Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production outlet, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here .
As I discussed briefly in my previous column, the menus for my latest DVD reel were a series of live-action montages set at different times of day. I'd initially considered doing something like what's on Jonathan Glazer's Directors Label DVD, where he maintained an episodic narrative that purports to uncover that he really gets his ideas from a mysterious homeless man -- but considering my disc wasn't going to be sold on shelves for $20, I figured something a little less narcissistic would be more appropriate.
The disc has five menus: four of them are set at specific times of day (dawn, afternoon, sunset, night), while the fifth, the main menu, sets up the others. What I was most interested in was the manner in which light changes throughout the course of the day: colors, direction, intensity, etc.
I've never been a big fan of "movie lighting" (where exactly does rim light come from anyway?), although some filmmakers do it in a way that works for me. Movie lighting -- and, by extension, photography lighting -- came about, in part, because film stocks in the past weren't fast enough to shoot in low light levels. At the dawn of the medium, electric lights weren't even bright enough, so the filmmakers created roofless sets that the sun could illuminate. Eventually, cameramen started to stylize their lighting and created a whole slew of affectations; it was exceedingly rare to see light fall in movies as it actually does in real life. Eventually, film stocks improved and filmmakers took their cameras out into the world from studios. Things changed.
I generally prefer lighting that feels natural. That doesn't necessarily mean "naturalistic," which I think implies a certain type of filmmaking -- simply, lighting that feels as if it's coming from defined sources as opposed to lighting that feels cut and staged and artificial. For example, Vittorio Storaro is known as one of the more impressionistic cinematographers of the modern era -- however, much of his lighting has often been based around practicals that are complimented by Chinese lanterns. Similarly, Stanley Kubrick used to build most of his lighting into his sets -- he lit spaces, not people. In both cases, the lighting was achieved naturally, though the end result was usually designed to feel heightened.
As I've developed shooting on digital video over the past six and a half years, my eyes have become very attuned to how light falls both inside and out. Since much of my shooting is fast-breaking, I've had to quickly think about camera placement in relation to the light source to achieve the nicest effect. I don't expect film schools to change their cinematography curriculum anytime soon, but I do believe more time should be spent on teaching future cinematographers to study natural light as opposed to a mechanized approach based around T stops, key-light, fill, rim, and so on.
The ability to shoot digitally and to see exactly what you've got on an HD monitor is a radical change. Until now, photography was like a mathematical pool game based around the light meter; DP's needed to know their stops and the latitudes of their stocks because they wouldn't see what they'd gotten until dailies arrived the following day. Traditional photography is very theory-oriented in that sense. Digital filmmaking is altering that process, shifting photography into a more painterly approach.
Of the five menus I created, only one of them required tungsten light (two were daylight exteriors, another was an interior lit by a windows, another was based around neon/fluoresent store lights at night). The entire lighting scheme was based around two sets of doubled 40-watt ceiling bulbs on opposite sides of the room. While the diagonal light sources gave me just enough room tone for the action, which took place primarily in the center, I focused most of my shots directly toward the hotter areas, where the light was hitting against the wall or floor, thereby silhouetting the action and creating a high-contrast, evocative mood. It was a low-tech strategy based around natural light. The result doesn't necessarily feel naturalistic.
A lot of DP's feel like they aren't doing their job if they're not using all of the big manufactured lights. But this is one area, understanding light, that doesn't require technology as much as a good eye.