Me in frame

Lensing and Lighting workshop with Tanmay Agarwal

Day 12

Today was my shoot. We were a bit late to start with. Sumana and Ashok were doing camera and sound respectively. 

Generally when I go for my shoot I am calm, and I tend to trust my camera man a lot. I have always believed in working in a team and trusting it completely. I have always told my fellow mates that I would rather go for a person I trust as a crew member than going for a person just because he is the best. So I was pretty much happy with my conduct with the crew. Though I know I must have goffed up here and there but that's fine, I am still learning after all!

I had made up my mind to shoot with lamps today. I chose 18mm on P2 as my lens. The first thing I did once I fixed the lens was to measure my angle of view. With that set we went forward. Hindol, Kirti and Himel were acting for me. We started with the exterior shots.

Sir generally let's the Director of the day to start the shoot and get his conduct right, only when he sees that it is going towards messy waters that he intervenes. So, Sir came in at a situation where there was a bit of a confusion about a shot where I wanted to establish that the door of the house and the teashop were bang opposite to each other. This shot was a safe shot that I had planned on the go. I for one was not really sure of the shot thus all I could visualize is a long shot. Sumana started working on the shot and it became more complicated. Now we had a situation where a whole shop needed to be propped up for this shot to be taken, which ensured that a lot of time being wasted. I should have taken a call but I was not sure myself so I was trying to get a hang of it. Tanmay Sir came to rescue with his exact questions. This is one thing about Sir that he generally doesn't provide you with answers at first go- he provides the perfect questions and lets you come up with the answer. He asked me simply why I wanted the shot. Once I explained the reason. He asked me about the shots I had taken before. After patiently listening to my shot he looked at me in that one eyebrow raised way that he does and said, "Then why are you taking this shot. Tune fir itna mehnat kyun lagaya pichle shots mein? What more would you establish from this shot?" And the beautiful part of any confusion is always that you actually know the answer its just that validation that you need. Sir went on to explain that if you show everything as an apple for an apple then nothing is left to imagination- the space is fully defined. JJ enquired about which was better. Sir smiled and said, "You decide!" In spite of Mithoo da and the others working so hard to set the extra shot up, I gave up on the shot as it was JUST not needed! And I am terribly sorry for their hard work going to waste.

Moral: 

• Do not take a shot if you are not sure.
• Do not take a shot when that shot doesn't add to any information in the narrative.
• It is always better to leave somethings for the audiences' imagination.
• Take control of the situation when things start getting confusing. Ask your self why it is confusing. More times than not, you would discover you are not sure what you want of the shot.

Now, the last point of the above set of thoughts brings me to an important thing that I am not addressing for a very long time: Positive approach to a Problem.

First identify your problem. Once the problem has been identified, think of the positive actions that can be taken to solve that issue. You can either break down the task to be taken to solve the problem and delegate among the others or if it requires your own intervention, you go about it.

Sir keeps re iterating this point so like in my childhood days I choose to write it down to make this real, so that I can follow this approach.

Once the exterior shots were done, we moved to the interiors. The first shot was of scattered files where Hindol's hand would come and search for a file, find it and leave. I had designed a series of these kinds of shot to prove my point that this man did not care about the call he was getting, instead he chose to be busy with his work. Sir presented his barrage of questions.

What is this series of shot about?

To prove my point that this man did not care about the call he was getting, instead he chose to be busy with his work.

So, what is it actually about?

Him being busy.

So, you want to say that he is busy?

No, I wanted to show that he didn't care about the call.

So, what are you wanting to show?

His aloofness.

So does this series show aloofness? Yeah probably it does, but how much screen time would it take?

A LOT!

Now Sir started demonstrating the same point across but in a much precise manner. He designed a shot where the phone is in frame and as the phone rings we go for a small track out to get Hindol's face in frame, where he gives a wayward look at the phone and then puts on the earphone. Tough we did not take the shot then but the moment Sir said it I could visualize and in Himel's words, "The juice was there".

Moral:

• Be sure of what the shot is really about.
• Be precise about the information you want to give.

We broke for lunch. Some food and some smoke down our throat, we were back on floor. We decided to take an easier shot first and then go for the  track shot.

This shot was of Hindol typing in his laptop while listening to music, while he notices Kirti knocking on the window in front of him and thus he looks up. We had taken Kirti's knocking on the window shot separately so this was fully about Hindol's action. I personally wanted a close up but Sumana couldn't get a proper angle - so, both of us settled for a ticght mid close shot where a part of the laptop is seen and the table lamp is seen. Once the shot was taken, Sir asked again the same question, what was the most important thing in the shot. It was obviously Hindol but we all realized since the table lamp was the most brightest part of the frame, that over powers Hindol's action completely.

