We Have Film School At Home

The initial assignment I think was a little ambitious for me, so I’ve broken it down into learning subparts. I was going to shoot a dialogue scene from an Ozu film, The End of Summer. But unlike the previous assignment, I was really trying to get the spirit of the camera angles, which is so distinctive of Ozu’s films. So, for this first subpart project, I just wanted to shoot basically 3 angles – one with both characters in the scene, and one with each of the characters speaking to the other.

The issue of getting the correct shots for each, however, ended up being an issue with trying to balance focal length and field of view, though I know how to try and attack the issue again next time. Basically, I thought with the close quarters, I would try and shoot the scene with a 35mm instead of a 50mm lens. The wisdom being that I would be able to shoot the scene needed without having to back up so far – where distance from the scene is not in great abundance.

You can see the problem mainly in the second shot, where it was not possible for me to move far enough back – but even there, the closeness of the subject causes some distortion that changes the feel of the shot. While the other scenes were shot with a 35mm, I was able to zoom in on the subject to essentially approximate something closer to a 50mm shot – and because the camera was actually further away from the subject in both shots, it minimized the distortion (especially when zoomed in). So, I actually like the first and third shots in this scene a fair bit.

I think the lesson in all this is to just shoot with a 50mm lens, and to simply place subjects in spots where I have the distance to shoot with the 50mm. This, I guess, is the art of what they call blocking. So I guess in subpart 2 of this project, I’m going to shoot these basic shots again, with the 50mm instead of the 35mm, as much as I would love to shoot with my Lomo LC-A Minitar-1. What I will say, is that I think I’m starting to get a feel for these different lenses and how I want to use them in different situations.

One nice thing about moving to the 50mm is that it allows me a much better F-stop. The Minitar-1 has a lowest F2.8 – though I bumped it up to F5 in these shots in order to widen the depth of field that I see in Ozu’s shots. The Takumar 50mm is an F1.4 which lets a lot more light in. And while the lower F-stop generally means narrower depth of field, because the camera is further away, the main subjects are going to be generally in similar depth-ranges, making it a bit less of a concern.

One other nice thing though, I was able to shoot these scenes at F5 indoors at night, and still ended up with a passable image. Even stopping down the Takumar a few notches, I can still shoot at F2.8, making it easier to get the light I need in these night shots.

Finally, watching this progress of three shots, I started to think about how the characters were introduced into the scene. Without an introduction, the transition from the first scene to the second is confusing, since you don’t have many cues to link the subject in the shot to a specific character in the first scene. (He is wearing a different jacket, but I think you need to give the brain more links, is my feeling). How would I go about addressing that? It got me thinking about the scenes I would put in prior to the first scene, and that got me thinking about how I would set that up, and the transition shots for that. This is all to say, I think I’m starting to develop some of the intuitions I need to put together more complicated short films.