Mockumentary- and self portrait

putting shots together
Kuleshov effect

http://rtv365.blogspot.com/2017/01/kuleshov-effect.html


The Life Of Pitti Peacocks - Pitti Uomo Mockumentary from Aaron Christian on Vimeo.


Missing in Iceland: a mockumentary from Alexandra Guité on Vimeo.

Here is a self portrait- its actually HONEST, but notice how he uses first person effectively to make you see things a particular way?

by David Goold

This is a video produced for the homage assignment but it tells a story about a person and who they care about- which could be true or false..

This was shot as if it was in a dream- one way to communicate something that may or may not be true.

Literally a portrait. Is this story true??

Homage+ style + David Lynch

Surrealism

Soviet theory of montage

SOVIET OR DIALECTICAL MONTAGE (Sergei Eisenstein)
CONTINUITY MONTAGE (DW Griffith)

Theory of montage:
Putting together shots to make a more interesting visual language.
Montage = assembly of shots

End of WWI
Russia impoverished and
 after the end of WWI 160 million people
Film means of mass communication
pre-revolutionary cinema was a capitalist cinema- filmmakers were driven out
New cinema committee was created as well as a new film school
founded in 1919.
The world's first film school.
Newsreels were to be used to support the new regime- agitation and propaganda = agitprop
people also wanted to study film
Lev Kuleshov- was pre-revolutionary filmmaker who shot newsreels during the long civil war
He was allowed to set up his own workshop with students to study film.


INTOLERANCE- movie by DW Griffith was made in 1916 and was fascinating to the Russians who deconstructed the editing style and the shots themselves in order to understand film language.


Kuleshov Effect- alternating shots of the identical expressionless face between three other shots reveals that the shot of different objects will impact the way the audience interprets the

the meaning of film emerges not only from spatial composition but also
through the order or arrangement of the shots

CREATIVE GEOGRAPHY (viewer constructs geography themselves as they are guided by the arrangement of shots)

Film transcends space and time-= film is born in the edit

MONTAGE- from French verb monter = assemble
Sergei Eisenstein was a student at the school; considered a peer with Griffith who developed continuity and theatrical impact.  Eisenstein used an intellectual approach to build ideas.

"Battleship Potemkin" the film was pure propaganda

DIALECTICAL CINEMA--> Thesis--> antithesis --> Synthesis
(Marxist dialectic) image of state--> image of people rising up --> suppression by state
Suppression by the state --> helplessness (shot of vulnerable) --> brutal oppression

kinds of MONTAGE

METRIC MONTAGE (duration of cut)
RHYTHMIC MONTAGE
TONAL MONTAGE
OVERTONAL MONTAGE  (how sequences play against each other)
IDEOLOGICAL MONTAGE (expresses abstract ideas by posing relationships)
(in Potemkin- the lions, priests and soldiers)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=OA-F9hNk2jI


Suprematism Kapital from Cristiano Lopes Cabral on Vimeo.


DW Griffith made films starting in 1908. Although we know him best for the racist film Birth of a Nation (1915), he had already developed many of the strategies about how to shoot and cut in order to create a realistic world. Some of the things he developed include the 180 degree rule and matching eyelines.

https://vimeo.com/170027565

Collage
http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/on-collage-grabbing-the-jackalope-by-the-antl-ears/

David Holzman's Diary by Jim McBride

David Holzman's Diary from Pablo Useros on Vimeo.

This was famous at the time for seeming real but being a total fake. "Holzman, an earnest young Godard-hound, decides to film his life in order to understand it—and only succeeds in ruining it. As a voyeur, a gentle intruder into other people’s lives, he can’t understand that the filming makes his subjects feel self-conscious, or that “reality” is altered by the presence of his camera and his tape recorder and his lavalier mike, which he calls his “friends.”" From IFC website

performance

60 second and longer shots: what are we looking at?

Long shots is a great idea for some movies: make sure you know the things we are asked to look at will be interesting and provide context

From Taste of Cherry by Abbas Kiarostami

Man with a Movie Camera (1929 by Dziga Vertov)

Using Zebras for film correct exposure

The zebra pattern is a guide for choosing the right brightness in a shot.
Learn where the Zebra button is on the HDR AX2000

When you select the zebra ON, the brightness level appears on the screen. It will not be recorded.
There should be some lines in your scene for it to be bright enough to record.
Lines in the brightest areas, say on the face, is a good indicator.

You can set the threshold of the Zebras to 70% or 100% or other values. The lower the number, the less sensitive they are-- useful for different complexions.. A lower value is better for people with darker complexions. Start by exposing at 70%

In the below image, it shows the lightest part of the scene, the sky.

If there are lines everywhere, or on more than half of the image, your scene is probably overexposed. Close down the IRIS, or change your aperture to AUTO.

Zebras covering the entire face means there is not enough shadow to show depth in the face.

Here's a good exposure. the IRE (zebra values) is set on 70%

Visual Story Chapters 1, 2 and 3 (Most of part 1) Powerpoint

LINKED Chapter 1 (D2L)
Visual Story Chapters 1 and 2 Powerpoint Download

Visual Story Chapter 3 to page 42 Powerpoint Download

Workers leaving today's factories

Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Workers Leaving the Googleplex from Andrew Norman Wilson on Vimeo.

WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY (DUBAI) (preview only*) from Ben Russell on Vimeo.

Reviewing the dynamics of how shots give meaning to a story