Achieving the film look

1. By Tabi Zama (TabiZee) Founder of TGIM CINE SCHOOL Achieving the film look

2. Introduction What is the film look? • It is the imagery we associate with cinema. The texture and the feel we get from a hollywood movie. • We independent filmmakers sometimes go for expensive gear and don’t get the look we want. This is because its not about the gear but how you use the gear

3. Introduction We believe that the look of your shots is determined by the Production Design and Cinematography

4. Table of Content • Production Design • Introduction • Psychology of colors • Moods • Costumes • Makeup and Hairdressing

5. Production Design • Introduction • Production design is the visual arts and crafts of cinematic storytelling • It creates a cohesive pictorial scheme that directly informs and supports the story and its point of view. • The process and application of production design renders the screenplay in visual metaphors, a colour palette, architectural and period specifics, locations, designs, sets, costume, make up and hairstyles.

6. Psychology of colours • RED • Bright red is like visual caffeine. • It can activate your libido, or make you aggressive, anxious, or compulsive. In fact, red can activate whatever latent passions you might bring to the table, or to the movie. • Red is power. But red doesn’t come with a moral imperative. • Depending on the story’s needs, red can give power to a good guy or a bad guy.

7. Psychology of Colours • Because we tend to see it first, red gives the illusion of advancing toward us. Due to this, it can manipulate our sense of space. • Because bright red has this visually aggressive quality, the space does indeed appear to come forward, and it looks shallower than it actually is. • Red can also make something appear to move faster. Bright red can raise your heart rate and anxiety level. It is visually loud and can elicit anger.

8. Psychology of Colours • BLUE • Blue can be a tranquil pond or a soft blanket of sadness. It is quiet and aloof. • In blue, people become passive and introspective. • It’s a colour to think to, but not to act. • Blue is the quintessential colour for powerlessness. • Even a very pale blue has an amazing ability to influence our emotional reactions to what is happening on screen. • Steel blue and dark indigo are colours least associated with the sensual and most associated with the intellect. Governesses and maiden ladies wear dark blue.

9. Psychology of Colours • PURPLE • There have been times, particularly in romantic tales and poetry, when purple has been associated with sensuality. • There seems to be no real evidence of purple’s having an effect in the physical realm at all. • The colour did, however, hold a powerful sway in the realm of the non-corporal, the mystical, and even the paranormal. • Purple is a colon that inspires associations with the nonphysical. It sends a signal that someone or something is going to be transformed.

10. Psychology of Colours • In Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius, his silver hair shrouded by a violet hood, watches his legions demolish the barbarians. • Visually, he is the regal grim reaper incarnate. Within the next half-hour of movie time, he, too, will die. • The death may not always be literal. It may not always be someone but something that will die or be lost when purple appears onscreen. • It might be love or youth or dream or illusion.

11. Psychology of Colours • YELLOW • Yellow is a contrary colour. • One of the reasons yellow is the colour used for caution signs is that it’s visually aggressive. It appears to come toward you. • We’ve built it into our consciousness as a cautionary colour. • Venomous reptiles and amphibians often are yellow— warnings to all who come near, a big beware built into our genetic code. • It is also the colour we identify with the sun. We associate yellow with powerful life energy—exuberance itself.

12. Psychology of Colours • In whatever situation you find it, or wherever it is, bright yellow can be the scene-stealer, always clamouring for attention. • Intense yellow, however, has an underbelly. Actually, this quality makes yellow a perfect signal for obsession. • Yellow environment seem to be anxiety producing. Yellow was like a visual car alarm trying to horn in on us. Yellow creates anxiety and makes you more stressed out. . . . In yellow’s presence, you’ll be more apt to lose your temper.”

13. Psychology of Colours • ORANGE • Orange manifests its influence in a different way from the other colours. • While red says “I’m here!,” yellow is exuberant, and blue is laidback, orange is generically “nice”. • The colour simply supported a warm and welcoming congeniality. • How we feel at sunset is not just a romanticized cliché.

14. Psychology of Colours • Something actually happens to us physically when we watch the intense brightness of the near-white sun transform itself into a glowing rich orange in the sky. • Glowing orange light (and its associations with the sun) can take us on a visceral ride that warms and expands our emotional field. • Orange light in an interior, on the other hand, can read as romantic. • Orange is also a colour that celebrates the working class. • Versatile orange can also read as exotic.

