Shoot Like a Cinematographer, Not a Videographer

in a lot of ways we're living in the Golden Age of documentaries a new big budget doc series is coming out on Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever at the same time camera technology has advanced to the point where it's possible for documentary film Crews to afford cameras that look really good which is seriously upping the production value it used to be that Cinema cameras cost so much that they were really only practical for big Hollywood Productions but thankfully those days are over and with a lot of new cameras from Sony Canon or Blackmagic or wherever you can get some amazing results but just having a good camera and lens isn't automatically going to make your documentary look cinematic cinematic cinematic cinematic cinematic cinematic cinematic cinematic cinematic getting a cinematic look there's so much more to what we call the Cinematic look than just spending money on gear and in this video I'm going to get into five things you can do to make your next project look as cinematic as possible hey guys welcome back and if you're new here my name is Luke Forsyth documentary cinematographer and filmmaker and on this channel I teach the skills I've learned over 10 years working as a documentary filmmaker and photographer the word cinematic gets thrown around a lot on the internet to the point where it's hard to even know what it means anymore I've said jimy jeliker so many times the words have lost all meaning it used to be that non- Cinema cameras like cam quars or news broadcast cameras looked so much worse than the Hollywood gear that it was obvious to everyone Cinema looked cinematic and everything else looked like cheap video this was especially true in the documentary world where tighter budgets meant cameras with smaller sensors that could only shoot in specific frame rates luckily for us that's all changed and there is no reason why your next dock shouldn't look amazing when I first started shooting video one of the most confusing things for me to understand coming over from the world of Stills photography was what all the different frame rates meant it took a while and I got all sorts of weird results shooting my dslrs and different frame rates but eventually I learned to just stick to one and not change it unless a client demanded It For Me project shot outside this frame rate looked terrible and I'll do anything I can to avoid it if you compare a Hollywood movie to a football game or a news broadcast there's an obvious difference in the way they look and I don't think any of us wants our next film to look like a CNN report maybe it's just because of my background as a DP but to me there's something much more organic looking about a movie whereas the news looks more artificial I guess is the best word it's too sharp and too smooth and the real world just doesn't look like that that's because most news and sports and a lot of reality tv as well is shot in 30 frames a second which is not natural to our eyes I don't want this video to Veer off into a deep technical dive into frame rates but the easiest way to understand it is to wave your hand in front of your face like this notice how your hand blurs as the movement gets faster your average sports or news broadcast there's no blurring at all everything is totally sharp this is good for sports where you want to follow a lot of fast action but it doesn't look organic at least not to me and I think Hollywood agrees because pretty much every Hollywood movie is shot at 24 or 25 frames a second depending on what part of the world it was made in in North America we use 24 in the UK and some other places use 25 but they're pretty similar so if there's one thing you can do that will have the greatest overall impact on the Cinematic quality of your work just setting the camera to 24 frames a second will make a huge difference right away like I said unless someone forces me to do it I shoot every single project they work on at 24 and I'd recommend putting your camera on that and never changing it unless you want to shoot slow motion of course depending on your camera it might also say 23. 976 but for all practical purposes it's the same thing the second thing I'd suggest has to do with your lens and not your camera let's compare the average news broadcast to one of my favorite looking movies in the last couple of years Joker notice how in Joker the shot of Wen Phoenix on the bus the subject is isolated and focused while the background and even some of the foreground Fades off into blurriness this is called depth of field and the out of focus area in the background is called bokeh there's quite a few reasons some of them are deliberate and stylistic why the news has so little depth of field but that could be entire video in itself all we need to know here is that depth of field is closely tied to the Cinematic look so using it intentionally in your documentary can really up the visual style there are a couple of ways you can play with up the field but the easiest way is by using a longer lens and a smaller aperture if you're not sure what I'm talking about the aperture is the little number on the side of your lens that says 1. 4 or 2.

8 when companies sell lenses they generally describe them by the minimum aperture and put the number right in the name of the lens so you know what you're getting the lens I'm shooting this video on is the Sony 16 to35 2. 8 you guessed it it has a minimum aperture of 2. 8 a good prime lens might go down to 1.

4 or even lower a zoom lens that comes to your camera is probably more like F4 but you don't need to rush off and buy a bunch of primes just so you can shoot everything at 1. 4 in order to get some depth of field wide-angle lenses have less depth of field than telephoto lenses so just by using a longer lens you're going to get more background blur so an F4 kit lens at 24 mm might not have much depth of field but at 50 mm you're going to get a lot more I'm also not saying you need to shoot everything at the minimum aperture because it's cinematic your aperture should be a stylistic choice and you pick it BAS based on the situation you're in and what look you want if you're following moving characters on an 85 1. 4 you might have a really hard time keeping the action in Focus because your depth of field is going to be razor thin you also tend to get slightly better image quality when stopping down a little from your minimum aperture and a lot of Hollywood DPS shoot at F4 or even 5.

6 though their lenses can go a lot lower and of course if you want a very long depth of field like for a landscape you can shoot at f8 or even more personally I shoot most things between 2.