Cinematography

By Kitty Moss
INTRODUCTION

Film is a big part of everyone’s life, allowing them to escape

reality for a small moment in time and connecting with the
characters we see on screen. A cinematographer, who is also
known as the director of photography, is in charge of the
camera and lighting crew. They are the person responsible for
creating the look, colour, lighting and for the framing of
every single shot in a film. Cinematography is the art of
being able to capture moments on screen that will stay with
the audience forever. They set and support the overall look
and mood of the film’s visual narrative. Each visual element
that appears on screen, can serve and enhance the story, so it
is the cinematographer’s responsibility and duty to ensure
that every element is cohesive and supports the story.

HISTORY

Cinematography is constantly evolving and changing, films

today are bigger and better than they have ever been. History
has helped to evolve films to what they are today. People
like, Louis le Prince and D.W Griffith made a difference and
shaped the cinematography we see in films today. In the 1880s
French creator, Louis Le Prince made the first ever moving
picture that Shows real successive activity that was recorded
in 1888. The 2-second-long film was actually filmed in Leeds,
England. le prince used his brother Albert, his Mother in law
and his father in law. He tested with
projection strategies and was due to hold his first public
screening in New York in 1890. But he never attended. While
visiting his brother Albert in France with two friends, the
Wilsons, Le Prince was said to have boarded a train from Dijon
to Paris in September 1890. And from then on, he vanished.

During the early years of the 1900s, D.W. Griffith created a

film called "The Birth of the Nation", this film engineered
the future of film with its ground-breaking camera work.
Including close ups, night photography, and tracking shots.
When creating Birth of a nation Griffith realised that by
moving the camera forward and closer to his subject into a
close-up shot, helps to reveal more intimacy on the subject’s
face. One of the most celebrated shots in the film starts with
a mother and child weeping on a hill side without a cut. the
camera slowly pans to show what the family is watching
'General Sherman’s devastating march'. Griffith successfully
creates the personal to the historical in one shot. Griffith
also masters the use of dissolve as a transition. He went from
a fixed stationary position, dissolving from an empty
courtroom to a courtroom full of newly elected black
representatives. This film is believed to have transformed the
way films are made and how images are perceived. Griffith
today is hailed as Hollywood's first ever great artistic
director, whose pioneering filmmaking has created a new art
form.

Another influential film is Citizen Kane. This film was

directed by Orson Wells who helped to shape how movies are
shot today. Greg Toland the cinematographer experimented with
light and shadow, deep focus and camera angles. Wells and
Toland experimented lots with the deep focus shot, deep focus
allows the audience to see the fore-ground, mid-ground, and
background of a shot in a clear and sharp focus. Deep focus
creates a sense that there is important activity happening in
the fore-ground and the background. It creates the impression
of a fully realized, detailed, layered world. Although Citizen
Kane doesn’t use focus to guide your attention in a scene
instead things like dialogue or movement draw your eyes to
certain people at certain times.

Toland also makes use of a variety of shot types; low angle

shots, wide shots and crane shots. When creating realistic
scenes, the production design had to be thought out carefully,
so that the camera didn’t look like it was interrupting the
scene. The scene where Kane is a kid playing in the snow, when
his parents are inside a cabin talking about sending him away.
The camera slowly pulls back through a window, and eventually
stops on the other side of a dining table. When looking at the
final framing the table would have been in the way of the
camera tracking backwards. This movement was able because
Wells created a mechanical table that splits and comes back
together. Toland had the production design team cut out some
of the floor to help him get the low angle shots. This is so
that he could get authentic but creative different ways of
getting a shot.

Something that was extremely significant to cinematography and

films is technicolour. Technicolour was something that changed
films forever. The oversaturated greens, yellows and reds led
to new ways of using colour to tell stories. The first film to
use colour was "Cupid Angling" which came out in 1918. But the
process of actually trying to colourise the picture took quite
a long time. When creating this film Leon F. Douglass used
only a two-colour system in their cameras which only produced
one strip of negatives, which basically means it reverses the
tones of the subject, so the image is dark where the subject
was light and light when the subject is dark. Which made the
pictures negatives? By the 1930s technicolour developed a new
camera which used three colour systems. The most famous film
that changed technicolour forever was The Wizard of Oz, for a
lot of people this was the first film they had seen in colour.
A lot of studios didn't think it was worth the time or energy
to use colour, but after The Wizard of Oz things started to
change.

