Cinematography

This is a thread for all things cinematographic. I'm an amateur (film) photographer and have had an interest in cinematography for the last couple of years, mostly browsing on places cinematography.com and soaking up the jargon and techniques from folks like Roger Deakins and David Mullen.

Here's a question for Kevin/trev - how did Ernest Laszlo get his signature hard-lit look for films like SHIP OF FOOLS, FANTASTIC VOYAGE, AIRPORT and LOGAN'S RUN? What film stock and lighting set-ups did he use?

It does my street cred no good to admit this, but I didn't even realize the same guy shot all those movies, to be honest (and I mix him up with Andrew L too.) I love the way the metal of the plane is dark and shiny in 'PORT, that's for sure.

This gives me a good excuse to go find VOYAGE again, as I recently got FOOLS on BR with LILITH, plus I plan on buying the SOYLENT/OMEGAMAN/LOGAN triple bill BR when it comes out in a couple months.

My semi-educated guess about the look of a lot of stuff from that era, including some of the Bonds, is that the slower stocks requiring more lighting just gives a look that is very compelling to the eye (MY eye, anyway), moreso by far than the available light look in the 70s when faster stocks were commonplace. That's not to take away from all those awesome Gordon Willis and Owen Roizman films of the 70s in any way, just that in terms of rewatchability, I find 60s stuff with its saturation of color very addicting, and that includes TV (would not want to compare UNCLE with THE WALTONS, ferinstance.)

I'm not sure if this ever came up here before, but I remember a couple of interviews with Jerry Finnerman (TOS, MOONLIGHTING) in which he mentioned how a lot of classic portraiture and B&W techniques were what he employed on TREK to get a quality he called half-tones (which he learned from somebody he apprenticed with, might have been Haller, not sure.) But it involves bringing the light to edge you and then dropping it down down exposure wise to where you think you're in trouble ... and that's where the magic happens. I used to have an 8x10 of Shat in TheChair, a closeup profile view, and that half-tone is there, it is like you've got a big rim backlight, but on this side there is only a smidgen of detail, but it isn't mushy, it is crisply dark, if that makes any sense.

Nowadays with Alexa and the F65 and the cameras coming out, the push is much more toward available light, or just working with the available light by amplifying to get it to play out further across the frame than it would in reality. I think this rather drastic change in approach to lighting is one of the things that really bother me about the last couple years of MAD MEN ... the darkness is murk rather than defined, and the fact a show about the 60s doesn't have that definition is kind of a weird flag to me, sort of like that Ryan Gosling gangster pic that was shot on digital or the Johnny Depp one, which just look to me like camcorder recordings of people playing at making a movie.

(I'll try to check in more often, just been busy again as of late.)

I remember listening to the commentary of Mike Nichols's CATCH-22, with Steven Soderbergh saying how with that film, David Watkin invented modern cinematography as we know it, or at least was the first to bring it to a mainstream American audience. Softer lighting as opposed to the traditional 3-point lighting set-up of the studio pictures of that era.

Interesting topic about it here:

http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=14957&page=1

trevanian wrote:

Nowadays with Alexa and the F65 and the cameras coming out, the push is much more toward available light, or just working with the available light by amplifying to get it to play out further across the frame than it would in reality. I think this rather drastic change in approach to lighting is one of the things that really bother me about the last couple years of MAD MEN ... the darkness is murk rather than defined, and the fact a show about the 60s doesn't have that definition is kind of a weird flag to me, sort of like that Ryan Gosling gangster pic that was shot on digital or the Johnny Depp one, which just look to me like camcorder recordings of people playing at making a movie.

I thought that Ryan Gosling gangster pic had the most beautiful visual appearance since Blade Runner, and it didn´t look un-fitting at all to me.

Just watched Manhunter again the other night. I´m still awfully in love with a lot of things Dante Spinotti did in that film. Especially how the first and final shots with Graham look like paintings even though perfectly fotographic and full of 80s colours. I love the colours throughout the whole film. And nobody does better shots over the shoulder of one actor onto another actor.

