Hi. Welcome to Tutorial number 3. My name is Tom Antos. Today I’m going to show you examples
from a film I’ve been working on recently.
And here is a little sequence that we’re going to work on.
So, just to give you a little background information,
this is a pretty low-budget film.
So, I decided to use this new camera
that came out from Canon
called Canon 7D.
It’s a digital SLR. It shoots video too.
It has pretty much the same image sensor size as thirty-five millimeter film.
It’s good in low light situations.
It has some negative things about it, but in general
if you are working on a budget, it’s a pretty good camera to use.
Actually, one of the things I really love about the camera
is the fact that it is so small.
You can quickly grab it. You don't really need a director’s viewfinder anymore.
You can just pick up the camera itself,
walk around with it and pick your shots out.
As you can see here for this restaurant scene, I was kind of limited by
the size of the restaurant.
Actually, our original location fell through
and we ended up with our back-up location,
which is fairly simple. There's only, I think, four or three tables at this location.
It is pretty small.
But I had to make it feel like it’s filled in... well, not filled in,
but I had to make it feel like it is an actual restaurant...
like there is a few more tables and stuff like that.
So, the way I went about it is first, for the wide shot, I wanted quickly to establish
our two characters sitting at a table and just show a few people around them
before I cut to the close-ups.
And here you can see me walking around with the camera handheld
and... trying to pick my shot.
I know I’m going to end up on a dolly for the final shot
so I’m replicating that with the camera moves here.
This was on a... I think,
an 85mm lens. Then I switched to a 24mm lens up here.
And that right away look a bit better. So I decided this was going to be my wide shot.
Now, here I put the camera already on a dolly
and I had one of the tables in the background put farther away.
It was actually right up against the wall. There wasn't a lot of space.
But since I knew the camera was going to be so low and you won’t be able to see all those details there,
I can fake it and make it cool like there is a lot more space there
by squeezing one person at the table.
And for our two main characters, I had this tiny table brought in.
We dressed it up and
we put it right in the middle of this restaurant.
And I had the actor walk through the scene.
Here you can see the final lit scene with all the extras sitting in there.
And as far as the lighting set up, it’s pretty straight-forward.
I turned off pretty much all the lights in the restaurant.
There were a lot of these fluorescent lights up at the ceiling.
So, I turned all of these lights off
and I just left this little light there that’s on the wall.
That’s a practical 60W light bulb
which gave a little bit of light, but not much.
And then I lit the scene with one fairly big soft box.
I think it was a 36-inch 500W light bank.
And I put that just to the left of the camera.
Then, I added a simple 65W fluorescent light
on the right side of the camera, behind that woman there.
That acts like a rim light,
slash hair light, slash... because the color temperature of this light
is quite different from the tungsten key-light that I was using
it gives you the feeling of this blue... evening feel.
And also it adds contrast. This way the scene is still fairly dark.
You don’t get to see everything.
It adds to the romantic feeling of the scene.
And most importantly, it lights the main actress nicely.
And the last thing,
I added a small 100W light bulb
just on the floor, behind the woman dressed in black.
And that light illuminates that back wall a little bit.
It accentuates. Otherwise, it looked really dark in this restaurant.
Now, in this shot, this is the reverse angle of the same setting.
So, we’re seeing the guy sitting at the table.
Just to show you,
this is the footage that comes straight off the camera,
using whatever lights there were at the restaurant.
As you can see, it looks...
maybe it doesn’t look flat, but it looks boring. That’s what it is.
For sure, it doesn’t have any kind of a romantic feel.
So, for this scenario, I did
exactly the same light set-up as I did for the reverse angle...
the only difference is that I flipped the lights around.
Here is the final shot, with all the lights in place.
And as you can see, it makes a bit difference, I think.
And that’s pretty much it. Here is the final edited sequence.
So, as you can see, it’s basically the same thing that I’ve been talking about
in the first and second tutorial. It mainly comes down to shot design.
You have to really design your shots.
You cannot just put down the camera in the first place you think of
and think that it’s going to work.
Sometimes it will, but most of the time it won’t.
So, you have to move the camera around, move the lights around
and sometimes, like in this case, move the actors, tables, things around.
Next, I’m going to show you a little scene. I’m just going to let you watch it for now.
So, as you can see from this little clip, it’s basically another flashback.
We see what happened to one of the characters the night before.
And for the most part, the scene works.
But one thing that doesn’t really work, and that became really apparent in editing,
is this one shot.
The problem with this shot is not so much from the technical point of view.
More it’s because it doesn’t work for the story.
So, what we ended up doing was, we had to reshoot just this one shot.
Now, the great thing, of course, about the Canon 7D is the fact that
it is such a small camera.
You don’t need a crew. You can go, just you and the camera
and your actors, and you can shoot it pretty much anywhere.
Which is exactly what we did. This is after the film was shot.
We went quickly and within half an hour, we found this location,
this tiny little alley.
We used minimal lighting, because, again, the camera is very good in low light situations.
And I changed the scene in a few different ways. First being, that I added an extra actor in there.
Two guys always look a bit more scary, dangerous than one guy.
Two, I placed them in a little alley,
because, again, it makes the setting more urban and dangerous.
And here, if you look at the final sequence with the new shot in place,
you’ll see that it works a lot better technically... and for the story.
Well, thank you guys for watching. I hope you learned something.
In the next tutorial, I’m going to show you a few cool examples
from a music video I shot recently... and from another film.
I will show you some set-ups outside
and explain how you can use the sun as well as HMI Par lights or reflectors
to make your shots stand out and add life to them.
So, stay tuned.