Describing it is much harder…. Love you guys. What Dick Pope said almost at the end, that's it for me. It's searching always for the best. Of course this is relative, but that's what we have to go for. The best story, the best version of the script, the best position for the camera, the best of everything. And always answering the question: "why". Here where I am it's so hard to convince people to go for the magic. And always present, and now more than ever, Jean-Marc Selva's point: beautiful images is not what we're necessarily looking for, it's all about the story.
In fact, we're so bored by beauty already that what we really want is truth. This doesn't mean a washed-out realistic image, it means emotional truth, psychological truth. European cinema tried to go for physical truth with realistic imagery and totally missed the point of story telling with the tools available to us lighting, sound, motion, to create emotion.
Skip to main content. No Film School. By Emily Buder. Light is important because it helps create a mood.
For instance, soft lighting can make a scene look dreamy and airy. Hard lighting with harsher contrast creates a bit of drama in the photo. For a smooth look, use soft lighting that comes from a large source. On a cloudy day, clouds diffuse the light and give us soft light. Or you can try shooting with natural window light when the sun is not streaming directly into a room.
You may also want to try working with a softbox. Softboxes are a form of artificial light that spread light over a large surface, creating a soft light. Hard lighting comes from a small artificial light source—for instance, direct sunlight on a bright day. Neon signs and the glow of their light can give you a cool, futuristic effect.
Think of films like Blade Runner for cool, neon inspiration. Although a bit harder to control than artificial lighting, the weather and time of day make a huge difference to your cinematic photography. The same can be true with your images. If you want to shoot a cinematic look with a happy feel, you may want to shoot during the golden hour. The time of day and the light it provides can make a huge difference to your photos.
There is always a nice depth to a scene in movies, which allows us to focus on the main subject. This way, the background does not distract the viewer. You should use the same formula should when taking a cinematic photo.
This can be achieved by using a wide aperture. Prime lenses are sharp and create a nice bokeh effect in your photo. This means your background will be softer and your main subject sharper. This shallow depth of field draws our eye to the main subject. Prime lenses like 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm are the most popular for portraits and street photography.
These lenses usually have an F stop of about 1. This sharpness makes them great lenses to isolate your subject and control the narrative of your photo.
Alternatively, you can use a fast zoom lens with a wide aperture. A zoom lens is beneficial for street photography as it allows you to focus on your subject without getting too close. The background should be blurry enough not to distract your main subject, but its presence should still add to the photo. The background is still an important part of the story you are trying to tell as it provides context to the scene. Shooting in JPEG significantly compresses your images which means you lose vital details in your photo.
This can make it harder when trying to edit your photos to have a cinematic look. Shooting in RAW records much more information. This means you have maximum control of your editing in post-processing, as you have more to work with.
Being able to edit RAW produces much higher quality images like what would expect from a film. A cinematic photo should leave the viewer wanting more. What was going on in the moments before and after the shot that evoked this feeling? What does the shot say? Ideally, your cinematic photo will provoke an emotional response. It should be something that the viewer can connect with so that they understand the story. Think about a narrative. What are you trying to say in your image?
What story are you trying to tell? Try to capture an emotion in your photography. You can create emotion with the subject choice and framing. A key skill to creating cinematic photography is to be observant. Many cinematic-style photographs are best shot in street photography or candid situations. This is because, just like in a film, the subject is either unaware or not acknowledging the camera. This helps it feel more like a real cinema still.
Is it the lens , the lighting , color grading , the story , or something else? In this fantastic video from CookeOptics TV , some of the top cinematographers share their opinion and definitions on the topic. What most cinematographers agree is that a cinematic image is a combination of a lot of factors. It includes camera position and movement, composition, script, creating the mood and emotion, plus all of the factors I mentioned above.
Philippe Ross sees a cinematic look as something your imagination creates before you arrive at the set. How I understood it, the point is that the look puts you outside of reality, but still keeps your attention and provokes emotion. There definitely are different opinions and definitions, and many of them are different. Something else does it. It is not a well-defined technical term. Just as you can't formally describe what "beautiful" is, you can't do that with "cinematic.
If you read the title carefully, you will find it's not "How do you make images cinematic? The first one assumes any image can be made cinematic, which is the case scenario for most beginners. They have an image shot with whatever camera they have and then they try to find the secret to make it look "cinematic. It is a way to create an image that looks cinematic prior pressing the shutter button. The first approach won't always work. I can compare it to "How to make the bread I bought taste good?
The reason is you haven't started the way you should. Also called "envelope" in some editors, the "black bars" are the non-lit areas of the screen when projecting a wide-aspect ratio video such as the 2.
As your screen has different proportions, the areas that are not containing the video image will be black. There are movies that are not that "wide-looking", but still look cinematic.
Check out "Hugo:". So, the "black bars" are not the essential thing, although they can be a part of the "cinematic" look. Color grading or applying filters over images or videos is thought to be the bread and butter of the cinematic look. Usually people who need a cinematic look apply an action or a preset over an image and sometimes that doesn't look cinematic at all. Let's see how ungraded footage of a Hollywood movie looks like:.
I grabbed a sample "raw" frame from the video. Of course, I'm using just a screenshot, which is not the actual raw file information, but it works for the example. The "raw" looks desaturated and with low contrast. I increased the contrast and the saturation so that it looks "normal. As you can see the image with "normal" color correcting on the left is supposed to look real.
Although it is not blue-tinted as the final version, it still has that "cinematic" look. So, color grading is not the essential thing either, although it helps if the image looks cinematic in camera. As we have seen, a "cinematic" image can be that which is seen directly in the camera. One of the components that takes part in making of an image before it goes into the post processing phase is definitely the lighting.
Let us see a comparison between two frames from " The Truman Show :". As you can see the image at the bottom pun not intended looks "more cinematic" than the image at the top.
0コメント