The Moving Pictures pt 1

Movies are often taken for granted. Cinema as a place to hang out with friends, renting a movie as a way of spending evenings. And TV… well, let’s not talk about TV today, shall we?

Instead I will try to encourage you to take a closer look at the next movie you will be watching. I bet you will find there a lot of inspiration if you look for it!

The techniques used in movies are usually a bit different from the ones we use in photography. When the action is important, things going around matter less. Obviously it all depends on the type of a movie. I have observed that there are actually three types of films when it comes to art:

• Everyday drama
• High fantasy or science fiction
• Artistic drama

And I’m not using drama according to series, just a story.

Everyday drama is a movie which cares about the story, not visual effects. It usually takes place during the day, eventually during the night under way too bright street lights. However, the scenes are prepared to show us everyday places, they show “reality”. I’m not saying these movies are bad, no, I watch a lot of them actually. They just aren’t much interesting photographically.

“High” fantasy or sci-fi are movies with high digital (or overall fx) budget. They usually have beautiful, painted sceneries, great effects, lots of green-box and beyond. There aren’t many such movies that would have a good story at the same time, but I watch them anyway to check out what are the newest digital trends. People into photo-manipulation usually love those.

Artistic dramas… well, these rarely come by. It can be a piece of art by itself or at least a damn beautiful movie.

I know, I know, it’s all theoretical! Actually only a short bit of my theory… I just wanted to show you my point of view. To be clear. Below, I will be talking about the pictures, the lighting and the mood, not about stories or characters!

With all that clear we can begin with an everyday piece called The Nines:

Except the psychedelic feel of the movie (which is great btw) most of the frames are as plain as the one above. Lighting is soft, like during the cloudy day or under trees, or in a room with big, bright walls. And that’s basically where most of the action is. No big deal. In this movie, the plain lighting was creating an illusion of reality. It was showing that everything is normal, nothing to worry about. Sun is at it’s usual place, world is normal.

Let’s try another everyday film that, however, has quite a bit of sci-fi scenes:

Overall the Knowing is quite dark, lots of night scenes and indoors. Although look at Nicolas Cage. Usually, his movies contain a lot of perfectly prepared “portrait” scenes. You can think of his acting whatever you wish, that’s not the point. Each of his movies has at least a few scenes that are actually portraits. They usually happen to have awesome lighting, no matter what hour, weather or place there is. Look at the right frame. It is night. They are in a dark house with no lights inside. The only source of light should be the flashlight and, eventually, the moon. And what do you see? The background is quite bright and the face? Yup, if you look closer there are two sources, one definitely over the camera to the left and second below to the right, probably softboxes.

Want more examples? Try National Treasure. You will be amazed how bright the underground can be… I’m not saying the light needs to look natural, I’m far from that.

Ok, but let’s move on. Anyone seen Iron Man? An interesting sci-fi movie with definitely nice budget:

When it comes to lighting techniques there is a plethora of examples in there. Every time the mood changes, the lighting is different, however, what is quite unusual, the lighting is consistent. There are no jumps of mood when the character is in the same place and time. We will talk about realism in sci-fi another time…

I know I’m not writing a lot about how to achieve those moods. The purpose of this article is to sensitize you to the lighting in movies. Learning to observe the light in movies is harder than in paintings mostly because it’s moving, changing dynamically, making you look at the action, not the little details.

If I told you that most of those impressive movies such as Iron Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers or new Terminator look bad, you would laugh at me. The thing is you never looked at actual frames, but went with a flow of the movie. They look great while moving, a lot happens, it’s hard to catch up with details. I often wonder how do they make such a great illusion… Photographers have it harder, what is not in the frame is just not there, no way to pretend, nothing moves, nothing distracts, spectator has all time he wants to look closely at every detail.

There are movies that care about all those little details, these are what I call artistic dramas. But again, it’s totally subjective. For some examples try Lost in Translation, or Elegy, or American Gangster, or MR. Brooks, or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the genre really doesn’t matter when it come to artistic movies. There is more, we will come to it, don’t worry. For a little sample see this frame from The Fountain:

See you next week!