Cameras are the biggest thing that have developed and changed
over the past decades. Cameras where the one thing that
everybody wanted back then. But the problem was that they were
bulky, heavy and unattractive boxes. In the year 1900, the
reis camera changed it all. It was the first portable camera;
it was compact and could easily be folded away. In 1946
Keystone K-25 Capri this camera needed to be wounded up to
supply it with power. This was a very basic camera and had a
fixed focus lens. In 1965 the first consumer camera was
invented the Sony CVC-2000 was the first domestic video camera
with 13mm video tape in a reel to reel format.

In 1975 the Kodak digital camera was invented cameras moved

from being bulky and unattractive boxes too lightweight and
portable ones. cameras kept on developing from there as well
as technology. Cameras now are high end digital, which means
they offer superb image quality and video recording at 4k
resolution. After all of these years of slowly but steady
advancement cameras now have great power and portability and
are packed with numerous features to allow us to shoot a
moment and share it with the rest of the world in a matter of
seconds.

Something that has also changed in cinematography is different

camera angles and the way shots have altered over time. I
looked deeper into the dolly zoom shot! The dolly zoom was
made famous in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo in 1958. It was
created by cameraman Irmin Roberts to help create a visual
feeling of acrophobia by zooming in with the lens whilst
simultaneously dollying the camera backwards. Another well-
known example of the Dolly Zoom is in Jaws to show Martin
Brody’s reaction to his first sighting of the shark, this shot
allows us to see how uneasy he is in this scene.
Unfortunately, the dolly zoom is treated more as a trick shot.
And directors mainly use this shot because they think it's
cool.

In 1976 the Steadicam was introduced. An American

cinematographer Garett Brown had a simple, but revolutionary
idea to create a device that could smooth out handheld action
shots. Over the past 3 decades the Steadicam has been
irreplaceable dynamic production tool in the industry. When
the director of "Rocky", John G. Avildsen had finished
scouting for locations, he still didn't know the best way to
get the perfect shot. It wasn't until his assistant cameraman
showed him a demonstration reel for a new piece of equipment.
It included Garett Browns girlfriend running up the stairs of
the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Iconic shot of Rocky
running up the steps of the Philadelphia museum was made
possible by the Steadicam.

Cinematography has continued to develop through the years and

a great example of this, is Sam Mendes’s 1917. This film has
won many awards for its cinematography including a bafta award
as well as an academy award for best cinematography. Sam
Mendes is known for his choice of one-shot scenes. For the
opening of his 2015 Bond Film Spectre, he did a one-shot
sequence during the day of the dead festival scene. The camera
tracks a masked figure through crowded streets, into a hotel
lobby, up an elevator, out of a window, and over the rooftops
to a deadly assignation. His latest film 1917, uses several
takes and set-ups, seamlessly conjoined to give the appearance
of a continuous cinematic POV. The result is an immersive
drama that follows two young British soldiers through the
trenches and battlefields of northern France, as they attempt
to make their way through enemy lines on 6 April 1917. One of
the most significant scenes in the movie was when Schofield
runs through Ecoust. The dynamics of the scene was thought
through very carefully, before shooting the scenes they used
models to focus on how the scene would be lit and how the
camera would follow the action.

A film which also has fantastic cinematography is La La Land,

Cinematographer Linus Sandgren, was nominated for an Oscar for
his cinematography. This film is very different from 1917 with
the modern-day musical feel, the bright colours and the
energy. Sandgren and the director Chazelle agreed that the
camera would be like a musical instrument. They both wanted
the camera movement to have rhythm and energy that fitted with
the technical aspects of the film. During this film Sandgren
wanted the camera moves to be quite punchy and slightly more
noticeable to the audience, so when they zoomed in on a
character, they wanted the audience to feel it emotionally.
One thing that Linus sandgren included a lot with musical
numbers was the spotlight effect which made it seem like they
are on a stage and perusing their dreams. One of the scenes
that is very elaborate and colourful and had many challenges
for filming, was the dance number on the freeway. This is
another scene that had to be carefully thought out. With the
concrete medium in the middle it made it very difficult to
cross over. Sandgren had to think of the best way to move the
camera around this location smoothly and trying to keep every
shot with the same amount of light.
CONCLUSION

Technology within the film industry has advanced greatly over

the last century, allowing movies to tell greater, more
realistic stories than ever before. Cinematography has
progressed and developed and will continue to change as people
find new ways to excite the audience.