Final Piece - Evaluation

Cinematography - Final Piece. from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

I am exceptionally pleased with the final outcome for my assignment. I feel that it follows the style of The Lovely Bones quite closely, but also has it's own elements of style. My favourite part is either the use of pull focuses or a number of the close ups which I shot in the forest. I also love the opening shot of the second part of the piece, where the trees slowly come into focus. The final colour grade is very similar to that in The Lovely Bones, it gives quite a surrealist edge to the piece.

I chose to use a piece of music by one of my favourite artists Iron & Wine, it is a piece called 'The Trapeze Swinger', I chose to use his piece of music as I feel that a lot of the stuff he writes is very country and has a rustic, outdoor feel to it. I think that it ties my piece up quite nicely.

Overall, I am very pleased with my piece, and if I were to change it, I would try and get a longer narrative and more variety of shots.

Colour Grading

A lot of the footage from the first shoot came out with a red tinge to it, so when I took it into Final Cut Color I began by removing some of this red on the primary grade. When I started to remove some of the red I found that the darker areas, such as the characters skin became too blue. To correct this I went into the three way colour wheel which can be seen at the top and I added a little more red into the shadows. This gave my footage a realistic look, and also kept with the style of The Lovely Bones.

I added a number of secondary grades to the footage, especially on the close ups. This allowed me to darken the background and keep the character in good light. My final grade for the first section of the film can be seen in my final piece.

For the second section of my piece I did two different colour grades. My initial grade made all the footage look realistic, as the original footage was quite blue and dull. I went through each shot and removed the blue from the mid tones. I also pushed the red and green mid tones up a little bit. This gave the footage quite a bright, saturated look.


Cinematography (Part 2) - Initial Grade from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

However, when I looked at the initial grade in comparison to The Lovely Bones, I found that the colour wasn't the same. The colour grading that I did made it look realistic, however, the colour grading in The Lovely Bones is quite green and yellow, making it seem quite surreal. So I took the footage back into Final Cut Color and re-graded it.

I began by removing the blue, as I did in the initial grade, however, in this grade I did not changed the red and green mid tones. Instead, I adjusted these in the secondary grading tab. I didn't bother applying a vignette to the first secondary grades as I wanted it to effect whole of the shot. I pushed the mid tones, shadows and highlights into a yellow colour, this gave a similar look to The Lovely Bones.

The final grade for the second part of my piece can be seen in the final film.

Second Shoot

The second shoot occured a few days after the first. I was originally planning to take my own SLR (which is seen in the first part), and have the central character walking around the forest taking photographs, which ties into the photo album from the first part. However, it decided to rain and I didn't want to risk carrying my camera around and it getting damaged in the rain. So I thought the character could just be taking a walk through the forest looking at the scenery similar to that he has pictures of in his album.


Cinematography (Part 2) - Original from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

I didn't use any kind of artificial lighting in this section as I thought it would be too difficult to take a generator up some of the hills with just myself and my actor. So I decided to use all natural lighting.

I used similar shots to those seen in The Lovely Bones and also took influence of a number of different films such as Harry Potter and the Twilight Saga which show people walking around in the forest. I preplanned all of the shots beforehand so that when I went on the shoot it was done in good time.

Overall, I feel that this and the first shoot were extremely successful.

First Shoot

I planned to shoot the film in two different parts. The first part being indoors and the second part on a different day outdoors.

For the indoor shots I followed the style of the scenes of Mr. Harvey, especially with the use of close ups. I used mainly close ups and extreme close ups to give a feeling of claustrophobia. I really like my focus pull at the end of the piece, it is very similar to a shot I saw in The Lovely Bones and I thought that it would work well within my film. I used a photo album as a basic narrative device, with the central character flipping through the pages. I quite like the idea of using the photo album for two reasons. First, it gave the character something to do within the scene. And second, it tied in the second part of the film piece to the first part of it.


Cinematography (Part 1) - Original from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

I set up my shots using three point lighting, which remained unchanged throughout the shoot. I used a practical lamp in the background, this acted as a back light. Because I used a practical light as a back light it meant that the light did not need to be hidden. However, the lamp I used is quite orange, so it gave my shots a very orangey red glow. The lighting casts quite a dark shadow over one side of the characters face, however, this may need to be enhanced in Color.