Here, Sir demonstrated the different things that grabs our eyes in the frame. He asked us to close our eyes and open when he asked us to. At first go we opened our eyes to an image with a single bright source of light, and after a glimpse we close our eyes again. We all had noticed only the bright source. Second time around the image had a bright spot but then the eye is drawn towards the lines which were the sharpest part of the image. Third time, our eyes went for the movement in the frame. These just proved that our eyes perceive information in a certain manner and unless we can place information properly in our frames we would not be able to express the correct message.

In this shot there were two sources of light. One was the table lamp and the other was the laptop. While the table lamp was tungsten, the laptop gave a blue light. To top it, the blue light was very faint. So, we decided to use a Dinky(300 watt fresnel light- tungsten) to simulate the laptop light. We used a blue gel but still it was  not blue enough. We threw in more nets and blue cellophane, even we tried using a thermocol with a blue cellophane but it just didn't work. The light was still more. We could go for a white balnce to tungsten approach, where the tungsten table lamp would seem white but the blue would look more blue. And then we could go for a 85 gel on the table lamp to make it yellow but that would take a lot of time, finally we reached a point when we decided to use a florescent rather than a tungsten light. So a Kino was got in position and we used a thermocol and a blue cellophane to diffuse the light. This gave us perfect simulation. Sir told us to try and simulate the lamp light by using the Dinky. But no matter what was done I was not getting satisfied because the light became more and more forced. So I came to a point where I stepped in to say I liked the lamp light much better. This just proved a simple point It was always better to use practical lights. With film cameras a lot of light was required to get proper exposer but with today's digital cameras which were highly sensitive even to low light conditions, it was better to use natural sources of light rather than trying to simulate it.

Now, as Sumana worte in her blog, that there can be 2 types of direction that you can give your actor.

• Active actions- Where you give concrete actions to your actors which are doable, visible and simple.
• Passive actions- Where you will tell your actors about the emotions you want to convey through his actions. Here you don't really give exact actions to the actors. The actor himself has to interpret and do the actions.

Sometimes, a passive action does not come out the way you want. Thus its easier to give active actions. The same thing happened with Hindol in this shot. He knew the whole pretext but the emotion, that he could have got the phone call but he chose to listen to music other wise was not coming through. Sir instructed Hindol to actually sing a song in his head and then type. He did and suddenly the typing became less important and the listening to song became more important and the emotion came through.

Once we got the emotion right. Now came the question that if he was so engrossed in the song how would he notice that someone is there at the window, and say if he does notice how do we make the audience notice it as well. Thus it was decided to use the Dinky with a 85 gel to simulate a street light and Kirti would stand at the window to cast a shadow on Hindol's face which would be captured by the camera. 

Personal realization:

During this above shot, at some point while checking the frame I found it too tight so I kept on insisting to go a bit loose. Sir turned and said, "You are scared of going close to people!" For few seconds I didn't know how to react cause Sir had just said a truth that I just couldn't deny. This made me wonder how much of ourselves we put to display when we make a film. We think we are telling others' stories but actually each of our frames are about us being in frame- a part of us for everyone to see.

We went for the track shot at the end. Sumana was having problems getting a proper frame, so Sir stepped in. He chucked out all unnecessary details from the frame and went for a beautiful shot. Though we had a late pack up around 6 and the floor dadas and the light dadas were annoyed, we had a great day! I was happy! 

Extra things we learnt:

• Dinky - 300 watt fresnel unidirectional tungsten light.
• Baby - 1000 watt fresnel unidirectional tungsten light.
• Kino - Kino Flo is best known for its fluorescent tube arrangements that are used for the color of film and digital video. These lights provide a relatively compact and efficient way of providing soft lighting. Compared to the original workhorse of motion picture lighting, incandescent lights (and, more recently, HMI lights), Kino Flo tubes produce less heat and fit into smaller spaces, two significant advantages that have made them popular with professionals. [Information Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino_Flo]
• Fresnel Light - A focusable spotlight used in film, television, and theater lighting, which can be adjusted via a knob on the back of the light from "spot" for a narrowly focused beam, to "flood" for a wider beam.  This type of focusable lighting instrument is called a Fresnel because it features a Fresnel Lens, a glass lens with concentric ripples that is visible on the front of the light, casting soft, even illumination across the light's beam.
  The Fresnel Lens is named for its inventor, the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788-1827), who designed the Fresnel Lens to efficiently project beams of light from lighthouses.  [Information courtesy: http://www.3drender.com/glossary/fresnellight.htm , ]
• Examples of films that use natural lights: Barry Lyndon, Jesus Christ Superstar, Amadeus etc

Later, once the shoot was done Kirti, Sumana and I were sitting down for a chat with Sir when Sumana popped a question which was there in all our heads.

Is there any exercise or process that we can follow to practice finding actions to replace the emotions in our scripts?
Try thinking in terms of metaphors. Not literal ones but visual ones. An apple for pear. 

It doesn't come easy but I am definitely going to try it!!

It was a good day and thanks to my whole crew for making it possible!! Cheers to us!! Tomorrow we shoot some remaining portions, and I am sure it's gonna be fun!