Category Archives: Filmmaking

You Need To Trust Me

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We all know the routine. You’re watching a TV-show or a movie where something mysterious is happening. Our hero is urgently looking for answers and solutions. Suddenly a character pops up that is supposed to be enigmatic, but more often is just plain annoying. Our hero demands an explanation, but the annoying enigma-character just answers «You need to trust me. We don’t have much time.»

At this point I’ve seen this scene done badly so many times that my bullshit alarm goes off. It’s lazy writing, and a grim example of a writer baring the device inadvertently, through incompetence rather than conscious choice.

Trust is something you deserve, but cannot demand, in storytelling as well as in life. Through the annoying enigma-character, it’s really the writer that’s asking you, the viewer, to trust him. And when a storyteller reaches that point, he’s in pretty bad shape.

The confused writer may think that this device is totally valid. «I’m just creating mystery and suspense, and adding a sense of urgency,» the writer thinks. «And besides, it can’t really be that bad, since I’ve seen it used in almost every action or thriller series the past fifteen years.»

I’m sorry, but creating suspense and mystery isn’t supposed to be easy. It isn’t enough to just have a character say «We have to hurry!» to introduce pressure. And when you let your annoying character say «You need to trust me,» the subtext is «The writer doesn’t know the answer either. Or he is so lazy that he doesn’t bother telling stories without cheating by using stock lines and cliches from his tired bag of tricks.»

This doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting that the writer should give the audience all the answers right away. It means that mystery and suspense are advanced storytelling devices that need to be solved more elegantly.

Especially when it comes to a scene that’s about «I know the truth, but I’m not going to tell you,» the writer has a formidable challenge. The line between enigmatic and annoying is very thin indeed.

But while suspense and mystery in the hands of a poor writer is terribly annoying, they become art in the hands of the elegant and subtle storyteller. David Fincher’s Zodiac, for example, is a film about wasting years in a futile search for a truth that no one ever finds. It’s a crime mystery that does something very different than the genre norm. One might even say that Zodiac is to the crime genre what The Unforgiven was to the western genre.

How to crop the aspect ratio of HDSLR footage

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HDSLR cameras shoot 16:9, which is fine, but sometimes you want a more cinematic look. The two perhaps most common ratios are 1.85:1 (Academy Flat) and 2.35:1 (Cinemascope). Read more about cinema aspect ratios here.

I edit in Premiere CS5, and there are two ways I can export my videos with wider aspect ratio. I can export with letterboxing (black stripes masking the upper and lower parts of the image), or I can crop the the video when I export with Media Encoder.

Let me show you how.

First, you need to see exactly what parts you’re cropping out. You do this by applying a mask with the appropriate aspect ratio to a video layer above your footage. You can do this in Premiere’s Title tool or in Photoshop. My video is full HD, that is 1920×1080 pixels – so I made a Photoshop document with those dimensions. Then I draw two black rectangles and place them at the upper and lower edges of the image. If I want  to go Cinemascope I crop 132 pixels – so I make the rectangles 1920×132 pixels. (Note: this isn’t excactly 2.35, but close enough, and actually avoids some exporting problems.)

Then I export this image as a PNG-file with transparent background, so only the black rectangles, the letterbox, is visible. You can download and use mine, if you like. Just click the image on the right to get the full size, and right-click to save.

Now you’re ready to import the mask into Premiere, and place it on top of all the other video layers.

Here’s an example of mine, with the original footage seen in the source monitor (left) and the cropped image in the program monitor (right). Notice the matte being on the topmost layer in the timeline, and of course stretched to cover the entire length of the footage.

Once you’ve done this you have some headroom to move your footage vertically. Make sure you don’t cut any heads or lose any valuable information.

Once you’ve positioned all your footage correctly and applied any effects and transitions, you’re ready to export. Go to File>Export>Media to open the Media Encoder.

In your source monitor you have your cropping options above the image. Specify 132 px for top and bottom. Then choose your export settings, for example QuickTime H.264, and under Video>Basic Settings make sure you specify a width of 1920 and a height of 816. Make sure your frame rate and Field Type (Progressive) is correct, and your Aspect should be square pixels. To save some work next time, save your settings as a preset. Here are my settings:

Now you can go ahead and export, and end up with a nice widescreen video without letterboxing. Videos of this type are great to upload to Vimeo, but YouTube always adds letterboxing anyway, I think.

Here’s Philip Bloom explaining how to do all this in Final Cut Pro:

 

Docu-storytelling

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I guess most people agree that any kind of documentary is also some kind of storytelling. So I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to the notion of the “objective” documentary film, which many people still insist is actually possible.

Going back to Nanook Of The North (Flaherty, 1922), the documentary has never been an objective representation of “truth”. Two obvious questions arise. Is such a thing possible? And would that really be the aesthetic, social, and political ideal for a documentary film?

In recent years, debates about the Michael Moore and Al Gore films have highlighted this issue. For Norwegian readers, here’s a recent piece by a colleague of mine, regarding a conflict between a documentary filmmaker and the NRK network. I’m fond of the professor’s focus on the difference between “documentary” and “documentation”.

Aronofsky used Canon DSLRs on Black Swan

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Being fans of Darren Aronofsky’s work, we’re anxiously awaiting the opening of his latest feature Black Swan. Like Aronofsky’s previous films, this was also shot by his DP Matthew Libatique.

American Cinematographer brings a very interesting interview with Libatique in their latest issue. This time around the talented DP decided to bring out the Canon 7D to shoot some of the scenes, in addition to the Super 16 and Arri cameras.

Libatique on working with the 7D:

The 7D has more depth of field than the 5D, but I needed that because I didn’t have a follow-focus unit and needed to work really fast. I shot everything documentary-style. I did all the focus pulls by hand, and we’d just look at it on the camera’s monitor. I ended up shooting on a Canon 24mm lens at 1,600 ASA to get as much depth of field as possible at a stop of T81⁄2.