It took me a while to get this put together because of other life events, but I had as a project to try and recreate a scene from a movie, shot-for-shot. In this case, I put together a scene from Bong Joon Ho’s movie, Memories of Murder. It was really a good learning experience, because it got me to really understand both the scene itself, as well as the “logic” of how the scene was put together. It also helped me to start to understand the editing process, as I had to make some decisions on my own, based on the footage that I had taken over a 10-minute period in our dining room.

In this scene, the protagonist expresses a viewpoint – which is posted throughout the movie (I think? its been a while since I’ve seen it) that he has “shaman eyes” and is able to see things that are not immediately obvious. The chief of the police department challenges him on this point, pointing to a pair sitting at a neighboring desk, consisting of a rapist and the brother of the victim, who caught him in the act and dragged him into the precinct. The chief asks the protagonist to identify which of the two was the criminal, which invites the viewer to think about the extent of the protagonist’s powers (and the answer as to whether he has shaman eyes or not is not revealed in this scene).

The scene utilizes a few different camera angles – I had to add another one (the closeup of the police chief, which is a bulldog salt shaker) in order to break up the shots a little bit – as I don’t have an actual scene partner to add an interactive element to the scene. (In the movie, the shot of the protagonist and chief conversing takes up almost half of the scene). But I think I am starting to get how things were put together. There were interesting shot choices – the subtle lean-in of the camera when the dialogue comes closer to the “hook” of the scene, and the cut to the protagonist leaning toward the chief’s test subjects (here, a pair of Japanese pagoda lamps). It may seem obvious, but I understand a little better how much the scene-writing is important, and not just a matter of getting pretty camera angles.

The shots are otherwise very sepia-toned because the room has a lot of incandescent-colored light, which makes it more difficult to color-correct. But not really the focus of the project. But otherwise I think I got a lot out of this. I may try a few more shot-for-shot exercises before maybe taking a scene from a script and figuring out for myself how I’d want to shoot it, or maybe even writing a scene myself from the ground up. This scene was just so cool as an intellectual exercise, I hadn’t really thought about it much until I tried to put it together myself.

After the issues with outdoor shooting last week, I cleaned my lens – in this case a Takumar F1.2 50mm, and did some shooting outside. While the universal glow effect did disappear with a clean lens, there were still some dots that appeared in the image, which you can see below. Given this, I took a look inside my camera and saw that there were some spots. While they initially looked like spots on the sensor, they were in fact spots on the IR-cut filter, which covers the sensor itself. I cleaned those up, and when the IR-cut filter looked clean, I shot some additional footage, some of it straight into the sun, and as you can see, it looks like the image is for all intents and purposes free of spots. There are of course lens flares galore with the Takumar, but that’s perfectly fine. And the last few images that you see out of the camera when everything is clean, look really spectacular I think.

Next week, I think I’m going to tackle a series of projects, where I find a scene from a movie, and shoot something similar to it, just to get a sense of how to set things up for a shot or series of shots. This will, I guess, require a bit of acting, but all the more things that I will learn as a part of increasing my skill set.

The assignment for today was to shoot a transition from outside to inside. I also wanted to include a basic match cut.

I haven’t shot film outside in a while, and wanted to get practice with that, since lighting is very different. Here, I ran into an easily-identifiable problem, because you can see the shadows of dust specks in the shot – something that doesn’t show up when you shoot inside. So, I basically need to clean the lens. Cleaning the lens will also, I suspect, cut down on the blooming glow that you see in the shots that include the sky – which while overcast, is nevertheless a significant source of light.

Because I didn’t want to stay outside for long, I also handheld the camera, and wanted to test the stabilization capabilities internal to DaVinci Resolve, which I’m sure are great, but which did not result in super smooth video, at least not without applying a more severe stabilization algorithm. Not the biggest issue, because I was really whipping the camera around, and I don’t plan to do much handheld video work in the future.

