Shooting Movies Without Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Becoming a Cinematographer

Jack Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136040498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Shooting Movies is the book for all those film enthusiasts who can't get on a professional set or can't undertake studies at an expensive film school. This book approaches the subject of cinematography from a 'hands-on, in the trenches' viewpoint, as though the reader were an apprentice on the set. It's a book about learning to shoot a film without making an idiot of yourself and wasting lots of time and money. It's a book about how to take artistic inspiration and make it a reality. A breezy writing style mixed with practical, interactive exercises geared for both film and video give filmmakers the experience they need to take their work to the next level. Beginning with fundamental techniques and concepts of cinematography, the author shares his many years of experience with the reader, imparting invaluable advice and guidance on how to avoid common pitfalls, and more importantly, learn from mistakes. This title provides a mentorship-in-a-book approach not found any of the other technical guides to cinematography, using both film and video exercises. It is written for filmmakers working on a budget. Unique exercises throughout the book provide the reader with an interactive experience that will give them a higher level of expertise and will improve the quality of their shooting, lighting, and reel - all on a budget. It helps you learn the realty of filmmaking from the cinematographer's perspective. Companion website showcases video samples, visual demonstrations of the exercises in the book, and further video explanations of the concepts that are better explained visually.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

One way to learn cinematography is foolproof and effective, and it's worked for over 100 years. It's apprenticeship. No doubt it began with the first movies, but it unquestionably stems from no later than 1912 when D. W. Griffith brought his company to Hollywood to settle permanently and make movies. One of the people Griffith brought along was G. W. (Billy) Bitzer, his cameraman. Today, the person responsible for everything concerning the photography in movies— cinematography—is variously called the cinematographer or the director of photography (DP). In the early days and for many years after, the cinematogra-pher was usually called the cameraman, or sometimes the first cameraman.

And, very specifically, it was always cameraman. Women did not shoot feature movies until the 1970s. Certainly the first woman director of photography who was admitted to the Hollywood camera union, then called IATSE #659, was Brianne Murphy in 1977. She was also the first woman invited to join the American Society of Cinematographers, an honorary society and the oldest surviving organization in the film industry. Many female DPs, operators, and assistants are in the business now. Most terminology has finally changed to reflect that, although not always. The first woman admitted to the union as a camera assistant in 1976 was universally known as the “girl assistant cameraman.” So please forgive me if I sometimes slip up and say “cameraman” when I am referring to the director of photography.

Getting back to Billy Bitzer, he began as an electrician and worked with Thomas Edison, who became a major producer when his employee W.K.L. Dickson perfected motion picture photography in 1889. Bitzer became a movie cameraman and eventually wound up at Biograph, one of the most important film production companies of the first decade of the 1900s. Biograph became a giant in the industry after D. W. Griffith started directing for them. Griffith quickly became the premier director in the world. So when Griffith became independent and moved to Hollywood, he took his company with him, including Bitzer, who had become the most prominent cameraman in the world and one of the best.

Shortly after the Griffith company arrived, Karl Brown, a young man in a theatrical family, managed to get Bitzer to hire him as his assistant. Bitzer may have had assistants in New York, but Brown is the first person I know of who was an official camera assistant. He learned from Bitzer and performed many duties not today associated with the camera assistant (e.g., shooting stills), but he did become the first professional assistant and set the pattern for the next 100 years.

Karl Brown began by carrying camera cases—still the first job for an assistant— and over the years he learned how to care for the camera, how to load, and how to photograph. He eventually became a top DP himself and a director of major Hollywood productions.

The pattern of apprenticeship is still unchanged: Start as a grunt, learn techniques, gradually get more responsibility, and move through more and more demanding and remunerative jobs until you finally advance to the highest position. It's still a wonderful way to learn. I got my start in camera work when I had the good fortune to be admitted to the Camera Assistant Training Program, a now defunct effort of the camera union (now the International Cinematographers Guild, Local #600, IATSE) and the AMPTP (Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers). The program assigned me first to Panavision (the manufacturer of the best movie cameras in the world) and then for two or three weeks at a time to various movies, TV shows, and commercials. I worked on Pete's Dragon, Oh God!, The World's Greatest Lover, and One on One. I learned from the crews of Most Wanted and Charlie's Angels. It was a fantastic experience.

One great aspect of this program was the chance to work with many crews with their different personalities and their different ways of getting the same job done. I could pick and choose from the many variant techniques of being an assistant and slowly build my own style of working. Of course, there's no one right way; a number of different approaches get the same work done in the same amount of time. You might notice that I refer occasionally to “industry standard”; this is an expression the crew uses to denote generally accepted procedures. Sometimes it's the best way to work, sometimes it's the only way, and sometimes it's just the cool way. And everyone on the crew knows it's vital to be cool.

