Week 5, Tayjib

Cinematography

For the first time since our first short film in the Making Short Films 1 module of the first semester, I fulfilled the role of the cinematographer. This was a pleasant change for me in comparison to the roles in the other weeks. While sound design and editing have their perks, I quickly felt more comfortable when I had greater influence on the visual language of the film.

In preparation for week 5’s film The Disturbance we decided to go location scouting since one of the exercise’s requirements was to film outside of the campus and within 10 miles of Aberystwyth. We chose to visit the Ystwyth Trail in Llanilar and brainstormed ideas for the exercise while taking inspiration from our environment. Once we decided on an idea and chose our roles, I took plenty of photos as references to figure out where and how we could shoot different scenes.

Compared to the last time I took on the role as cinematographer, I invested more time in the pre-production to find inspiration and put more thought into creating a visual style for our film. That was quite challenging since we had limited equipment and limited time for pre-production and filming. We didn’t have additional lighting equipment and thus, since we were filming in an exterior location, we were solely dependent on natural light. Due to that it was fairly difficult to find a spot with the right lighting especially in the woods. However, the more open spaces, like the broad path and the bridge, didn’t pose as much of a challenge.

In order to fix some of these lighting issues, Daniele and I worked with DaVinci Resolve to color grade the picture. We also took this opportunity to apply a more distinct visual style that the writer-director Aaron and I have chosen. We looked at films such as Children of Men (2006) in inspiration for the handheld camera and the bleak de-saturated image. Through this choice we wanted to amplify the sense of disruption in nature that occurs once the character steps into the scene and decreases once he crosses the bridge and finds peace. This was also aided by the sound design from Juliette. During editing we had a lot of discussions regarding the picture. We had different visions in mind and had to discuss those clearly, which was difficult because we didn’t have sound yet. After the sound came in it all came together much quicker and it was easier to settle on one vision. This experience made it clear to me how important sound is and how it impacts the meaning of the picture.

Further inspiration for the cinematography for me came from The Revenant (2015) which has striking similarities when it comes to the men in nature themes. Here I looked at perspectives in which the characters are shown in nature, especially in critical moments that could decide the characters fate in the blink of an eye.

I gathered all my ideas and inspirations and discussed them with the director. Of course, he also had his vision, so we tried to see what fits together and what aligns best with the story we wanted to tell. Following this I composed a storyboard to help us finalize our approach.

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After I presented my storyboard to the director and we made a few adjustments, we managed to settle down on a shot list. However, we did have to make slight variations during filming due to weather conditions and unforeseen changes to our location; for example, the riverbank and parts of the woods being flooded. Other challenges caused by the weather were the need of the rain-protection kit for the camera which made certain things, like pulling the focus and even observing the monitor more difficult.

To conclude, this week’s exercise had quite a few challenges in addition to the usual short time limit, like the natural lighting in an exterior location and weather conditions. Working around these problems and finding greater appreciation for sound design as well as more experience with cinematography and colour grading made this week very exciting and rewarding for me.