Shooting that became Testing

I shot my film on the weekend it decided it would snow. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. It was so cold that my tripod snapped and the grease inside it froze. So after shooting for around thirty minutes I called it a day and decided that this footage would now become test footage.

It was a good test in the end, as it allowed me to evaluate certain weather conditions and making extra provisions before heading out into the freezing weather. It also allowed me to see what shooting in the snow was like, so that I would be prepared for that eventuality again.

I did managed to get some really nice shots in the snow, and I think that they would've looked really good had they been used in my final piece. I particularly like the framing in the shot and the way the sun light is coming from between the trees; it is very picturesque.

Cinematography Testing from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

Colour Grade Testing

As said previously, I need to look at colour grading, especially to get my film to have a similar style to The Lovely Bones. Also, a lot of my test footage came out quite dark.

I decided to colour grade some of my test footage to see how similar I can get it to look like The Lovely Bones. I imported some of my test footage into Color and I began by removing some of the blue; I also upped the red and green. I concentrated mainly on the mid-tones of the shot. When I got an overall style that I was happy with I began working on a secondary grade, where I applied a total of 6 vignettes and graded each one. I began by grading the background; I turned up the greens to give the background a similar look to The Lovely Bones. I applied various vignettes to different parts of the sky in order to get a desired look.

Cinematography - Colour Grade testing from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

I think that I managed to get the footage to look quite similar to The Lovely Bones and I will try to get the final piece as close to this as possible. 

Colour Grade

Colour grading is a very important aspect of The Lovely Bones. The scenes of Susie walking around in the forest are one of the main focuses of my cinematography piece; these shots have a lot of colour grading to them in order to make them seem surreal and as if they are straight from Susie’s imagination. These shots don’t have a great deal of blue colour in them, but they have quite a lot of reds and greens. The colour of the red and green is quite strong and contrasted.

I am going to try and achieve this type of grade through the use of Final Cut’s Color software.

Test Shoot

The next step of the production was to go on a location test shoot where I needed to experiment with various different types of shots. For the shoot I used a Panasonic 151. In the first video you can see a few different shot methods I wish to use in my final piece.

Test Shoot from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

I had quite a lot of trouble on the shoot using the depth of field on the Panasonic. To alter the depth of field on this camera I changed the ISO setting, this allows more light into the lens thus giving a higher depth of field. I feel that the depth of field isn't fantastic on this camera, so I have decided to use a Canon 550D for my final piece as the size of the CCD chip will give a look and depth of field that is closer to using a 35mm camera.

I also found that a lot of my footage came out on my iMac quite darkly, I will look at colour correcting this in my next post.

Choosing a Location

To get a similar effect to that in The Lovely Bones I decided that it would be best to shoot in a forest or wooded area. The closest and most convenient area is at Trentham Gardens. Before renting a camera from University I decided to use my own SLR and take some photographs of the area.

This location looks very similar to the location used in The Lovely Bones. There is a lot of dense tree cover with little light falling through. The only difference is the time of year that I am going to be shooting. It seems that The Lovely Bones was shot in either Spring or Autumn, so there is a lot of nice yellow colour to the trees and the surroundings. However, as I am planning to shoot in the Winter there will be little leaves and colour left in the trees. But as you can see in the above pictures there is a lot of nice colour in the leaves that have fallen to the ground.

Second style I wish to study

The second section of my assignment will follow the style from Susie’s Heaven; I will look at some of the more natural and realistic shots of her walking through the forest when she enters heaven. These shots are very nice in the way that the colours of the forest are emphasized through the use of green and red tones. In this particular scene of Susie that I am looking at there is the use of a pull focus, which I think looks fantastic. Because using focus to draw attention to a particular area is a part of the assignment brief I will replicate this type of focus pull to suit my piece.

Style I wish to study

 For my assignment I would like to try two different styles from The Lovely Bones. The first style I will be looking at is the overall style of the shots of Mr. Harvey. The majority of these are close up’s, some are often out of focus, obscuring the character from our view. The grading on these shots is often quite dark with a lot of dark areas, to portray that he is lurking about in the shadows. I will try to replicate the kinds of shots used in order to portray my own narrative.