And by the way, cool is important. It's not just a matter of social acceptability. If you're cool, you don't run, nobody ever waits for you, and your work appears smooth and effortless. It's a sign that you know what you're doing and that you've achieved mastery. Gaining the confidence of the people you work with—and work for—eases the day; everybody believes that the work is being done well, that the organized chaos of production is proceeding as efficiently and artistically as possible.

Okay, let's get back to my training program. Even though I entered the program with a film school education, I had little experience of the routine of a professional set and not much knowledge about the specialized jargon, the language of the crew. And I knew little specifically about how to load a camera, much less how to do the exalted work of framing and lighting. I learned by watching (and watching and watching). I asked questions, but soon discovered that while most people will be happy to share their knowledge with you, there is a limit to how much time they have to teach you while they're in the middle of shooting. So I learned it is better to watch carefully, pay attention, and see if I could figure out what the crew was doing and why. If you do that, you can ask questions selectively and not make a pest of yourself. It is unfortunate but true that much of what you learn comes from making mistakes. One of the purposes of this book is to share some of mine so you won't have to suffer as much embarrassment as I did while learning the ropes.

On my first day on the set as a trainee, I had been assigned to a TV miniseries, How the West Was Won. I was trying to remember who was who on the crew, and I was preparing my slate and camera report. (It seemed like a big thing to be trusted with, and I wanted to be perfect.) I leaned up against a big piece of equipment so I could write more easily. Suddenly, something hit me, my feet went out from under me, and I was looking up at the sky. A big guy leaned over me, reached out his hand, and said, “Let me help you up.” Well, this was nice, especially after all the horror stories I'd heard about how rough crews were. He brushed me off and said, “No hard feelings.” Hard feelings? I didn't understand. “But I want to make sure you remember this,” he said. “See, that thing you're leaning against is a crane arm.” Sure enough, I had been leaning against the Titan crane, which is the biggest crane available in the movie business. It is a truck with ten wheels and a pivoted arm that can counterweight up to 2,500 pounds, holds the camera at the far end, and can move silently up to 27 feet high. I wouldn't have believed anything could move it. And this nice guy who picked me up had knocked me down. “That crane arm has tons of mercury in it to balance it, and if you lean on it, you're going to unbalance it, and someone could get hurt. Remember that.”

Chapman Titan crane.
Photo provided courtesy of Chapman/Leonard Equipment, Inc.

I certainly would remember. And I gradually learned that there's a lot of dangerous equipment on a set. But there are also experts who know how to use it properly and without danger to anyone. But a crane, while gigantic and apparently indestructible, can be lethally dangerous if it goes out of control. No one ever touches the crane arm except the grip who's working on it. (Grips are the jacks-of-all-trades of the movie industry. They are sort of analogous to stagehands, but they are craftspeople who do work ranging over a far greater area.) The worst case of a violation of crane etiquette is often an excitable director who rides the seat on the camera platform of the crane to see a shot, loves it, and excitedly jumps off before the grips can counterbalance the crane arm. More than one grip and cameraperson have been injured when the arm flies out of control, not to mention the cameras that have been catapulted through the air to land as million-dollar piles of junk.

So there's nothing quite like apprenticeship training. It might not seem terribly efficient—you have to work years to perfect your skills—but there's a lot to be said for having your ass on the line while you're learning. Unfortunately, not everyone can get an entry-level job working on a camera (or grip or electric) crew, where they can learn cinematography. So what else can you do? Another option is to enroll in a college course that allows you to work with professionals on a low-budget project. There aren't many of them, so you may have to go a bit afield to find one.

I was lucky enough to have this experience. One summer while I was attending film school at Cornell, I was given the opportunity to participate in a unique filmmaking project. My thesis advisor had gotten money from the university to bring Ed Emshwiller—a world-famous independent filmmaker from New York—to campus to make a film there using a student crew. I was on that crew, and the experiences of that summer transformed my life. That's when I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life making movies.

Years later I was invited to Grand Valley State University to teach cinematography by supervising a student crew on a production financed by the school. Remembering how much the summer program at Cornell had meant to me, I was delighted to participate as the director of photography on this project. The director and actors were also professionals. Each student was assigned a specific job, and did that job for the entire production. Beyond learning technical skills, the students learned whether they liked the rigors and the culture of professional filmmaking, how to conduct themselves on a set, and practices, tools, and techniques they could use for making their own films.

Since then I've shot eight summer films with students: seven shorts and one feature. I knew that this opportunity could be really valuable for students, but the reality ended up surpassing all my expectations. The appreciation expressed by the students who went through this experience overwhelmed me. Many of these students are now in the film business, some locally (in Michigan) and some in Hollywood. Many have told me that what they learned about filmmaking on the set during their summer shoot prepared them better for working in the business than all their traditional classroom courses. So I advise you, if you can find a program like this, working with professionals, sign up now.