Interesting topic. You clearly are an expert, Trevanian. Nice having someone so knowledgable  around.
Some of my favourite cinematographers: Michael Ceresin, Roger Deakins, Geoffrey Unsworth, John Alcott, Robert Rodriguez, Bill Pope, Stephen Burum, Dariusz Wolski, Alfonso Cuaron, Giulio Albonico, Fabian Wagner, Vittorio Storaro, Michael Ballhaus, Henri Alekan.

Phantom Commander wrote:

Interesting topic. You clearly are an expert, Trevanian. Nice having someone so knowledgable  around.
Some of my favourite cinematographers: Michael Ceresin, Roger Deakins, Geoffrey Unsworth, John Alcott, Robert Rodriguez, Bill Pope, Stephen Burum, Dariusz Wolski, Alfonso Cuaron, Giulio Albonico, Fabian Wagner, Vittorio Storaro, Michael Ballhaus, Henri Alekan.

IMO that's a really good list. Out of that list, I've interviewed Pope, Wolski three times, Storaro, Deakins at least six times and Cuaron, though as a director when he had Chivo as his DP.

I really liked Owen Roizman's work in the 70s and early 80s (he was a total chameleon going from FRENCH CONNECTION to EXORCIST to NETWORK, or from TAPS to TRUE CONFESSIONS to TOOTSIE), along with damned near all of Gordon Willis and Conrad Hall work. Fraker was pretty good too, but I find a tad too much diffusion on a lot of his stuff (Hall runs up against that too sometimes.)

I started out writing about visual effects and didn't get into cinematography articles till about a decade later, but that was opportune because that is when digital was really starting out round the turn of the century so I was able to get educated about the stuff I was utterly clueless on (always shot film, reversal film, only shot one video in my life actually, so digital was a very hard sell for me, though I now grudgingly admit it has its place ... Hoyte's work on HER is a rarity for him, shot on digital, but to me it looks absolutely as it should.)

The big issue for cinematographers now is trying to protect the image, because there are so many tools now that can be used in postproduction to alter what was shot in much more extreme ways than during the photo-chemical era. One cinematographer told me he saw a trailer commercial for a movie and it was 30 seconds before he realized it was his own project, because they had quite literally changed night into day in post, doing some kind of faux lighting tricks that absolutely horrified him. Without getting more specific, I can say that I've seen the trailers for the film, and the day stuff in the trailer looked like it was a TELETUBBIES episode, just grotesque beyond belief.

Now we have filmmakers de-graining (or perhaps de-balling is a better phrase) their own movies years after the fact, removing grain from the image so the film more clearly resembles contemporary product. Blu-ray.com has got some vigorous discussions about the new versions of most of Cameron's movies that are now popping up, and I'd direct you to those if you have any interest in ALIENS, ABYSS, TRUE LIES and TITANIC, all of which have been 'affected' to some degree or other (TERMINATOR 2 on UHD was already ruined years back, which is why I only have the blu-ray.)

Good point about all the new tools available. Makes you admire the film makers of old the more, who had to cope without all those gizmos.

Any of those interviews available online somewhere, trevanian?

Phantom Commander wrote:

Good point about all the new tools available. Makes you admire the film makers of old the more, who had to cope without all those gizmos.

Any of those interviews available online somewhere, trevanian?

A whole lot of them are on the icgmagazine.com website, though they seem to be putting more recent stuff on a site called issuu.com, in whole-issue form. Some of my stuff from the mid-2010s seems to be inaccessible right now, not sure why.

The ICG site also has the EXPOSURE Q&As, which are usually with filmmakers of some note, and a lot of those are good too, though a few of the couple dozen that I've done didn't turn out (Oliver Stone was really vague.)

Last I checked, none of my American Cinematographer stories were online, but thare aren't that many of those anyway.

Studiodaily.com is no longer in business, but my stories there are still some archived form of the site, and most of those are DP-oriented.

Thanks, have bookmarked that icgmagazine. Gonna take a lookaround later.