15. Psychology of Colours • GREEN • Green is really a dichotomous colour. • It’s the colour of fresh vegetables and spoiled meat. • Perhaps its duplicity comes from our earliest times on this planet when green signalled both food and danger. • Green can signal health and vitality or danger and decay. • Precisely because of its positive associations in the plant kingdom, green can be used as a powerful tool for irony.

16. Psychology of Colours • Our association with green in slime-covered swamps filled with snakes and alligators, however, has given birth to the look of dragons, demons, and monsters. • It may also play a role in our aversion to green in liquid form. Try drinking a clear green liquid and see for yourself that there is something about green drinks that you’d rather stay away from. • When associated with the human body, green’s clue is often illness or evil.

17. Production Design • Costume: • Consider clothing as a coded projection of its owner’s self-image and intentions. Consider what personality and mood each character manifests at different times, and how their clothing contrasts with that of other characters. • Think not only of color and design, but of overall tone in relation to surroundings. Very light-toned costumes may be too reflective, whereas dark tones, especially in night exteriors, may disappear altogether. • The size and fit of clothes, the way they are worn, the accessories that go with them, can express volumes about the wearer.

18. Production Design • Make up and hair dressing • Always make camera tests to prove that even the most naturalistic makeup will work. Especially when departing from established norms or special effects such as wounds, scars, or an appearance of illness. • Research the world of your film, in books, galleries, or in real life. If your central character is a doctor, go to a hospital and make notes and take photographs of the doctors you see there. The real world is far richer than imagination can ever be.

19. Production Design • Moods: • If you can, alternate interiors and exteriors, day and night, to give a sense of breathing in and out.

20. Summary • Colour can greatly affect the perception of a scene or shot. Choosing colours wisely would put your audience right where you want them • Production design as a whole could say everything about a scene without any acting or dialogue

21. By Tabi Zama Cinematography

22. Cinematography COMPOSITION • For the sake of this tutorial, we won’t go through all the establish conventions of composition. First of all there are no rules when it comes to cinema; there are just some things that are more appealing to the eyes.

23. Composition RULE OF THIRDS • Imagine that your image is divided into 9 equal segments by 2 vertical and 2 horizontal lines. The rule of thirds says that you should position the most important elements in your scene along these lines, or at the points where they intersect.

24. Rule of thirds

25. Composition UNUSED SPACE • The entire screen should be filled with important subject matter. Empty space is wasted space.

26. Unused space

27. Composition BALANCE ELEMENTS • Placing your main subject off-center, as with the rule of thirds, creates a more interesting photo, but it can leave a void in the scene which can make it feel empty. You should balance the "weight" of your subject by including another object of lesser importance to fill the space.

28. Balancing elements

29. Composition DEPTH • Because photography is a two-dimensional medium, we have to choose our composition carefully to convey the sense of depth that was present in the actual scene. You can create depth in a photo by including objects in the foreground, middle ground and background.

30. Depth

31. Lenses • What lenses do we need to achieve a more cinematic image? • A standard kit could have about 10 different lenses but for us indie filmmakers, 3 basic lenses would give us most of what we want. • My recommendations will be: 24mm wide angle lens, 50mm standard lens and a 70-200mm telephoto lens. • Prime lenses are the best for the job since they produce sharper images. • Also lenses with a wide aperture(low f-stop) will produce images with higher quality.

32. Lighting • Unless you are going for a stylized look, basic lighting tends to reflect lighting found in our day to day lives • Take the three point lighting as a starting point. • The error most filmmakers make is put all their focus on making the image bright and position the lights such that it produces a bright but very flat image. • Lighting is an art and has to do with a lot more than getting the correct exposure. • Lighting usually gives depth to the image, models it and sets a mood

33. Camera Settings • To achieve a more cinematic image there are camera settings to consider. These settings are best applicable when using the DSLR cameras. • Shutter speed: 1/50 or 1/48 • Framerate:24fps • Picture profile: Saturation-2 Sharpness-0 contrast: -3 • ISO: the max for reduced digital noise in low light would be 1600.

34. Camera Options • Camera options: The Canon DSLRs come a great way to help us indie filmmakers achieve a cinematic look. • The canon 5D Mark III could produce a decently looking cinematic image with certain considerations. • Other similar cameras that could enrich your film look. 550D/Rebel T2i, 600D/Rebel T3i, 60D, 5D Mark II • The list is quite long. The cameras mentioned above are the ones we could easily find among our filmmaker colleagues. • It’s a good thing to go DSLR but camera is not everything. Good cinema skills used with a regular “wedding camera” could create very stunning images. • My favorite example of this would be “Ninah’s Dowry by Victor Viyouh”

35. The End Thanks for your participation