By now you're thinking, “Sure, it would be great to get on professional productions, but pigs will be flying over Hollywood before that happens. And how am I, a student at the University of Nowhere, supposed to find Hollywood professionals willing to spend a summer working with students?” That's a good question.

Realizing that few aspiring filmmakers will have these opportunities, I have written Shooting Movies Without Shooting Yourself in the Foot: Becoming a Cinematographer with the idea of simulating the apprenticeship experience as much as is possible in book form. This book should give you the means to learn the important things you need to know about cinematography: the importance of preproduction, the kind of equipment you'll need and how to work with it, how to use the equipment as an expressive tool, how to function and behave on the set, and how to avoid making the kinds of mistakes that will cost you your job and your future in filmmaking.

This is not a textbook. It is a guide through the process of shooting a film from the perspective of a director of photography and his or her crew. It covers technical and scientific details but only on a need-to-know basis. You'll be able to easily choose how much you want to delve into technical explanations, or you can skip them until you see the purpose of knowing all that (and I hope I can convince you that you do). And I won't be encyclopedic. My purpose is to focus on what the experience of being a DP or a member of a camera crew is really like in practical terms.

You will see that this book is divided into several sections. In the Realities section, I'll take you through preproduction, production, and postproduction. When we encounter highly technical subjects, I'll direct you to the Technicalities section, where you can immerse yourself in the hard-core science and how-to material. You get to choose when and how much you want to read about technical things. There is also a section of Checklists, Cheatsheets, and Datasheets, where I boil down processes and information I've presented in the rest of the book into quickly accessible and useful forms. These will be invaluable when you're actually working on a project.

You'll also see exercises that are designed to get you to express yourself with the tools of a working cinematographer. Sometimes you may not have access to all of the equipment we have in Hollywood, but I'll be giving you suggestions for ways to get around the access problem. You'll learn that it's important for a cin-ematographer to be resourceful. Many of the wonderful projects you work on may have very limited budgets. I've worked on mega-budget films, micro-budget films, and everything in between. Regardless of budget, every show I have ever worked on has had moments when sheer inventiveness—chewing gum and baling wire style—has been necessary. So don't feel deprived if you don't have fancy cameras, cranes, and lights. I will talk about the professional way to do things; most importantly, I'm going to lead you through a detailed approach you can adopt that will enable you to do professional work regardless of your resources.

Of course, artistic visual expression is why anyone is drawn to cinematography in the first place. But teaching someone to be creative is pretty much an impossible task. While I'll give it a try, what I know I absolutely can teach you is how to do everything necessary to make artistic expression possible. You need to have both technical and creative abilities to allow you to successfully realize a director's vision. A director of photography has to be a creative artist and the commander of an army at the same time. This book helps you learn how to do that.

I won't tell you what stories to shoot, but I will show you how to use your tools, introduce you to “industry standards,” and share with you many of the tricks I know that make professional movies so good.

This book is intended to be a self-tutorial, an apprenticeship in a book. I can tell you how to do many things, and I can give you exercises to learn on your own. Each exercise is followed by a discussion of what you should have learned from doing it. Try to do the exercise without looking at the discussion first. That way you'll have the opportunity to learn what I set up the exercise for without knowing beforehand what the final intention is.

I am not foolish enough to think I can cover every situation that may arise. But I will talk about the mistakes everyone makes, and I will tell you some big ones I've been a part of. Remember: You learn by making mistakes. Both your mistakes and your solutions will stick with you. Not a day will go by that you won't learn something, and every member of the crew feels the same way.

So you have to improvise, and you have to make mistakes. The information and the exercises in this book will move you past the simple mistakes so you can learn on your own from the more interesting mistakes that only you will make. The book is organized to take you through the entire process of shooting a film, from reading the script to screening the final print. Each step builds on the previous one. I'm pretty sure each step is necessary, and I think you'll get the most out of doing all the exercises in order.

But I want you to play. The single most important thing for you to do is to shoot—anything and as much as you can. Don't forget that this is what you love doing. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, commenting on why particular people achieve the greatest success, quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin: “Ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.”¹ So let me start you out on your 10,000-hour adventure.

¹Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers, Little, Brown, New York, 2008, p. 40.

PART 1
Realities: Preproduction

CHAPTER 2
What's First?

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, made famous his admonition, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” This advice is as applicable to cinematography as it is to basketball or any other endeavor. Director Alfred Hitchcock took preplanning to such an extreme that for him the actual shooting of his movies became a very mechanical procedure. At the other end of the spectrum, shooting a movie with the freewheeling approach of an Altman or a Cassavetes takes no less preproduction planning because, interestingly enough, it takes a lot of preparation to be ready for impro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: What Is a Director of Photography?
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1 Realities: Preproduction
• Part 2: Realities: Production
• Part 3: Realities:Postproduction
• Part 4: Technicalities
• Appendix 1 Cheat Sheets
• Appendix 2: Checklists
• Bibliography
• Index