Digital Cinema: How to Make Your Mini DV Look Like Film (page 2)

Once we were on the set, we incorporated two conventions borrowed from over one hundred years of filmmaking: controlled lighting and controlled depth of field. I will admit, both of these techniques intimidated me in my early years of shooting, but after experimenting with some simple lights and camera settings, I realized it was not so difficult. I also studied scenes from my favorite films with the sound down and my finger on the rewind button so I could analyze light, shadow and focus.

There are many different styles of lighting, but I suggest you start by learning the three-point lighting system, which you can read up on in this magazine's monthly Light Source column. Learn the basics and then experiment. Proper studio lights are ideal, but halogen shop lights or photoflood lights will work. Outside, you can bounce sunlight with car windshield reflectors or white poster board. Just about every single film you spend money to go see manipulates and controls light very carefully. If you want your video to look like them, you need to control your light as well.

One way cinematographers manipulate what their audience will concentrate on within the frame is by manipulating the depth of field. Depth of field is the range of distance in front of the lens (e.g. from four feet to eight feet) that stays in focus at a given aperture setting and focal length. At its deepest, everything from the closest object to the camera to the farthest from it is in focus. The more you zoom (telephoto) the shallower the depth of field. When I want a shallow depth of field, I place the camera as far as I can from the subject (on a tripod of course), have the subject stand at least ten feet from the background and zoom in to compose my shot. This puts the subject in focus and put objects as close as five feet in front or behind them out of focus. You'll see this technique in almost every film you watch, but rarely in projects shot in video.

Opening the iris (aperture) will also give you a shallower depth of field. An easy way to achieve this is to use neutral density (ND) filters (either an in-camera option or a screw-on filter) to cut down on the intensity of light entering your camera, thus forcing the iris to open. You can also reduce the exposure by increasing the shutter speed, which will allow you to open the iris more.

One serious difference between film and video concerns contrast ratio. Film can handle a greater ratio of bright to dark than video can. With video, a dark shirt on a light-skinned person in a dark room is not going to work. Video cameras cannot show details in extremely bright and extremely dark objects in the same frame well. If you expose to capture the details in the bright part of the image, you will often crush the details in the dark. Though there are some cameras that may mitigate this limitation with film-like gamma curves, there isn't a lot you can do about it except be conscious of the limitation and try not to have a huge range of brightness values in your shot.

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