That said, the inside video I think looks really great compared to what I’m used to capturing. I think I also learned an exposure concept, which is something that is very different from the audio world. In the audio world, you don’t want the track to distort because that kind of distortion can easily distract from the general listening experience. But in the video world, distortion is not terrible – there is distortion (clipping) in the sky. You want to shoot so that the object of the viewer’s attention (as you intend) is exposed correctly. I think working in audio world for so long, I always tried to correct video work to avoid any kind of distortion (clipping) at all cost. But I’m less averse to that now, and that leads to better exposure and correction.

The match cut worked just fine I guess. In the “narrative” of the shot, I just used the fiction of an object being found outside, and then viewed inside, as a way to create an occasion for a match cut. The goal is really just for the viewer to connect the dots, which is not a big leap for the viewer, so I think it turned out fine. What was interesting to think about is how becoming comfortable with different types of cuts can themselves be occasions for building narrative. As one becomes comfortable with more kind of cuts, the director has more avenues for story-telling?

Of course, there is a cut-on-action also built into this clip, which also worked out reasonably well, and allows an occasion for the match-cut itself, to connect back to the more general assumed narrative of someone finding a watch outside, and bringing it inside to examine.

My assignment was to put together a short scene that involved several transitions and a dialogue, using the more speeded up process that I used before for color correction. Here, I have maybe 4-5 different shots, the first two cuts are what I now know are called “cut on action”, and the remaining cuts are some kind of dialogue cut, or a POV cut? The way I see it, is that the cut to the bottle works, because it is cutting to what the protagonist is seeing. Alternatively, the cut draws on the viewer’s understanding that they are watching a dialogue.

In either case, the color correction presets I had developed worked, even though this is shot in the daytime, which was great to see work. (I made a slight adjustment in a separate node where I adjusted gain but that was it).

This was also an experiment in a concept that I’ve been thinking through, using subtitles to allow me to vary the dialogue of the actors regardless of what they are saying. (Because I do music video work, it sort of doesn’t matter what they actually say, so if I can write my own dialogue independently, that is always interesting).

I have always had difficulty with color-correction, and have gotten in my head about it. What I decided to do with this video was to use some LUTs to make the process of color correction faster. I suppose a while back I might have felt that color correction was an expressive part of the process of filmmaking. Probably because I used to be a painter, and color correction shares so much psychology with the act of rendering in painting.

But part of developing filmmaking skills involves, I think, practice. And in order to get as much practice as possible, I need to streamline the process. And this involves streamlining color correcting. I am sure I am using all of the language wrong, but I used two LUTs. One prepares the LOG film to look more “regular” (REC709?), and the other lightly adjusts it to look “stylized”. Unlike in the before times, I’m saving the color-correction settings so I can re-use them in all future projects.

In the clip below, I decided to shoot two night shots with minimal indoor light, because I have always had difficulty with that. (And BlackMagic cameras are notoriously not great with low light). I also used two different lenses, because I wanted to see if the Lomo Minitar lens (with I got in the last year) rendered colors that differently my Takumars. It’s not that different! And I think these came out so much better than when I tried to color correct everything from scratch! Took me almost no time from shooting the video to color correction to compiling.

I’ve started this blog, using an old website, to work on my film skills while I’m in between albums. Unlike many indie musicians you might have heard of, I began releasing albums when I didn’t have the money to pay someone to make music videos for me. So, I started making my own music videos as part of the press process for an album release. Over the years, I’ve come to really enjoy the process of making music videos. The format is short enough that it doesn’t beg for an expensive production, but you have a lot of freedom over what it is that you choose to shoot. (Despite the fact that music videos have become a cliche in the modern day).

Nevertheless, there is still a lot more that I can learn from the process, so I decided I might try and give myself something like abstract film school assignments, and see what I can shoot in a given week. I’ll come up with an assignment – many will be very mundane – and see what I end up with. Provide some notes on what I learned, and what worked and what didn’t and go from there. Maybe by the end of this process, I will have expanded my skills for when the next round of music videos need to get made.

Cheers.